Falling Off The (Horse-Drawn) Wagon

Dear readers I have a confession to make: I’ve described myself as a “recovering horse girl” for several years now, but I fear that I have officially fallen off the wagon.

My addiction started, as many do, in childhood and manifested in obsessions with Breyer model ponies and the Phantom Stallion book series, a subscription to Young Rider magazine, and persistent begging for riding lessons. My parents (unwilling to take out a second mortgage) tolerated my stableful of tiny plastic facsimiles being sprinkled all over the house, let me spend my Christmas money on horse-related books, and sent me to horsey day camps for a precious week each summer vacation.

By the time I entered teenagerhood I was a full-blown addict, voluntarily spending my weekends shoveling literal shit for the privilege of riding lessons at various barns around the Fraser Valley (although I did eventually restable the Breyer models in a box under the bed in the name of being too cool for toys). I rode on and off as a teenager and racked up a few pretty spectacular falls despite my lily-livered unwillingness to jump higher than the height of an average toddler and prided myself on my pitchfork-induced callouses.

By the time I started university though, time and money both got a lot thinner on the ground and I hung up my riding boots. You would think it was happily-ever-after from there on out having gotten the youthful pony obsession out of my system, but addiction is a wily beast and although I wasn’t riding much anymore I still worked in barns throughout my early twenties (for cash instead of lessons so that I could pretend it was a pragmatic decision instead of an opportunity to continue getting needed hits of Horse Smell). It was at this point that I started calling myself a “recovering horse girl” and finding other adultish hobbies and cost less and involve less fecal matter. Eventually the last barn I had been working at was forced to move and my job fell away, convenient circumstances under which to kick the habit for good. Or so I thought. I thought I was finally done getting up at ungodly hours to try and convince a 1000lb animal to hop over colourful sticks without killing us both.

But then my partner mentioned that a someone-who-knows-someone at work was looking for weekend barn help in exchange for riding lessons and I felt that old familiar pull. Reader, I relapsed.

So here I am, having not taking a group riding lesson in more years than I want to think about, dusting off my helmet and half-chaps, and getting ready to once again trust my life to caprices of an enormous prey animal.

Here’s to hoping the wagon is the only thing I end up falling off.