Europe: All the Pretty Little Horses

Hush a bye,

Don’t you cry

Go to sleep-y little baby

When you wake

You shall see

All the pretty little horses

Dappled and gray

Black and bay

All the pretty little horses.

Mom sang this lullaby to me often when I was a little girl, because she knew it was my favorite. She sang, I closed my eyes, and I imagined all the horses that I would own someday. Every little girl wants a horse. I was no exception. 

When I was about seven, I began learning everything I could about equines, from the visual clues for breed identification to proper dressage technique in the English saddle. I determined that I would get an Arabian horse and use paper strips instead of straw in its stable. I read The Pony Pals series from beginning to end, in order. When we visited my grandparents in rural Illinois, my favorite activity of the day was taking a walk with Mom to the edge of town to visit the horses who lived there and feed them grass.

Years go by, and I found out that I didn’t really want a horse after all. But still, the sight of horses, their smell, the feeling of their hair when you pet their cheek or flank— these are magical to me, and always will be.

Thanks to Mary and Elly, the past few days have been full of all the pretty little horses. Mary took me out for a cart ride with Yonker, a black Shetland pony who spends his days grazing with several other horses. First she showed me how to groom him (I knew it all in theory from my research 16 years ago, but had never done it before), and then we hitched him up to an elegant cart. For an hour we would our way through the countryside, past cornfields and green pastures and through hallways of trees lining the road. The cart bounced and rattled pleasantly and Yonker trotted along with an absent-minded attitude, glancing around as if he was enjoying the scenery as much as we were.

The next day (yesterday), Mary let me accompany here to a cart-driving lesson. We hopped into the cart again and set off straight across an empty field. I watched hot air balloons floating in the distance, and the wide open sky deepening from blue to pastel purple. A stork flapped his way over the tree-line.

One of Mary’s fellow students, a woman named Mika, allowed me to ride on the back of her horse-cart. I rode along for the entire lesson, sometimes just enjoying the scenery, sometimes grasping the cart with both hands as the horse galloped through the course laid out in cones. It was better than a carnival ride! Then Mika asked, “Would you like to drive?” I gasped, and I felt like putting on a pretty dress and twirling in a circle and clapping my hands for joy. Instead, I practically squealed, “Yes, please!”

I sat in the driver’s place and took the reins. Mika showed me how to hold them so I could “feel the mouth,” and then we were off. The horse, a mare who had been pulling carts for most of her 21 years, knew how to walk between the cones and move at the slightest direction, so I had no trouble driving her. We did one figure-eight through the cones at a walk, and then one at a trot. I couldn’t stop grinning.

Today I also got to ride bareback for a few minutes. We were cleaning the stables for some horses that Mary and Elly’s friends own, and Mary showed me how to hop on the back of the misnamed horse Fury. He calmly walked around the enclosure with me trying my hardest not to fall off. I succeeded, and dismounted with an easy swing of my leg. Again, I was grinning. 

“You smile so wide I am afraid it will swallow your ears,” Mary said. It’s a legitimate concern. After all, it’s not every day that I get to be around an animal that will always be, at least to me, magical.

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