A Day at the Horse Rescue Farm

Yesterday, I cleaned a horse’s hoof. I bent over, cupped my hand around his foot and scraped out mud and gunk using a hoof pick.

I did it because I was handed the pick and the horse’s foot and expected to do the job. And in that expectation, there was no question on the part of the person teaching me, that I could do it. She didn’t ask “Would you like to try cleaning his hoof?” because if she had asked, it would set the stage for wondering whether I was capable of cleaning his hoof. And because I’d never done it or seen it done and because the horse, at that moment, seemed even larger than his thousand-pound self, I might have said those awful words, “No, I’ll just watch.”

Before the part of the day when we cleaned the horses’ feet, the six of us – all women in Stepping Stone Farms’ Women Taking the Reins program – followed our leader, Lia Sader, to a large paddock where several horses were grazing. We stood just inside the gate while she talked about the proper way to approach a horse. One of the women was eating soup out of a thermos; she had been taking riding lessons and seemed nonchalant about what was to come next. I listened to every word. Don’t look a horse in the eye. Don’t approach from the front. Talk as you approach. Watch out for his rear. And then it was time.

“Go find a horse,” she said. And I aimed for the one furthest away.

This very activity was what had deterred me from taking this class before. Walking into a paddock with loose horses seemed too brave for me, something a much more confident person would do, although some, maybe many, would say I seem to be plenty confident myself. (There is deep utility to the phrase “you are who you pretend to be.”) I decided to be a person who walks confidently across a paddock to heap compliments on a horse about how beautiful he is and what a nice boy he is and what a great grass eater he is, and then puts her hands on the horse’s broad brown side and reaches up to stroke his neck and smooth his mane, all the while talking, and moving with him when he stepped to reach better grass. After that, I wandered around like I’d been hanging out in paddocks my whole life.

At the end of my second ride, after going around the big ring many times, trying to keep my hands down and my legs back and my heels down and my back straight and my chest open and my head up because “You’ve already seen the ground, you don’t need to keep looking at it,” it was time to get off the horse.

“Take your feet out of the stirrups, lean forward, swing your right leg over and slide down to the ground.”

“I’m not sure I can do that.” The day had caught up to me. The being brave in my private tiny ways, all the leading, grooming, feeding, saddling, mucking, and then the riding, all of it made getting off the horse the only impossible thing of the day. Everyone was younger than me. This is true almost everywhere I go and usually this tricks me into thinking that I’m ageless, that my age is in my head, invisible to other people, but then I can’t hear something important or lift the box or step on a stool to reach a high hook. This is the trick, the game I play, that I am like everyone else when I’m not anymore. I am like the other old people.

I am too old to do this, I thought. I’m not that strong anymore. I’m 74.

“You already did this once. You can do it again.” And so, I took my feet out of the stirrups, leaned forward, swung my right leg over the horse and slid to the ground just enough off balance that friendly arms reached out to grab me. I walked over to a bench with wobbly legs. It doesn’t matter, I thought, it doesn’t matter that I had to have a safety net. What matters is that I got on the horse in the first place, talked to the grazing horse in the paddock, stood with my hands on his beautiful broad side, held that mud-clogged foot in my hand, did what was expected, and I did it all as an old lady in skinny jeans and knee-high boots from L.L. Bean. It was an achievement for me, all of it. And very precious.

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Stepping Stone Farms is a nonprofit horse rescue organization that offers therapeutic riding to youth, veterans, and disabled adults, as well as horsemanship classes to people of all ages.