2009 Youth Award Winners
Tie Second Place: Alexandra,
Age: 15, Celebration, Florida
My Most Memorable Horse Experience
Maybe it was reading Heartland-an amazing set of twenty horse books-more
than five times and dreaming about what it would be like to own a horse.
Or maybe it was that day that my mom brought myself and my sister for
our first-ever private riding lesson. We were both so excited! I can
still remember everything about March 2nd, 2006. My lesson was at noon.
The instructor was named Maddie. The horse was named Ivanhoe. When I
got home, I took our dog Lucky out for a walk and mistakenly ordered
him to trot. Oh yeah, and my sister got to ride first. My mom told me
that it was because she had been into horses longer. Fat chance when
I was the one who’d been addicted to Heartland for the last six months!
It could also have been the riding camp that we rode in during the five
days that followed. We learned about horses. We groomed and tacked horses.
We played games on horseback and practiced trotting on a lunge line.
By the end of the week I was trotting solo and won the blue ribbon in
a mini horse show we had for our parents.
I know I remember the hot Florida summer that came that year and how
my mother insisted that-because my sister was and still is prone to
heat exhaustion-we were only going to have a private riding lesson every
three weeks. I looked at our calendar every day during that time and
counted how many days and how many hours until my next riding lesson.
The time that I had to wait six weeks because it was my sister’s birthday
and-yay!-we were going to Disney World instead, I was furious. But should
I label my most negative horse related experience my most memorable
one? Absolutely not.
Especially not when it didn’t even come close to being the worst thing
that happened to me that year. In October, when the weather had cooled
down and we were back to weekly lessons, my favorite instructor decided
to leave town. I found someone else to teach me, of course, but I was
still sad. Within weeks of that happening, Lucky was fatally struck
by a car on a busy road. My life was absolutely miserable after that,
mostly because of the lack of pets in the house. I desperately wanted
to get another puppy to raise and to love and to snuggle up with when
I was sad, but my mother, who was crying all the time, insisted that
we would be horrible pet owners if we didn’t wait for puppies that were
conceived after Lucky’s death so that he would have a chance to come
back to us through reincarnation. As you can imagine, horseback riding
was my only salvation.
This was despite the fact that I was spending most of my riding lessons
yelling back and forth with the trainer. My first few riding instructors,
including Katie, had babied me, so when I started riding with Kimberly,
I found her toughen-up-and-no-nonsense attitude shocking. But I could
see that I was making progress riding with her, so I kept riding with
her. By early the next year, she had hired me to write a newsletter
for the equestrian center. By the year after that, I was her apprentice
and followed her to a different riding school when our old one closed
down. I began going to the new barn with Kimberly four days a week.
I was away from my mother (an amazing change, considering that I’d always
been home schooled), cleaning the barn, grooming and tacking horses
for lessons, and even exercising a few horses. I loved every minute
of it. And-most shocking of all-was that after all this time, Kimberly
and I actually became friends.
During the summer of 2009, Kimberly’s daughter Morgan joined us and
all three of us found horses to ride. We did a few crazy things, had
a lot of laughs, and did a ton of riding. But soon enough, that summer
drew to a close. Not only was Morgan going back to her middle school,
but I had just been accepted into the Osceola County School for the
Arts as a creative writer. For the first time ever, I was actually going
to school! But there are times when I wish that I was back at the barn.
Yes, every moment in horseback riding, even the moments that were related
to horseback riding, have been memorable for me. So what, out of three
years of joyful and sorrowful moments surrounding these wonderful animals,
is the most memorable? How can I decide? Particularly when I was twelve
and thirteen, life for me was built around, “Before I go riding” “After
I go riding” “It’s my birthday, so I get to ride for forty-five minutes!”
“How many days until I go riding?” “How many days until I go riding?”
The past three years in my life have been critical ones. Particularly
my twelfth year, during which I was experiencing the transition from
child to teenager and all the excitement and confusion that went with
it. Throw in a sister with serious health issues and the fact that pulling
away from your mother is hard enough when her past decade has been consumed
with making sure you and only one other person have been properly clothed,
fed, disciplined, and even educated-and she’s inclined to remain in
control of that-and horseback riding wasn’t just something that made
me happy. It was the thing that made me happy.
So
as to what my most memorable horse experience, the most complicated
answer is really the simplest. It wasn’t any one moment being around
horses. It was the fact that horseback riding came to me during a very
difficult time of my life. And it got me through.
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