I just need to pause and tell my horsey cohorts: I love you.  

Seriously.  I was hit by an overwhelming wave of it as my friend of 30 years, who flew all the way down here this weekend, stood hanging a gate with me in my dirty barn, at 100 degrees, during her short visit.

I love that horse people are both dreamers and realists.

I love that we can put on stage makeup, a three piece suit and leather, climb on a thousand pound oven and smile through blinding sweat.  Then we show up for work with no makeup and wet hair.

I love that we can handle the occasional heartbreaks and humiliations that come with relationships with horses.

We can spend every dime on our horses and almost nothing on ourselves.

My non-horse people seem to have a reaction to the peeing in stalls (or the woods or wherever.)  I don’t think they understand the almost public changes of attire at a show or on a camping trip.  Horse people aren’t a shy lot when we are in our horsey world.  

We are a sub culture.  We deviate from the norm and it binds us together.  We don’t even need to speak the same language because we all speak “I love horses, too.”

We lug water and feed, hay and tack, change trailer tires and can back a rig most people can’t drive.

We don’t wonder if we’ll get it done, we skip straight to how.

We are out in the cold, out in the heat, out in the bugs, out in the rain.  The Post Office wishes it had our devotion and commitment.

We’ve slept in stalls, trailers, trucks and had nights with no sleep at all.  We fix fence, we fix manes and tails.  We filthy ourselves to clean our four legged friends and we have entirely uncommon ideas of what smells good.  New saddle pads trump new clothes and stains don’t matter.  Horse snot is just what happens if you wear clean clothes to the barn.  

And we enable each other in this crazy life.

I think you are awesome.

Be well, horse friends.

Love from the farm, Katy