Little Girls and Horses

I was a horse-adoring little girl, though I rarely ever did more than brush their velvet noses with my hand. My grandfather, a miner and steelworker who also raised Hereford beef cattle, declared, with love and hope in his eyes, that he would buy a pony if our family would live with him all year round. My sister and I thought this was a fine idea, but our parents did not.

So I raced on fence rails and old tires. Usually my tire was named Secretariat, though occasionally, when my sister insisted on riding him, I saddled up Allegro, and then promptly lost the race, which seemed unfair since I was the oldest child and in charge of the game. But I nodded to the inevitable. Our bicycles were also horses--not racetrack stars but the sure-footed steeds of canny western sheriffs named Hank (my sister) and Leslie (me), and we galloped them through the neighborhood streets, in pursuit of desperadoes.

All my little-girl feelings about horses rushed back yesterday when I watched American Pharoah win the Belmont. The peacefulness of that race, the effortless ease of the victory, the beauty of the shoulders and the stretch of the head, and then, afterward, the quick ducking chin and alert ears, the skittish high step.

When I was in my twenties, I finally began to take riding lessons. I was not a good rider: I never really learned to sit a horse easily or to use my body to calm and direct his. It was a great disappointment. I had assumed that my childish passion would translate into skill, but it did not.

Nevertheless, I still hang onto that living sensation of animal love--the flooding warmth that enters me when I touch a horse's flank, my deep joy in the scent of horses.

Velvet's dreams were blowing about the bed. They were made of cloud but had the shapes of horses. Sometimes she dreamed of bits as women dream of jewelry. Snaffles and straights and pelhams and twisted pelhams were hanging, jointed and still in the shadows of a stable, and above them went up the straight, damp, oiled lines of leathers and cheek straps. The weight of a shining bit and the delicacy of the leathery above it was what she adored. Sometimes she walked down an endless cool alley in summer, by the side of the gutter in the old red brick floor. On her left and right were open stalls made of dark wood and the buttocks of the bay horses shone like mahogany all the way down. The horses turned their heads to look at her as she walked. They had black manes hanging like silk as the thick necks turned. These dreams blew and played round her bed in the night and the early hours of the morning. 

--from National Velvet, by Enid Bagnold (1935)