Mrs. Brenda had a unique lesson program. Instead of charging a per lesson fee like most barns, she charged one lump sum per year. Every time we got on our horses we were learning something new, even if it wasn’t a formal event. After a couple of years of paying for the lessons my parents decided it was an unnecessary expense. Not to be deterred, I thought – “no big deal! I’ll just work for my lessons!” And work I did. It’s funny how working student programs tend to have way more “work” than “student.” Maybe we should call them “Really Hard Thankless With a Free Pass to Abuse Working,when it’s convenient and there’s no work to be done which is practically never at a barn Student.” That’s not just Mrs. Brenda. That is practically every working student program that has ever existed in the horse world.
I remember hanging out during the summer with the girls at the barn. We were all tacking up and getting ready to ride, and literally every 3 minutes Mrs. Brenda would yell “A horse just pooped!” and I would have to grab the wheel barrow and pitch fork and head in to the battle zone to clean it up. Needless to say, I missed several rides that summer and when I did get to ride with the other girls I was always a good 20 minutes behind everyone else.
There was one day I remember in particular when my mom had dropped me off at the barn for a few hours. I rode my horse, and Mrs. Brenda told me to make sure all the stalls were clean before I left. She promptly disappeared from the property. Well when I went to clean the stalls they were all – and I mean all 30 of them – a complete mess!!! In my mind, there are 2 different types of stall cleaning. “Picking the stall” is when it’s kind of messy, but you can go in and pick out the poop and the pee without taking everything out of the stall. Then there is “stripping the stall.” Stripping it is when you have to take nearly every scrap of shaving out of the stall because it’s all dirty and then you have to replace what you took out with fresh new bedding. All 30 stalls needed to be stripped and that was quite a feat for a girl to do all by herself. Needless to say, my mom showed up ready to take me home and I was nowhere near finished. We are the kind of family where when we say we are going to do something, we do it. So my mom (did I mention she is a school teacher and knew nothing about horses except what she had learned through me) picked up a pitchfork and got to work. We must have had an engagement that night because somehow my dad (a CPA who spent his days behind a desk) ended up at the barn pushing wheel barrows and picking poop with us! It took the 3 of us at least 3 hours of hard and sweaty labor (did I mention Mississippi summer days average 95 degrees with HIGH humidity) to get that entire barn clean. I’m fairly certain my parents decided to pay for my lessons again after that, but most importantly we all gained a new level of respect for each other. I don’t think they realized how hard I worked to pursue my passion until that point when they were in the trenches with me. And I could never thank my parents enough for joining me in the trenches that day to get the stalls done.
My mom especially spent many a day crushing pills for my sick horses, breaking ice in the water buckets in miserable cold weather, and literally driving water out to my horse in mid-winter when the pipes were frozen at the barn.
Even for non-horse families, the horse is a family affair. It’s amazing how an animal can create so many experiences and bring families together.
Lesson for the day: Don’t take what our parents did for us for granted.
I love you mom and dad!!!
Soli deo gloria
~Sarah
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