Evanescence

Frank, all clean and ready for our first jumping comp.

Frank and I have been to our first showjumping competition. Please don’t imagine some big show, it was a tiny local fundraising gymkana. I paid a day membership and, with two friends, entered the the 50cm and the 65cm classes.

It’s just a smidge over three years since Frank arrived in my life as a slightly gangly three year-old baby. He was not the horse I thought I’d finally own after the children had grown up and left home. I’d imagined a school master, a been there and done everything sort of horse, perhaps a bay with a star and an effortless trot, or a flashy chestnut with a bold blaze and white socks, the look of eagles in its eye. All we’d need would be a few lessons to get back into the swing of my fearless teenage self and we’d be pottering off to events within weeks. The reality was the price tag for a horse who’d done anything was eye watering. Instead my daughter went to work and found me a baby Australian Stock Horse. He was well bred and handled and when she rode him, she was impressed with how hard he tried. I bought him.

Right, I’m skipping three years of getting to know Frank. Some of it I’ve written about in TSS (read this one if you’re interesting - on getting back on after I had a back operation) and perhaps there’s a longform essay on confidence and middle age, but it’s enough for you to know that going to our first competition was a big deal. These were the things I was nervous about:

1. That Frank would be excited.

2. That Frank would shy at a strange horse and deposit me on the ground.

3. That Frank would be overwhelmed by the jumps/bunting/general vibe.

4. That we would be out of our depth and refuse to jump.

   (spoiler: none of these things happened

The night before we rode on the river flat. We did simple exercises, making his trot bigger and then slower. We canter, trot, canter. He’s lovely, so we walked home along the river bank and up the hill. I tied him to the garage door, washed him and packed the float. Around us the world shouted, SPRING.

The jumping starts at midday. I find a park in the line up of horse floats, unload my lovely horse who looks around at this strange place, at all the strange horses. I’m early. My friends haven’t arrived. I fill out the forms. Have my new helmet checked and return to the float and saddle up.

It’s so familiar. This is what my daughter and I did and we loved it. I’d be the driver and hold all the things. Now I’m here - for me! I grin to myself, squash the nerves and get on. Frank feels a little taller. But he’s calm. He’s a little horse shy - this means he is on high alert reading the body language of the horses around him. He’s reactive (which means he might leap away from a horse he perceives as a threat), which means I need to be equally reactive to stay with him and not end up on the ground. We walk away from small children on street smart ponies. Frank’s head is up, looking, looking. I think back to our earliest lessons. Inhale, exhale, again and again. And we trot and walk and trot and walk. I ask him to move this way and that. He’s not stirred up, he’s just bigger. I let him be this, don’t try and shut him down. We pop a couple of the tiny practice jumps then walk back to the float. Around us, big horses high on spring and life reef and plunge. I slide my hand along Frank’s neck, scratch him under his mane. He watches, curious and slightly tense. I make my body loose. Then it’s time to change into my daughter’s too tight jodhpurs and put on her too tight riding jacket. I think, no one is looking at me. I am actually invisible, a middle-aged woman and her plain brown horse.

With my friend we walk the tiny jumping course. My friend is riding an off the track thoroughbred at her first event. Frank tries to eat grass while my friend’s young mare dances, her feet needing always to move. Then it’s our turn we go into the ring. I’m nervous and I hang on a little bit too tight. The jumps are so tiny Frank barely notices them, but it’s okay, we start at a trot and by the end we’re cantering around the course. I am thrilled.

The next class up and the jumps are more like jumps. This time I don’t hold on so hard. Frank is on the job, there’s a lovely rush. We take the short lines and it feels so good. Then I look at the wrong jump, realise at almost the last moment it’s wrong and though I could have turned sharply, I don’t, we circle and come back at it. Oh how I love my middle-age maturity in not pulling him onto that jump. We get the 8 strides between the related fences. The two strides in the double. Nothing feels hard. We take all the short lines and both of us are grinning as we trot out of the ring.

I drive home dusted in happiness. And it’s not the competition. It’s working towards something that’s been so far away it mostly felt impossible. It’s overcoming fear of failing. It’s turning up. It’s saying, this is important to me. It’s sharing it with friends.

I take Frank down to his paddock. He gently noses my pocket for the handful of oats he knows is there. The plovers call letting everyone know we are home. The old horses line up on the fence to ask where he’s been. He’s full of his own importance. There’s no ribbons. No one even noticed us today, but both of us are covered in gold.

mm x

Poem of the Week

Happiness, by Jane Kenyon (an extract, read the whole thing here)

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

Reading/Listening

Finegan Kruckemeyer The End and Everything Before It. Loved it. It’s a playwright’s novel. The characters are still with me and if you love a little bit of myth woven through your story, then this is for you. Here’s Catriona Menzies-Pike’s review. I’m halfway through Louise Erdrich’s new one The Mighty Red . She’s a master storyteller and I have post it notes fluttering from all the marked sentences. Here’s something short - this brilliant piece of Flash Fiction, Whiting by Deesha Philyaw (sorry, can’t remember how I came across it - if it was you, thank you). Loved Monica Dux in the Guardian writing about breast cancer and her decision to not have a reconstruction. And still on aging and bodies, I loved this profile on Rosalind Fox Solomon’s and her new book A Woman I Once Knew (which is 50 years of self portraits and looks extraordinary).

Listening is where it has been at. I’ve been writing in the mornings. My phone off. Door shut. Then into the garden. I listened to Alison Espach’s The Wedding People (and apart from the slightly annoying american accent, it was a romp). The premise is so dark, (woman books herself into hotel to die) but the book itself is a joy. So acutely observed. Loved it. Then, in one of those moments that reinforces that a book needs to come to you at the right time, I listened to Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, which obviously everyone has been telling me to read forever. It’s brilliant.

Whoops! Over my word limit.

Have a good week Sitters, it’s nice to be back here.