In The Beginning – Part I
“We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, so we buy ice cream.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
My morning ritual, without fail, is adding Breyers Natural Vanilla ice cream to my coffee! Without fail! If you ever come to visit our house we will do our best to convert you, if you are a coffee drinker that is, and also because our wit is not trustworthy. I bring this up to welcome all of you who have opted to follow this photography page in the last few weeks! Your support does not go unnoticed and I appreciate each of you, it matters not if you are an ice cream lover or coffee drinker!
This also gives me a chance to give a pocket-sized history to those who are new here. I will try not to bore you!
I grew up on a small but progressive dairy farm in southeastern Minnesota where we used horses to move steers in the summer to different pastures. I lived and breathed horses, not unlike a lot of kids from that era and even today (no I’m not going to reveal my age, but let’s say old okay) and I recently told the story when as a teenager I brought my Appaloosa colt into the house, of course when my mother was not home! His name was Boojum and he was only a few months old but he was so spoiled and loved he would go anywhere with me! I will never forget what he looked like standing in our kitchen.
Please don’t laugh too hard. This is Boojum and I at a local horse show in the 70’s!
At the age of ten the pointer finger on my left hand, down to the first joint, was severed when a friend and I were getting our horses ready to go riding. Her mare was a challenge to bridle and I had a hold of the halter when she fought back. The pressure from the halter and my finger against the bone of her jaw was enough to sever the end off, but keep in mind how tiny our fingers are at that age. Of course there are countless times when I was kicked, bit, stepped on, rolled on, bucked off, scraped off by a tree on the run back to the barn, oh and being grounded and sneaking my pony out through the milking parlor and then taking off on a wild ride! I’m sure many of you have had those same experiences, hopefully with all your digits still intact, but it has never dissipated my love for a horse.
That concludes the first snapshot of history and I promise not to take you all the way through my youth! Tomorrow we jump to the year 1999! These short ‘history’ snapshots are to bring you to the heart of the journey and to the stallion himself! Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being a part of his story!
