RODE HARD AND PUT AWAY WET

There’s a horse in our back garden. We call him Charlie. Or Chuck. And sometimes the kids call him Caspar. It really just depends on who is addressing him at the time. The neighbors call him something else. He answers to any and all, as long as you follow the delivery address up with an apple, or two.

I tell him he is a rock star when I visit. He has ice blue eyes, which hide behind a wild mane of white rasta hair. He has a cool demeanor, and you wonder what he’s thinking as he stands there tall and aloof. He likes to nuzzle his nose into my pockets. He's learned they often contain treats. 

I love this moment. It reminds me of when I was a girl; letting my pony rub his nose up and down my body. I used to think it was his way of showing his affection. But he really just had an itch. I was his scratching post.

Charlie is a stud. Literally. He is left staked to the ground away from the other herd, only to be brought in to the mix on the occasion that one of them is ready to be ridden. I see the other horses look on to Charlie — seemingly star struck, as I am.

Chuck seems content enough to stand there. Every few days his owner mysteriously moves him (I never see this happen), and I wake to find him staked a little further out or closer in; depending.

Horace (my coonhound) and I go for walks and stop to see Charlie just about daily. I like to brush his hair out of his face and look into those amazing eyes, breathing in his horsey scent. He lets me. But as soon as I walk away, I notice he flicks his head until his hair falls back into place; hanging long down his nose.

(This reminds me of my daughter Gabby, as she doesn’t allow me to do anything to her hair either. I pull it back out of her face, and when I’m not looking she lets it down, falling over her beautiful cheekbones. But that’s another story.)

I am a girl, at heart, still fascinated and romanced by all things Charlie. I once gave my mom what appeared to be a random photo of an unknown horse. I bought it at a tradeshow where I worked in Cleveland. I stood for days across the aisle staring at this horse.

Taken from a distance, the Chestnut mare stands in the mouth of an old barn — alone, with a broken down tractor in the background. It is a very lonely picture. I told my mother I feel like that horse, often. She keeps it in her kitchen, closeby.

The other night it snowed. Hard. And the temperature in England fell well below zero degrees Celcius.

But there Chuck stood, alone in the darkness. I wanted to cover him with a blanket. That innate sense of caring for another left out in the cold was overwhelming. I shuddered at the thought of him standing there in the night; out in the snow and stormy weather. The winds whipped the snow across the heath. It was dismal.

I kept thinking of my Dad.

He always used the expression “rode hard and put away wet.”

It wasn’t a reference to horses, though.

You might imagine. He was referring to other lonely creatures; usually standing alone at the bar; waiting.

My Dad lived his life outside the sphere of anything close to political correctness. But he had a big heart. And he cared in his way very much. I know that now. Though, as a girl, I felt much like what I imagine Charlie feels, and maybe the horse in the photo I couldn't leave behind in Cleveland — adored maybe, but from a distance without too much connection.

(I woke the next day to find Charlie. He was standing right where I last saw him. He made it through the storm. I gave him extra apples.)