* short ride, long fall

While my parents both experienced farm life, this was not part of my own. My time on farms has been limited to day visits or an occasional weekend.

All of which is to say that when it comes to knowledge about farm life, I’ve got nothing. Well, maybe just a little.

For example, one day while still quite small (5 or so), we were visiting my great uncle’s farm. It had a variety of animals, but only one that to me, anyway, looked ride-able. This was the work horse, a massive, but generally oh so slow moving horse used for various tasks on the farm. While it loved my Uncle John, by the time it got back to the barn after a day at work it wasn’t interested in doing much else. Certainly not providing rides to kids!

Add to this picture the presence of several second cousins, let’s just say of the more energetic type. They were on the farm frequently and had tried every which way to ride him. To which this horse had developed a range of methods to end the ride, the first of which was to head straight for a low-hanging apple tree. If this wasn’t successful then the sagging clothes lines came next. Once free of this unwanted baggage, the old horse would plod off to its stall to do what it had wanted to do all along.

So take one naive 5 year old, trying to understand this mysterious world while keeping up with these energetic mostly strangers, add a grumpy old horse and some creative second cousins and before I really understood it all I was perched atop the horse, hanging on for dear life, rocking and rolling around on the blanket on top of the horse (and the horse hadn’t even started moving yet)! Then it started moving, faster than I had ever seen it go. Hanging on for dear life, sitting straight up in the saddle, I turned to bravely smile at my cousins who were yelling something at me I couldn’t really understand, but it sounded something like

“LOOK  OUT  FOR  THE

T

R

E

E

!”

“Ouch!”  

Not so long ago I saw one of these second cousins again and asked him about this incident, as I always wanted to find out why they didn’t warn me about the apple tree? He laughed and said they knew full well what the horse was going to do. The only question was whether it was the tree or the clothes lines that would remove me from the back of the old horse?!