Horses

When I was little we had a complete farm which included horses.

I am fully aware from having witnessed several and too many horse-breaking events, what's involved tormenting a horse into submission to let a human being ride on its back and what I've seen, witnessing the process of breaking horses left a very strong impact and impression on me.

Anytime I have ever sat on a horse's back I have felt this overwhelming guilt just knowing I don't belong there, nobody belongs there (I don't care if people have been doing this forever its wrong and that's just the way it is).
Even when I was very little, and it wasn't fear, it was an overwhelming sense of guilt. I had seen what it took first for me to sit on their backs. I can't get past it.

I had an uncle with a particular cruel streak who actually *enjoyed* with a wicked vengeance coming over to our farm to break our horses, watched him break his own at his own place as well and its a nasty nasty wicked event. I realize humans have been doing this to horses for a really long time.

There are very few pictures of any of us from my childhood thanks to a really stupid impulsive move made by my father when my parents divorced and everyone was out of the house (I was in the children's home, my brother and sister were old enough to move out and with my parents divorced and my father looking to start a new with another woman and unbeknownst to us all, purged the house of all our family memorabilia, all pictures and brownie movies, all clutter in the basement etc, he didn't let anyone know, my mother, no one, and very little from my childhood save for what the others had taken away with them and my toys and few items that went to the children's home with me and a scant few items from my room at home survived, sticks of furniture...

but someone has pictures of my mother riding the our huge red Clydesdale horse named Tricky and other images of this first and real farm. I have been hoping and working on my family to get copies of them, trying to get my sister to make a DVD of what they have, including those baby pictures that you can pretty much tell by looking at me that I was a different, a disabled baby.

back to the farm though, and Tricky..
He was a very smart horse. He could lift eyehooks off half doors and let himself out, even untie knots with his teeth and he routinely got out and so did other horses and cows with him when he did.

Tricky was a really easy going horse and I was never afraid to stand near him even right under him. I didn't know properly that horses will go out of their way not to trample people, I just knew that Tricky wouldn't. He would try to eat my hair because it was so blond and I was about the height of a feed trough, he would attempt to munch as if I were a head-full of hay and I thought that was funny but my father didn't like that..sort 'horse injurious behavior' instead of me pulling my own hair it was Tricky.
I love the color of his hair, he was a very red horse and I loved the way he smelled. I don't mean the manure or anything like that, but horses have very nice smells that go with them, and the way they huff and make sounds is very relaxing to listen to. I loved to hold the currycomb and try to brush on his belly and the way that felt. I liked the way the items that go with horses smell, the blanket that goes under a saddle and the saddle smell, even if I didn't want to be where I didn't belong on top of him, he was a friend to me and I really liked Tricky.

Tricky was a Clydesdale and he was huge and kind of dark red colored but he had no fur on his feet. Not all Clydesdale come with fur on their feet like the 'Budweiser horses'

I'll have to come back and write about Patches the Palomino horse later. He wasn't so nice but I understood why (he was my brother's horse and that's a 'long story' in and of itself right there).