Dad's Slides: I Found a Horse!

As family lore has it, I began pestering my parents for a horse when I was a toddler. So, it is no wonder that they did not believe me early one morning when I told them that I had found a horse.

I was three and we lived on the edge of town in a small neighborhood. Directly beyond us were farm fields and woods. I had woken up before anyone else and wandered into the kitchen. The kitchen had sliding glass doors into the back yard and to my surprise, I could see a horse grazing on our lawn just outside those doors.

Running into my parents' bedroom, I gleefully told them that there was a horse in our back yard. My father responded (as the family story goes), "Nice way to try to get us up, Lynn." But as they soon discovered for themselves, it was true, and so my father caught the horse and put it on the dog tie out under our crabapple tree while he tried to find its owners.

 Leslie and me, feeding the horse carrots, ecstatic that we finally had our own horse.

We were pseudo horse owners for a week before we finally located its real owners. And that was a week of heaven as far as I was concerned. Dad would put us up on the horse's back and lead us around the yard, neighborhood kids stopped in frequently to pet it, and, if they were lucky, go for a ride, too.

Sadly (for me), the owners were located and they arrived in a station wagon to retrieve their horse. They did not have a trailer, and I remember a teenage boy with his arm out the back window holding the horse's lead rope, the horse walking beside the car as his father drove slowly down the road. 

I wish I had more information about the horse. Was it a mare or a gelding? Looks to me like a large pony, not a horse. (Although I remember thinking that it was huge.) Why did it take the owners so long to reclaim it? What was its name? Why is its halter in front of the ears? (My father had had Oh Boy and knew how to care for horses, so why is it not on properly?) What's with the odd tail?  And many more.

I'll never know the answers, but that's okay. It is enough to have these wonderful memories of my very "first" horse.