The Message

After opening the package and taking some time to process all the feelings it evoked, I sent a message to my friend letting her know that the package with the pommel pack had arrived and that I was very happy with it.  And then I briefly explained the circumstances of Nimo's death.  My friend was shocked, of course, and we exchanged messages for a bit as she tried to process what had happened and I tried to elaborate a little without sending myself into a deep despair.

And then she wrote, "It just dawned on me.  I have a baby you can have when you are ready.  My little black and white rescue."

To say I was stunned would have been putting it mildly.  It was an incredibly generous and kind offer.  And one that I wasn't even close to being able to accept.  I didn't even really know that I wanted another horse again.  I literally could not even imagine interacting with a horse other than Nimo in any kind of significant way.  I also wasn't even sure I knew which horse she was talking about.  She had quite a few.  I vaguely remembered she had a baby from one of her mares, but I was sure that couldn't be the one she had mentioned.

I found what I hoped was a gracious and appreciative way of thanking her for her offer and explaining that I wasn't ready to even think about another horse at the moment.  And I put the message out of my mind.

Days flowed into days and then weeks...  

As I watched what was probably the fifth Aurora Teagarden mystery of the day on the Hallmark channel, it occurred to me that I might have a problem.  I'm normally not much of a TV watcher, so my recent binge-watching of a show about a librarian who solves mysteries was pretty unusual.  There were other indicators of my problem, like moping around, not feeling motivated to do any of the things I normally enjoy, and a general sense of not being able to focus.  And let's not forget the random sadness and crying every time I thought about Nimo.  Which was a lot, because everywhere I looked there were pieces of him - pictures, bridles, saddle pads and other assorted tack, and the stupid Facebook memories that kept popping up every time I tried to use the app.

I realized that I could not go on like that.  I had already purged dozens of friends from my Facebook account because I was so frustrated with the ability of other people to keep living their lives as if the most devastating thing in the world hadn't occurred.  At that time, a lot of people were still very anxious about the COVID-19 pandemic and our political situation, and I have to admit, I simply didn't care.  At all.  I didn't care about people dying.  I didn't care that my friends were worried about leaving the house.  I didn't care about who was president.  I didn't care what was on fire or what was flooding or who was fighting whom.  I didn't care about my job.  I know those are all signs of serious grief and that they are normal and part of the process.  But knowing that doesn't make it any easier to go through.

And one day, I decided that I needed to find a better way to work through the grief than hating everyone and watching TV all the time.  I needed some purpose.  The only way I was going to get some purpose was to get a horse.  All through my life, when things have been difficult, I have headed out to the barn.  The barn and the horses in it are soothing in a way that nothing else can be.  But I had found that going out to the barn with my daughter a few times a week was a challenge.  I was starting to have trouble letting her take care of the pony we were leasing for her.  Not that I didn't want Gemma to take care of the pony, but I felt useless and unfulfilled.  So I was brushing the pony and helping to tack up the pony.  And leading her around.  Instead of letting Gemma do the things by herself, like she really wanted to (but was too sensitive to say) and deserved to do.  I couldn't even watch her lessons.  Plus I started feeling very isolated at the barn.  Even though people talked to me.  But there was this underlying awkwardness because of Nimo's death.  Like what do you say?  And I didn't know what to say either.  Sometimes I talked about Nimo like he was still alive.  Sometimes like he had been dead for years.  And sometimes, it was all I could do to say his name.  I was, in short, completely miserable and disconnected and confused and angry and doing my best to keep myself together for the sake of the people around me.

I know everyone has their own timeframe for working through grief.  For me, I realized that working through my grief about Nimo was not going to be an easy or quick process.  It was going to take a very long time.  I think it took me 10 years after the death of the horse I had before Nimo before I could say that I had fully processed his death, and I had only owned him for four years.  I'm not always that great at math, but even I could see that simply waiting to feel better was not going to work.  I needed to be proactive or I was going to have some serious problems.

So I started really thinking about what I might want in my next horse.  The search for a horse under any circumstances is daunting.  But in my case, I had all of northern Virginia, an equine mecca, as well as contacts all over the county to help me in my search.  To complicate matters, I had no idea what I wanted.  Well, that isn't entirely true.  I've joked before that my next horse would be ugly, short, and dirt-colored.  But somehow the joke fell flat after Nimo's death. 

With the reality settling in that I was going to have to start from scratch, I was at a loss.  Over my lifetime, I've owned two quarter horses, an Arabian, an Appaloosa stock-type horse, and of course, a Friesian.  I didn't really feel like revisiting any of those breeds again.  And I have generally ruled out Thoroughbreds because I don't trust myself to be able to find a good one.  All of the ones I know have an assortment of physical and behavioral issues, regardless of whether they raced, and I definitely didn't feel up to trying to find one that might not have those issues.

In the past, I had thought about the Akhal-Teke breed, but when I looked at pictures of them, I didn't feel inspired.  And I also want to get a Mustang, but I don't currently have the facility to handle training a wild horse, and honestly I wasn't feeling up to that level of training anyway.  Then I came across a picture of an old Morgan that had won an endurance race back in the 1920s or '30s.  I really liked the way he looked, so I started researching Morgan breeders.  The unfortunate thing was that many of the breeders had not maintained their websites for years, so I had trouble finding any information about availability and pricing.  Other breeders were clearly more focused on show Morgans, which had no appeal for me. 

I mean, who could look at this horse and not be impressed?

The one thing that I started figuring out during the process was that what I really wanted was a young horse with a good temperament and who would be easy to work with.  I didn't care too much about color (although who doesn't love a good buckskin, palomino, or grulla?) and I didn't care about specific bloodlines or breeding.  Plus I didn't want to spend the kind of money that it appeared people were asking for their horses.  It wasn't because I didn't think the horses were worth it - breeding and training horses is an expensive and time-consuming process if done well - but I had significant medical bills from Nimo's treatment to pay off and I was hoping to be able to buy a good horse for my daughter within a year or two.  I would need to spend good money on that purchase to make sure I got a safe horse for her.  But for me, I could get by with something much less expensive that needed work.

I even looked at the horses available at several rescues in the area.  But every one of them seemed to have multiple, chronic physical issues, which I didn't even remotely feel up to dealing with.  And then I came across a 17-hand 8-year-old Friesian gelding, and I completely shut down.  I couldn't look at another rescue page after that, for fear of seeing another Friesian pop up.

Which brought me back to the message I'd gotten from my friend that I had been steadfastly pretending didn't exist.  The one about a black and white rescue baby.  I finally decided that it wouldn't hurt to learn more about this horse.  But I didn't want to ask my friend for the details, because I had absolutely no intention of getting the baby.  I was just curious and figured I could distract myself from my lack of decision-making ability.  So I turned to Facebook for assistance.  I stalked my friend's page and figured out which horse she was talking about.

Oh, dear God.  It looked like the horse was a yearling paint filly that was probably gaited.  None of those characteristics were remotely like what I had imagined I would want in a horse.  For one thing, she was a filly.  Under no circumstances did I want a mare.  I had an Arabian mare for 15 years, and I often think of her as my first horse, even though she was really my second.  I did everything on her and she was an amazing animal.  But she could be a handful and she definitely had OPINIONS as only mares can.  After her death, I mourned her for a good long time, but never had any desire to own a mare again.  I liked my easy-going, people-loving geldings.  So definitely, I did not want a mare.  No.  Absolutely not.

And she was a paint.  Or pinto.  I have never been attracted to that coloring.  I can't even explain why.  I just had this negative association with it.  The only thing I can think of is that I used to have a friend who had a paint horse.  I had a falling out with the friend many, many years ago (as did everyone else who knew her because she turned out to be a horrible human being) and whenever I think of her horse, I remember all the conflict and tension and bad things that my friend did, and I guess maybe I associate them with her horse.  Which is totally awful.  The horse had nothing to do with any of it.  But nonetheless, I definitely did not want a paint horse.  No.  Absolutely not.

Finally, it looked like she could be gaited.  From what I could find out, the dam was a Missouri Fox Trotter.  I educated myself a tiny bit about fox trotters and while it looked like they could be good horses, I had zero experience with gaited horses.  I wouldn't have the first clue about how to train her or ride her.  Plus, my riding instructor, whom I'd worked with for 4 years with Nimo, would have been appalled.  She comes from a school of thought that believes any gait other than walk, trot, and canter is inappropriate for horses and causes long-term soundness issues.  I wasn't at all convinced that a gaited horse couldn't be balanced and coordinated, especially because I know someone who rides a gaited horse and she and the horse look beautifully balanced and coordinated.  That said, I still didn't want a gaited horse.  No.  Absolutely not.

Despite learning all these things about this filly that meant she was completely inappropriate for me, I kept digging.  I found out about the rescue that she was part of.  I found out a little about her sire.  And then I found a series of pictures of her as a baby, from just after she was born through several months old.  If you are a horse lover, I challenge you to look at pictures of baby horses and not fall in love with them.  It isn't possible. 

Look at that face!

 

Her conformation looks pretty good...

She looks athletic!

OK, the filly had been super cute as a baby.  And having all the pictures and even a couple of videos meant I had good stuff to use for evaluation of her movement.  If you've never bought a young horse before, you may not know that it is very difficult to get an accurate picture of any horse in terms of conformation and movement once they get to be older than about 6 months until they are 3-4 years old.  Because they are growing so fast, they often look awkward and disproportional and move like they are drunk.  Some breeds and/or bloodlines will look mature at an earlier age (think Quarter Horses), but even then, it's a bit of a crapshoot.

When I got Nimo, he was a yearling.  In fact, he was almost the same age as this filly that I was looking at that I had absolutely no intention of getting.  He was strikingly ugly.  I mean, really awful.  I bought him in part off of his first inspection results, where he was the Grand Champion out of a class of 22 babies still with their mothers.  Because that is the best time to judge them until they get to be at least 3 and 4 or even 5 would be better.  

So I already knew that having the baby pictures and videos meant a gold mine of information, especially for a rescue horse.  I obsessed over those pictures and videos.  I analyzed her conformation and movement, looking for any potential flaw.  The only thing I found was that her pasterns seemed a bit longer than I would like, and even then, it was hard to judge whether they would stay long.  It was entirely possible that her legs were a little out of proportion due to her age.  But I researched the implications of long pasterns anyway, and I satisfied myself that it was unlikely to be a significant problem.  (Some people believe that long pasterns make a horse more likely to have a soft tissue injury, while others believe that pasterns that are too short are the bigger flaw and that longer pasterns can help a horse more than they hurt it.  I suspect that the best thing to do regardless of your horse's pastern type is to make sure you train it properly with the goal of helping the horse achieve the maximum balance and coordination it can reach.)

Then, I chose two good friends to send some of the pictures and video to.  I wanted their opinions because I began to suspect I might not be objective...Both of them thought the little filly was beautiful and they strongly encouraged me to take a closer look at her.  (One reason I chose those friends was because I knew they would be honest with me, and if I was about to embark on a path of stupidity, they wouldn't hesitate to tell me.  That would not necessarily mean I wouldn't do the stupid thing, but at least I would have been warned.)

If you've followed my other blog, The Journey to 100 Miles, you may have gotten the sense that I can turn even the simplest of tasks into a complicated, frustrating, and often expensive marathon of activity.  I mean, even when it came to painting the walls in my house, I used a time-consuming faux-finishing technique instead of just buying regular paint and rolling it on the walls.  My life's motto has become, "If it isn't more trouble than it's worth, it isn't worth the trouble of doing it."

But it finally occurred to me that maybe I don't have to follow that motto for every single thing I do.  Instead of turning my search for a horse into a nation-wide endeavor involving interviewing dozens of breeders, watching sales videos, and traveling all over, while spending thousands of dollars, maybe I could look closer to home.  I decided that it couldn't hurt to at least go look at the filly my friend had.  I mean, the worst that could happen was that I didn't like her and that would be that.  In fact, I was still telling myself that I didn't really want her, and I was using the trip to go see her as an acceptable social event during a time when people were still pretty hesitant to go anywhere other than the grocery store.

So I got in touch with my friend and set up a time to take a look at the filly.  In the meantime, I contacted another friend.  This particular friend owned the filly's dam, a black Missouri Fox Trotter.  I knew some of the backstory on the mare, which included a rescue effort, and my friend gave me some more details.  

The basic story is that the filly's dam and sire had been taken in by a rescue that over time had accepted too many horses to care for properly.  The situation had deteriorated to the point that the county was called in and decided to seize over 40 horses.  I think 4 or 5 different rescues in Virginia and Maryland ended up participating in the seizure because there were just too many horses for one operation.  The filly's dam was pregnant with her at the time of the rescue.  A few months later, the mare gave birth at the rescue.  

At about that time, though, the rescue that had her sold its farm.  The effort of running a rescue had become too much and the coordinator wanted to shift the physical care of the rescued horses to foster homes only for the future.  The rescue was trying to place all the horses left in its care before completing the sale of the farm.  But no one wanted a young mare that was not trained under saddle and her baby.  Eventually things were getting desperate and this poor mare, who had already been rescued at least twice in her life, was facing euthanasia, along with her baby, because no one wanted them.  As it happened, the friend who had sent me the message about her decided to take the mare and baby.  Her sister worked at the rescue and had shared the story with her.  My friend had taken on project horses in the past with the intention of rehoming them among her wide circle of friends and acquaintances once she could find a good match.  She had plenty of land and another mare with a baby, so she thought she could make it work.

Over time, my friend weaned the babies and sent them out to live other horses in a huge 20+-acre field surrounded by woods with a creek running through it.  Basically, heaven on earth for horses.  But it was remote, and not the ideal location if you wanted to work with a horse regularly.

And my friend started looking for potential new owners for both the mare and the baby.  She found one fairly quickly in a mutual friend of ours.  The mutual friend wanted to take both the mare and the baby, but she really only had room for one horse, so she decided to take the mare.  

I found out that the mare was a delight to be around and to ride.  She had been about 6 years old at the time my friend got her and not trained to be ridden as far as anyone knew.  At first, the mare was incredibly defensive with other horses, likely due to the starvation situation she had been in at the time she was rescued.  She had also been difficult for people to handle when she was rescued.  But the rescue staff worked with her and she quickly became friendly.  And after she settled in for a few weeks at my friend's house, she stopped being defensive with horses too.  So she was incredibly smart to be able to quickly figure out that she was in a safe place and her troubling behavior stopped. 
She was also smart when it came to being ridden.  She was safe for my friend's boyfriend (who had minimal riding experience) to ride out on trails within several weeks of being under saddle.  She wasn't spooky or otherwise challenging to ride.  And she had good feet - no shoes needed for the trails.

I also found out a few details about the filly's sire, who had also been rescued along with the dam.  He was a paint stock horse.  According to the farrier who worked on his feet after he was rescued, he was easy to handle and had good quality hooves.  My friend didn't know where he ended up, and I wasn't able to track him from the rescue's website or Facebook page, but I hope he ended up in a good home.

I was encouraged by all the information my friend had given me, and I started to look forward to meeting the filly.  You can read about our visit in my next post.