The Gift

 I woke with a big whiskery muzzle gently roaming over my face.  There was the faintest light coming from the barn window over the stall.  A light dusting of snow covered my sleeping bag.  I was sleeping in a manger of hay, the best way to sleep on Christmas morning. 

A horsey breath was puffing on my face and I knew the mare wanted to eat some of the hay I was sleeping on.  I stroked her face and scrunched my sleeping bag over to give her access to the alfalfa/grass hay.  I was cold, stiff and had hay leaves in my hair.  The light was getting stronger and I could see the dust and hay particles dancing in the rays coming through the open east window.  I had begged my parents for a horse from the time I was about four to that Christmas.

Christmas eve, my dad had come home with a borrowed horse trailer behind his pick-up.  Inside was our first horse.  My sister and I were beside ourselves with joy.  Dolly was a beautiful sorrel quarter horse mare.  Dad had kept her for a month at a neighbors place and wondered each evening if we would notice the hay leaves clinging to his clothes or the manure on his boots.  We had not.  (He had brushed himself off pretty well and cleaned his boots before coming home). 

The wonderful smell of horse swirled around me.  I had to get up and go back to the house.  I had come to the barn well after midnight and I knew my parents would not approve of my sleeping in the barn. 

I crawled out of my sleeping bag and shivered in my heavy long johns, snow pants and parka.  Even dressed as I was, at below 20 below the barn was a chilly place to sleep.  I petted our horse one more time, pulled on my snow pack boots and went to the house.  The rest of the family was just getting up. 

My sister, age 10 and I at 13 were the happiest children in Del Norte, Colorado.  My brother at age 4 was completely wrapped up in the Tonka truck and grader he had received. 

We learned that morning that Dolly was expecting a foal in April.  From that Christmas morning on my sister and I have always had horses.  No other Christmas gift has compared with receiving my first horse. 

Now I am sixty.  Today my husband pulled the shoes from my current horse, Chance.  He will be barefoot until mid March so we can only go riding in the pasture.  Some days, even when it’s cold, I saddle Chance for a winter ride.  I feel 13 again.  We gallop across the pasture and the steam blows from his nostrils in puffs like a train.  Riding him always makes me think of chocolate silk pie, smooth, satiny and delicious.  Every Christmas I think of Dolly and the magic that began that wonderful day so long ago with my first horse.

Diane Johnson