by Martha Oaklander
I was born in 1953. For as long as I remember I have loved horses. Every Christmas when asked to make a list for Santa, a pony was at the top of my list. It made me happy to see “pony” on my list, no matter that I knew I would never get one. I remember waiting till Dad was reading the sporting green of the San Francisco Chronicle on weekend mornings with complete dedication and focus. Without trying to get him to pay attention to me, I walked up to him and asked, “Dad, can I get a pony?” and he answered “yeah, yeah.” That was it. I smiled and chuckled as I went back to my room to play with my plastic horse statues. Did this happen once? Or many times? I don’t know. I cherish that memory (or those memories!) I got to have horse back riding lessons in junior high with my horse crazy girl friends. In high school my friends and I would rent horses for $2 an hour and gallop out into the fields completely unsupervised. My joy was beyond the moon. Our last year in high school my friends and I all went to a dude ranch summer camp. After camp I was allowed to take one of the horses home for the winter so the camp could save money on horse feed and vet care. Again joy unmeasurable. I married young and we had three children. No horses for me for 19 years. Once my kids were old enough for me to have some free time, I took up riding in an English saddle. I had only ever ridden Western and bareback. A part of me felt that an English saddle would be too hard for me. To ride English, I had to have high top black riding boots. Pretty quickly and to my great delight I discovered that I could ride English after all. My English riding boots were and remain my all time favorite item in my closet. However horse back riding was no longer $2 per hour as it had been in the 1960s in the rural area around Sacramento where I grew up. It was $90 per hour in urban Los Angeles in 1990. Eventually our budget said “ouch,” and happily fulfilled with a forever memory of those beautiful riding boots and all the confidence and joy riding gave me, I sold my pricey beloved boots at one-third the price I paid for them to a very happy woman at the stable where I rode. Whenever life gives me lemons all I have to do is remember those black boots to get me smiling again.