The turning point

You don’t always get the horse you want, but sometimes you get the one you need.

- Margaret Cowan McGrath

After the veterinarian’s truck rumbled down the gravel drive, I stood in the barn’s parking lot, holding the lead rope of my very first horse.

Reality did not match my childhood dreams. Sirocco, a 6-year-old Arabian, fleabitten gray with bloodmarks splashed on his ribs and hip, didn’t look like the horse I wanted when I was 12. To be fair, I was no longer the girl who pined for the Black Stallion, either. I was middle-aged and---unmoored by my mother’s sudden death ---I had just done what all the books tell you not to do while in the throes of grief: made a big, potentially consequential decision.

I’d fallen in love with Sirocco based on an online ad. Under his trainer’s watchful eye, I’d worked with him for a few weeks of lessons and at a weekend clinic. But, I could count on my fingers and toes the number of hours I’d spent on horseback before my mother’s death, so it was clear that I was in for a steep learning curve.

To make matters worse, the long-ago riding lessons I’d taken lessons as a girl were linked to devastating memories. In the aftermath of an acrimonious divorce, my father circumvented the custody agreement by promising to buy me a horse if I came to live with him and my new stepmother. But after I took two bad falls from the sorrel Paint my father bought me, he sold the horse and sent me back to my mother.