Have you ever run like a horse?
I remember as a little girl running like a horse on my way to school and I often wondered why. Not then, of course, only in recent years has this question begged an answer. And this is the reason I have started my blog. I seriously believe there is a horse gene. For those of you reading this blog who have "it" you will understand. For all the others, don't go any further, this won't make any sense to you....
I used to dream about having a horse of my very own.
(Have you ever yearned for something you thought was unattainable? I am telling you to keep on dreaming.) But I came from a very large family and riding a horse, let alone owning one, was out of the question. So the next closest thing I could do was to draw horses. I got a book from the library and started to draw, and draw and draw. And plaster the pictures all over my bedroom walls. I wanted a horse so bad I even dreamt about them.
I never even sat on a horse until I was a teenager. I convinced some of my friends to go for a ride at the Blue Hills Riding Stable in Milton, Massachusetts and using my own hard earned baby sitting money took my very first ride. I enjoyed every minute of that ride. I was in heaven. Little did I know how life altering that first ride would be. Who knew where I was headed with that first ride?
Fast forward fifty years . Today I am a horse owner, no I don't just own one horse but over twenty! (I somehow am not able to do things in a small way.) And have a riding school teaching the sport that I love to children and adults. I like to think that I am fulfilling their dreams and getting them on the road to bigger things.
My husband and I own a horse farm in New Jersey in one of the remaining semi-rural counties of the state. In fact, the horse is the state animal even though we are more known for oil refineries and are the most populous state in the country. But where we are located there are many horses. Our part of the world is often referred to as "horse country". Two minutes away from the farm and we are in the woods with not a car or a house in sight. Just the quiet of the woods, maybe a squirrel or a rabbit hopping across the trail, a canopy of mixed trees above and lots and lots of ferns on the forest floor. Just me and my horse, running through the woods. It is a world apart from the busy life with which most of our neighbors are involved. It's a wonderful life.
My other reason for writing a blog is that I am worried that our lifestyle will not be here in the future and I wanted to record a year in our life so others could vicariously be a part of this dying lifestyle. Maybe you will help to perpetuate it somehow?
I will fill you in on how we started our business and keep you posted with the day to day activities, the horse stories, some of the wonderful people that we have met, the trials and the labor, and the not so glamourous, down right dirty jobs that are involved with our horse world. Hopefully it will be somewhat fascinating, a bit entertaining and perhaps eye opening but always encouraging for you and your dreams. If you too dream of horses, maybe you have the horse gene. Don't let it be dormant, go make your dreams come true. If I did, so could you. Here's how it all happened.
