I begin my mornings with these stories now as I sip my warm mug of liquid starter fluid aka coffee, the best thing ever invented. The two, a memory and a mug of warmth make each morning a little easier. I am not now, nor will I ever be or understand a morning person. Talk about me all you like but don’t talk to me until 10 am.
I’ll tell 2 stories today in separate posts because this cold morning reminded me of 2 amazing women that I miss, and I am grateful to have met.
I saw a golf cart on my drive to work, sad, overused and abused thing on the back of an old Ford truck being carried to God knows where and it reminded me of Carol. Carol was 4’9 and tiny. She had a big heart that often got taken advantage of and she was too honest. She owned a 23-acre horse farm in a local town and boarded horses for other people which meant they were constantly going and coming. For whatever reason, Carol attracted what I call whackadoodles.
In 2005, on a bright sunny August day, one meant for being outside, I had gone to Carol’s barn to work with my appaloosa and my temper went from 0 to 100 in about 30 seconds. There was an idiot horse owner there whose name I can’t remember. She was a tall, leggy blond, with an IQ of 0. Her new “hobby” was horses so she had gone to auction and bought this beautiful palomino named Spice on impulse. She didn’t understand the hows and whys of auctions or think about getting to know the horse before spending $6k she just bought one that was “pretty”. I am fairly certain the horse had been worked in sand before auction to make her tired and look sound and mild, but the reality was that this palo was a firecracker.
The idiot owner and this horse never got along, it wasn’t the horses’ fault it was the misinformed, self-titled “Alpha” owner who caused the trouble. Both Carol and I could handle, groom, wash, tack, clean, saddle and ride Spice with no issue, she was a fun ride and super easy under the saddle. But when miss Alpha touched her the horse would cringe and literally shut down. This particular day Spice was whipped into a lunge ring, connected to a lead line and was being whipped into circle lunges in alternating directions, screaming and foaming the entire time. The horse was miserable. Miss Alpha kept screaming I am your Alpha you will listen to me as he slapped that poor horse with the lung whip over and over. And I was getting madder and madder by the second. To hit an animal, any animal mine, yours, wild, etc. is to hit me and I just can’t.
She had worked that poor horse a good hour while I was there and had done God knows what before I arrived. 5 mares and my gelding were all standing in the same pasture watching her with big eyes from a distance. She took Spice into the alleyway of the barn to brush her off and clean her feet and was fighting with her to get her into tiedowns on both sides when Spice screamed and took off full force going forward towards the other horses. Miss Alpha ran after her screaming, lunge whip in hand. The other horses scattered to let Spice drive by and Miss Alpha made a mistake, turning toward my boy who reared up in defense of her whip. It was in that single moment that Miss Alpha made the mistake that taught her what an Alpha attitude would mean to her.
As my Buck reared up, Miss Alpha cut in his direction and immediately began hitting my Buck with her damn whip. My sweet old boy, screamed, turned his body and took off across the pasture towards her horse who was shaking and hiding behind other mares. And I lost my shit. There is not another appropriate way to describe my fit of rage, I simply lost my shit. I grabbed that damn lunge whip and shoved the bitch to the ground and let her have about ten good hits full force with that damn whip screaming who’s your Alpha now bitch until it broke and then I threatened to beat her stupid with what was left of it. I had her curled up into a ball screaming I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, crying like a baby. I stopped, yanked her up by her stupid blond hair and drug her ass 3 acres across the pasture to her horse and made her apologize to both her horse and mine. And then I read her the riot act. By the time I was done she understood that if she so much as breathed hard toward any horse on the property again, I would whip her to death. She called the Hoke County Sherriff who came out and listened to her babbling, snot filled story. He was a country boy, and one that I have known for a while, when she was done, and yes, she told the truth from her point of view, he actually said that had it been his horse, he would have beaten her much harder. He walked over to Spice, rubbed her nose, and left. From that day on she tiptoed everywhere for a good year before selling sweet Spice and buying her own horse farm. She bought 20 at auction and is probably still torturing animals today.
Back to the golf cart. I was calming down from the Miss Alpha incident when Carol drove over in her stupid golf cart. It was a stupid little chrome thing with a small dump on back. Stupid because it did weird things for no reason. One day it ran, the next not, sometimes it moved on its own. You might drive it somewhere and it runs fine to the place but refuses to start and you get stuck, or it may lurch, putt, or refuse to turn in the direction you need. This day Carol saw how pissed I was and decided I needed to go for a ride and needed a laugh, so she asked me to ride with her to the pond to check the drains. Short ride on her trails, about a half mile, mostly downhill, we had done it many times in the stupid golf cart. It had stormed the night before so there was a lot of debris and limbs down which made her swerve in and out and she was going slow and mostly just putting and talking when the stupid golf cart decided we needed to go full speed downhill. Now Carol is a very careful person when not on a horse, I doubt she has ever broken or done the speed limit on a roadway but this day that damn cart was racing down hill and she was screaming that the brake was gone, I can’t stop it, we are gonna die!!! She’s weaving back and forth screaming like a lunatic and trying not to crash the damn thing when we get to the bottom of the hill and just shy of a big oak, the damn thing just shuts down right before we hit it dead center.
Carol is in a full-blown panic and breathing like she had just ran a marathon and I am laughing my ass off because it was fun. When I said let’s do that again she slapped me and walked back to the barn, and I sat there laughing like a nut job. I leaned that day that I had a temper and a sense of humor. I really did enjoy that golf cart ride and loved the fact that I had no control. Carol recovered and it became a fun story that made her laugh, it also made her buy a new golf cart.
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