Horse Crazy by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

seemed a happy
one.
    Twice a week, every Tuesday evening and
midday on Saturday, I would bundle up against the January cold,
pull on bulky sweaters, my riding boots and my schooling chaps over
my boots, and trudge off to class.
    We students were asked to check a list
hanging on a clipboard in the center of the barn to see which horse
the instructor had decided we were to ride that day. There didn't
seem to be any particular method to this decision. But it did serve
to make us feel that someone was in control of things, or had a
master plan of sorts.
    Then, we would find the horse in its stall,
find his tack, tack him up, (the verb form of the word "tack" means
to saddle up, since that's basically what "tack" means--the horse's
saddle and headgear), lead him to the center of the indoor ring,
mount him, and be waiting in line for the instructor to appear.
(Having never taken any other kind of large group riding lessons, I
don't know if this sort of regimen is typical of group riding
lessons or just specific to the German military leanings of the
Verigs.)
    These particular horses, although disdained
heartily by Angel Barnes as "school horses" were, nonetheless,
nothing like the sweet, sometimes-plodding pasture ponies on which
I'd begun my tutelage. Remembering that I broke my shoulder on one
of those poky pasture ponies, my heart quivered at the size and
spirit of these "school horses." They were beautiful Lippizans,
many of them stallions. It seemed to me that these horses were only
one step away from the Horse of Horror from which I'd catapulted at
Angel's barn. Goodness, at least Amadeus had been gelded. (A
gelding is usually calmer than a fire-snorting, ground-pawing
stallion who is out to prove his virility at the expense of your
peaceful ride through the pasture.)
    My first few weeks of lessons, I was assigned
to a large Lippizan mare named Netta. Netta, at 24 years, was the
oldest horse in the academy. She had foaled half the barn and was
not terribly affectionate, perhaps as a result. Although, happily,
she did not bite like some of the others.
    As I bumped around the ring, holding
shamefully onto the pommel as I went, various riders in the group
would mention to me that they had taken lessons on Netta when they
were children. The knowledge that I was so green that I was a
palsied, trembling coward even on a children's mount--and an aged,
nearly decrepit mount at that--did still less for my confidence
level. (On the other hand, I did sort of wonder at these peoples'
progress if, fifteen to twenty years later they were still in the
beginners class at the same riding academy.)
    One afternoon, after we'd done several boring
laps at a slow trot, Netta got a little frisky and did a wee buck
and wing in one corner of the ring, joylessly called the "ghost
corner" because the horses tended to spook more often when they
went past it.
    Although she regained her composure and
promptly went back to the mindless, drudge-trudge that had
previously carried us around the ring, I was stricken. I moved her
woodenly to the center of the ring where the instructor stood and
there we remained for the rest of the lesson: immobile and afraid,
with my wanting very much to be off the frightful beast altogether.
It would be my riding nadir.
    Slowly, as the weeks passed, I was able to
rejoin the other students and continue the tentative, unhappy
plod-trot around the ring. I never felt confident during this time,
but I was eventually able to trot the ring without gripping the
saddle with my left hand. Knowing better than I, the instructor
soon began assigning me to different horses, although it took
several conversations and a crowbar to unpry me from Netta.
    I worriedly rode Imprint, a bouncy greyhound
of a horse, and a friendly one, and loved him immediately. He had
none of Netta's attitude of resignation and apathy, but seemed
eager to trot about the ring as if he'd not done it a hundred
thousand times before with various degrees of jerking on