June 8, 2010

Share a horse-riding story.

Blue and the ditch not jumped

As a youth growing up I was the one in the latter years after the rest of the boys had gone on missions that was left to help Dad with the chores. We lived on a medium sized farm but one that seemed very large to me at the time. Chores meant feeding the cows, horses, chickens and other farm animals that we might have. It also meant bringing the cows to the barn and milking one to three of them by hand each morning and night. Dad would always help me in the morning and I would usually have them done before he got home from work at night. Each day we would have to go and bring them in from the bottom parts of the farm. I quite often rode the horse but remember many times when dad and I would walk down and bring them home on foot. Well there was one particular summer day when I would have been better off having walked rather than riding our horse “Blue”. Blue and I were pretty good friends and I never had much trouble catching her to go for a ride and I enjoyed riding her. I was lazy though and would seldom take the time to put a saddle on her. I would just put the reins on her and then jump up on her and ride bareback. That worked a lot easier than putting on a saddle. (I would saddle her if I planned on taking a rather long ride up on the bench.) This particular night however it was a short ride to the bottom pasture where we would bring the cows back to the barn to milk them. We also had the irrigation water that night which was one of the reasons I chose to ride rather than walk. Well as I loped her down to the pasture we came near the ditch with all of the water. I expected for her to jump the ditch and readied myself for the jump instead she decided to lower her head and stop for a drink so I slid right over her head and landed in the water. I should have walked because I would have been drier in the long run.