Riding and Writing

Dear Reader,

At the time of this writing, it is early April, which means calving season, allergy season, and tax season. Like many Americans, I am sure, I am still trying to adjust to the time change. I always prefer early mornings over late evenings… in theory. I am not really a morning person (at all), but light early in the morning is easier for the rancher than light lasting until 8 at night. Now this is helpful if you are trying to fix fence, but in general, a rancher wants to get in the house at a decent hour. When the time changes in the spring, it can put a wrench in things because ranchers follow the sun and not necessarily the clock. When the clock does not follow the sun, the rancher is an hour behind everyone in his work. Sometimes in the summer we do not feed the animals until 6:30 or 7:00 because it is so hot.

But since I have an extra hour of sunlight after work how do I fill it? Well currently I am riding a colt after work. Most ranchers and cowboys have a side something that they do after work or on the weekends; riding colts is one of mine. (A colt technically means an young male intact male horse, but it is more often used to refer to young horses in general who are being trained.) It’s something that I have done with my dad since I was a little girl. I didn’t actually ride colts when I was little, but whenever my dad was working a colt in the round pen, my siblings and I would be lined up on the outside of the round pen fence. (A round pen is a, well a pen that is round that we use to train horses, it can also be called a round coral.) When I was old enough to follow my dad on my pony, I would ride with him through the pastures while he worked the colts that he was riding. It seemed like he would trot in circles forever while I just sat there and watched. Sometimes he would make me trot figure eights on my horse or weave through the trees while he worked his horse. I was pretty content there watching him, but I did learn how to exercise a horse pretty well. Even if I wasn’t really training a horse at the time, it was good for me to learn the motions.

The colt that I am training now is a little palomino gelding (a castrated male horse) named Vaquero (vah-keh-doh), which means cowboy in Spanish. And his name suits him just fine. He looks like a little cowboy horse, and he has the punchy little attitude to match. When I first saddled him, he got away from me and bucked all the way from the barn past the house. So now we have been keeping saddling to the round pen. As much as I enjoy riding, it is harder than you think to make time to ride. It always seems that there is something more pressing to get done. Or that I can do this one quick chore which leads to five other quick chores before I go to catch my horse. And with colts you cannot just hop on and ride. A quick ride may turn into an hour of schooling because you never know what might come up. Training horses is much like teaching a child to read. Some things come quickly, and some things might take longer than you would imagine (I was a “longer than you would imagine” child). So, making time to ride horses is like making time to exercise or do homework. You have to be disciplined to do it and to keep that allotted time sacred for the task.

Writing is a lot like riding a colt too. (If you speak with a southern accent it’s hard to distinguish the two words by sound.) It’s often a side thing that people do after work. Sometimes it can take half an hour to write an article and sometimes it can take hours to find the right word. Some ideas are easy to tame and put down on paper, while other ideas require hours of work and reassurance before they trust you to make something out of them. Even if you can get an idea on paper, some ideas never let you fully capture them, and they flaunt it every time you reread them. And just like colts, writing takes dedicated time that must be kept sacred. Writing isn’t just waiting around for the right words to come to you in a dream. It is a muscle that has to be conditioned and with time you can almost write on que…almost. There are still times where you have to wait for the stars of creativity to align. My family knows that if I am lying somewhere with my face covered, I am usually trying to find the right words. And in case you were wondering, the writer’s notebook is a real thing. You never know when the right idea or words are going to hit you after you have pondering them for hours and it’s always (always, always) a good idea to write it down.

So, dear reader, there you have my random, meandering thoughts of the week.