Withdrawals

I'm having horse withdrawals. Riding is an addiction, once its  in the blood it will never leave, there is always some remnant some faint glimmer of it, like the nostalgic taste of dust in the back of my throat or the course feel or grass through my jeans when I sit in the sun. Everything reminds me of The Barn.
I am away from home, which means I am away from Twilight, its been over a week since I've seen her after several weeks of steady riding every other day.
I feel like a horse junkie, I talked with my cousins Sarah and Jessica who own horses and practically attacked them with questions about their new bay a horse (with an incredibly long wordy pedigreed name which I can't remember and that my cousins have wisely shortened to Gus).
They scooped him up at an auction apparently he is very flashy and very wired. Always ready to ride, hot blooded easily spooked a bit of a challenge on the ground but a dream to ride. He sounds like my girl, back home. So I sat through breakfast with them picturing myself racing around on Gus, but the image would blur alter and suddenly it would be Twilight and me in my mind's eye on some dream plain of long silky green grass, transparent with sunlight and under a deep pure blue sky.
It made my heart ache.

I've ridden with Sarah and Jessica before, its funny to me the picture we used to paint riding together. Sarah is beautiful, she has soft dark freckles on her cheeks and nose and very fine blond hair.Her voice and mannerism are quiet and calm. She rides a chestnut paint named Red, her second horse since she gave her first horse to Jessica.
Jessica does not resemble her sister at all, her hair is short and thick, a wavy tangle of dark brown hair, her freckles are warm on her pale skin, she wears glasses. Jessica is a fire cracker, bold with her voice and opinions.  Jessica like myself has an absolute passion for horses we used to play with Breyer models together all the time, till on day I just grew out of it. Jessica rides a gangly mare named Jazzy who has the grulla coat of an elk. We joke that if she were to ride Jazzy during hunting season out on the trail, she would have to drape a orange vest over the horse so she would not be shot.
Both girls are excellent riders, very precise on their western trained horses. When I watch them together in their neighborhoods community arena I see how sisterly they truly are. They might not look alike in appearance, but when they ride together I see the same movements in their arms, the tilt of their heads as they focus on their horses and it becomes obvious that they are related.
Its funny though, my sister Emma and I still sometimes think that Emma and Sarah should have been twins (they are both born in June of the same years after all) and Jessica and I should have been sisters, because of how similar we are to each other.

When I rode with my cousins I would ride Jessica's old horse Jetta, a 20 year old mare who was never trained properly and to old and set in her ways to be retrained by me any way. She was a grouchy short black bay who had a "happy-go-lucky-kick" at the canter also known as a buck and developed a tendency to rear when asked to back up. I know I shouldn't of enjoyed it when she reared with me on her back, I know it was dangerous, but when I rode her in the white snow with the steely gray sky overhead and she suddenly went skywards and my heart came up into my throat, I had to laugh. It felt rugged and cowboyish to me, something that would have been captured for an old Clint Eastwood western. For me it was like for a moment there was no sound, and no other souls on the earth, just me on a horse with only two hooves anchoring us down from being air born.

Even though Jetta was 20 when we raced Jessica and Jazzy through the snow, Jetta had enough power to pull ahead every time and win.

It was fun trail riding with Sarah and Jessica in the snow last time we rode together, we traveled next to  a creek which was dark black in the cold with silver ripples of current pulsing in thin threads down its back. We rode past a dark mare and her pure black colt maybe three months old, small and fierce.

It was cold, so could that sound froze before it could travel, making everything a peaceful quite. I could almost imagine us (unrealistically of course) as ancient humans, wrapped in our furs, restless travelers riding our horses to somewhere beyond. . .
Tomorrow I go home, a long car ride in the summer heat, stuck in a car for about 6 hours.This morning I took the van to a car wash to have it cleaned before the trek home and I drove past an equestrian center. I could see the metal stalls, several rusty horse trailers, and I could feel the wheels turning in my head even as I drove straight past turning onto the crunchy gravel and asking if I could go for a ride on any horse, groom them, just sit there and look at them, please? I'll do anything because I really just need my horse fix, something real because frankly dreaming just isn't enough.