So, sitting in my living room, there is an old spring horse. My parents got her for my first Christmas, in Cheyenne, Wyoming back when I was six months old. She cost about fifteen hours of work for my Dad at the City Water Department, and Mom had to put her on lay away to be able to make payments and then bring her home for Christmas. Minimum wage was $1.25 and this regal ride was $20
I don’t remember that Christmas of course, but I do remember having the horse, a pool table, washer, dryer and sink and a lot of toys in our full unfinished basement. In winter blizzard or summer heat, the basement was often the one place my brothers and I could run, roller skate, practice dribbling basketballs and ride wild mustangs through the prairie. I always wanted to be a Sioux princess, like the Pine Ridge family of my great Grandma, Emma Laffety Slack, only maybe the Disney version, without sad endings, so my horse had a name that felt like she was a Sioux pony to me as a preschooler. “Singing Moon.”
My brothers and I played on the horse for years, although my brother rode it wildly and made it tip up on the back of its frame, because with him, it was always bursting out of the bucking chute. We did grow up in Wyoming, and that brother works with cattle now, but went through a time being an actual bucking bull rider.
I ended up with two sons, only a year apart, and they also loved the horse and so did their friends, and as they grew up, one had a dog who he would put on the horse, then he had a girlfriend who had a daughter who would ride the horse. My husband tolerated it but always breathed a sigh of relief once it’s possession of floor space was relegated to storage once more.
Now my house has grandchildren and the horse has been welcomed back from the storage closet, less enthusiastically welcomed by my husband who normally stubs his toes on it frame and has no happy childhood horse riding memories. Currently it has shoved his ottoman aside, the top of the ottoman is covered with a tiara and a pink stuffed owl and tiny LOL dolls anyway, so the horse is actually a better foot rest for him than the ottoman would be
A lovely tribute to it.