I'm a country girl, born and bred. My first home was in rural Quebec beside the Châteauguay River. As a baby, I loved to be out on the veranda, where I could watch the water for mallards and grebes. When they turned upside down bobbing for food, I screeched with delight.
As soon as I could walk, I discovered the farm dogs, Rex and Bing, innumerable cats ("minous" to me), Holstein cows, the gigantic bull and my first pony, a gluttonous, black-and-white Shetland named Pamplemousse. Pampy was old and single-minded. All she wanted to do was eat grass. When I was two, my dad planted me on her broad back and left us to toddle around the lawn. I had no fear. And I had no desire to get down. From other, livelier ponies to many horses of my own, I have been riding ever since.
Today, half a century later, when I put my foot in a stirrup and swing my leg over a horse, I am in my element.
"Life is a carousel"
Then and now, riding for me means a ringside seat for all the wonders of the outdoors; it's a veranda that's always in motion. From the back of a horse, life is a carousel -- a great swath of blue sky, a startling orange sunset and the clover showing purple in a field of waving grass.
The sounds go around and around, too. And they are the same comforting noises I heard as a kid -- birds nattering and the wind ruffling the leaves in the poplars, cows lowing and a tractor engine humming in the distance. I can smell the delicious sweetness of fresh-cut hay and the earthy sunlit warmth of a horse's hide. I can approach this world at any speed from amble to warp. And I can have singular, unexpected experiences.
Sharing a moment
One summer, late in the day, I was sitting on my huge Hanoverian mare just plodding around a quiet pasture when a young red fox suddenly appeared and began to walk with us. "Shoo," I hissed down at him, worried that his odd behaviour meant he was sick. He jumped in the air like a cat after a butterfly and kept right on coming.
For 20 minutes he walked with us, around and around. Then he ambled across a hilltop, stopped to turn his head as if to say goodbye, and was gone in the setting sun. I felt as though I'd been afforded a rare privilege. For some inexplicable reason, a wild creature had chosen to spend time with me and my mare; it had appeared to say, "Good for us, together out here just enjoying the twilight and the gift of life."
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