My teen years were pretty normal, meaning total angst and torture. There was that summer that I used my babysitting money to buy yards and yards of polyester double-knit fabric. I knew homemade wasn’t as good as store-bought, but I sewed a whole new school wardrobe, designed by yours truly. One outfit was lime green culottes with a matching v-neck vest. I wore a navy-blue blouse with one of those disco collars practically as wide as my shoulders. Explain to me why someone as horribly self-conscious as me would go to those lengths to embarrass myself even further. By then I’d already stopped w ..read more

I don’t mind getting stuck in traffic. It practically makes me un-American to say so. I don’t love it but I don’t get hair-tearing frustrated. I’m lucky to be an introvert who likes her own company. Perhaps a bit too much. As the youngest child, my mother expected me to go outside to play and not come back before dinner. It felt like a get-out-of-jail-free card and I’ve been amusing myself ever since. Besides, horses taught me that getting frustrated was never the right answer. And I’m fully cognizant that complaining about traffic is just about the most lowbrow, whiny small talk possible, bu ..read more

I hope I’m not going to end up writing some kind of justification for harsh training. Usually, it’s easier than the alternative. But here goes. It’s important to be clear about how we got here with horses. How, with all I know, I got here with my personal horse, Nube. Please understand that in all things, horses are complicated and fragile. They are the opposite of how they look and what we dream of in a horse. When we get lost in that counterintuitive swamp of horse ownership, we become love-blind and do some crazy things. Start here. Why would we think that all horses are born perfect? That ..read more

Do you follow the Iditarod, too? Northern breeds are such athletes with their instincts on full display. These half-wild dogs are perfect. They get to run with their pack. Then they stop and all lie down to rest. They eat better than most of our dogs. And then, with very little steering, they run some more. It’s a beautiful thing to see dogs get to do the thing their instinct compels them to do. Like equine endurance events, this race has required stops and safety procedures. Mushers take brilliant care of their dogs. At the end of the race, the winning musher and his lead dog both look fried ..read more

I saw a video this week that I can’t get out of my head. It lacked the drama of the usual train wrecks played for humor on social media. It was as slow and quiet as a PBS documentary. It was almost like we were peeping at the horse from a thousand yards. He felt that safe. I’m old enough to remember the days when the only opportunity to get a video of your horse was at a show if there was a photographer to hire. Technology, especially digital photography, is a miracle. Instant replays aren’t always flattering, but they help us catch up on what we missed while we were distracted. Besides, we l ..read more

It’s time for my annual announcement. Your horse doesn’t have a training problem. It isn’t a brain tumor, and he hasn’t gotten into the duck chow. It’s late winteritis or spring fever. Both are bad, their symptoms are unpredictable. One day, the pond is defrosting and I think I have survived the longest meanest winter I can remember. The next day, the wind is whipping through my scalp at thirty miles per hour and it’s sixteen degrees. On the blustery days, the inmates stand in the shelter and grumble. They have started to shed, but I wasn’t born yesterday. I don’t brush them. Two days later ..read more

It’s springtime in the Rockies. The time change was last weekend, so I’m waking up at three am now, but there’s more light in the evening. I can see tiny bits of green if I bend over for a close look. Earlier this week we were out in shirtsleeves and now we’re halfway through a thirty-six-hour snowstorm. The horses are exhausted. It’s a dangerous time of year to be a horse, especially an older one. On Tuesday, I had a carcinoma removed from my nose. It took a few injections into that fleshy part of the bridge of my nose. Bad joke, I’ve already had so many pre-cancerous growths burned off, tha ..read more

My first ex-husband used to tease me about my frantic love of shortcuts. I was always up early, on the run, impatient as a kindergarten class five minutes before recess. My multitasking skills were nothing short of genius, I thought. I did the work of a dozen in half the time. When my plans derailed, as they often did, he had a name for my shortcuts: alternate routes. We joke I should wear a big flashing yellow warning sign. On one of my shortcuts, I was irretrievably lost, my car broke down with no pay phone in sight, and swearing was no help at all. There was simply no way to be where I nee ..read more

We are sick to death of the violence against horses. It isn’t just the damage caused by rollkur in reining and dressage, or racing youngsters until their legs break, or the tragic mess rodeo has become, or the horses being tossed to auction for the crime of being old or lame. My personal thorn in the eye is the general acceptance of fear-based training in horses too young to be ridden. The numbers are astronomical, way higher than the abuse stories that hit the news. How did terrifying youngsters become so common that we barely notice it? Researchers inform us that they found the fabled “domi ..read more

My Grandfather Horse was so good with latches he could have broken out of Alcatraz and made it back to Colorado, but he wasn’t special. We all brag about how intelligent our horses are when they react to the sound of our car driving up the driveway. They’re geniuses when they know it’s dinnertime, or when they nicker to us as we walk into the barn. Science has proven that horses recognize humans from years in their past and other studies show horses recognize the emotions on our faces. Don’t these things sound a bit self-serving, even egotistical? As if it’s the horse’s highest calling to be ..read more