Midnight

All horses have a gift. Or maybe a specialty is the more accurate word. A niche that they fill. A job at which they specifically excel. For some, it’s the babysitter horse, the one that you can put anyone on and it’ll be steady and quiet through all manner of bad riding and unusual energy. It can be the one that’s so smart that you have to use your whole brain to work with them. Most Arabians I know come to mind. They challenge and ask you to step up their level, and remind you frequently that they’re choosing to work with you but are big enough and smart enough to take away that privilege whenever they may choose. There are horses that know their jobs so well that they can teach them. The cutting horse that tells you you better have a good seat or you’ll be hanging in midair while they have changed direction and moved on without you, the barrel horse who shows you what energy and verve are, the thoroughbred who teaches you about that extra gear they’re born with.


The all black paint horse, Midnight, came to Worthy Stables as a boarder and occasional lesson horse early on. He is my friend Lowery’s first horse. We all have a first horse who we might have ruined with our rookie mistakes or who we may have learned along with, and even through trial and error (and error and error), somehow we make them into a really useful horse. Midnight is the latter. Lowery was a kid when she got him and made the mistakes that we all make, tried many things before she found what works well. But she was driven enough and passionate enough and loved her horses enough that she never quit improving, never quit learning. Consequently, neither did Midnight. In all their early years together, he never stopped developing and growing.


Midnight’s specialty, his calling, I believe, has to do with fear. He has a gift of getting someone back in the saddle after a wreck, or in the saddle for the first time after a lifetime of fearing horses. For me, he gave me back a little bit of speed.


A riding accident had stolen so much from me. My confidence in my own mare, in myself. It stole my time when I needed surgeries and rehabilitation. It delayed dreams and plans as it stalled my certification processes and the opening of Worthy Stables. And it stole my ability to transition from a trot to a lope. Because that transition is where our wreck occurred, all my fear lived in the moment the steady pulse of a two-beat gait amps into the rocking scoop of a lope.


I had seen teachers and coaches, even a sports psychologist to try to recover my confidence. The most I could do was trot. And trot. And trot. I would psych myself up and back down, or I would decided suddenly to sneak up on it and just lope off….and I’d back down right before the transition. Again and again.


Then, Lowery started inviting me to ride Midnight when she was working with her other horse, a spicy little bay mare named Priss. Always cautious when I throw my leg over another horse, I eased into a riding relationship with him. Slowly I asked him to listen to my cues, stop, speed up, back up, ease up, trot a little, trot a little more, long trot, slow trot, trot through obstacles.


On a day full of fun riding in our huge open arena, several of us were on horses. We had played and horsed around and watched each other do this and that with whatever mount we had chosen that day. We had swapped horses and moved saddles around, built obstacles and worked through issues. It was the kind of day I would have lived for as a horseless, horse-crazy kid. Horse friends and clear days with no plans but to ride, that would have been heaven. And now I was living it. Even if I had dismounted and cooled and groomed Midnight after most of the day was gone, it still would have been a golden day in my memory. But I didn’t. From one end of that long arena, I asked Midnight for his big trot. Even in his older age, he has overly long legs that cover ground nicely, and uses them willingly. We trotted, big and quick, comfortable in the good saddle I had borrowed, riding straight toward trusted friends. One of them shouted, “Let him go!” The other said, “Squeeze!” And, for whatever reason….I did. It may have been because they had ridden so beautifully that day and I was filled with a touch of hero worship, or it may have been their smiling faces, actually believing I would do what I had avoided for so long, or maybe I was just drunk on a moment. Whatever the reason, I laid my leg firmly into Midnight and relaxed the tense L of my arms to give him his head, and there it was. I gasped with the first stride but then I felt the old familiar scooping of the saddle under me and followed it with my hip. I reminded my face to relax, my heels to sink toward the ground, my legs to become springy and athletic but not hard. And we loped. It was probably ten strides, if that. I loped right between my two friends and eased to a bouncy trot, and came around the side of them. Then I did the least and most cowgirl thing I think there is. I fell forward, standing in my stirrups, and I wept into Midnight. I thanked him and I scratched him and I hid my face for a long second.


I sat up and took a long swipe at my nose on my shirt sleeve. Lowery said, “Oh friend…” (One of her endearing qualities is to call people friend even when it’s hard sometimes. I love it.) “Are you going to have a little cry?” “No.” I replied, with a big sniffle. And I rode with my back to them until the breeze mostly dried my face. And it was done. I was free from the chains that told me all trot to lope transitions end at the emergency room. Free from making excuses to ride slowly. Free from feeling like I’d never feel that surge of energy and follow it into the wind again.


It was months before I would lope Jetta, my fiery red mare who had left me broken in the dirt in the woods that day. But it was the stepping stone I had to light upon before I could leap to the next one. Midnight, his black coat like the robes of an elder priest, his small white marking like the flash of white in a clerical collar, has always reminded me of clergy. A steady, wise, timeless presence in a chaotic world of new things. He pastored me back into a version of myself I had missed. A girl who hadn’t hit the ground so hard that she never wanted to ride again. A girl who gets back on. A girl who lopes off with a laugh. I wonder what it would have taken, if not Midnight’s patient willingness, to lope a horse again. Maybe I wouldn’t have. I’m glad we will never know the answer to that question. I’m glad I know an all black paint horse named Midnight.