Finding Peace In A Freezing Barn

By Jenna Fogle

It’s a funny thing what a horse can do to a person. Change their day; change their whole outlook on life.

 Now I don’t know about you, but my horse can bring more emotion out in me than my father can. Unless you want to kick your dad one minute and then spend the next hour you’re supposed to be practicing the pattern, genuinely apologizing to them like they understand you. (Maybe my dad and horse have more in common than I think.) They can understand you, right? 

What’s the fun in talking to your horse if they just hear jibber-jabber? Of course they understand what you’re saying!

“Be careful, that ones kind of weird. I’d walk her in here” (in reference to the lameness area) is what I was told on my way to hand walk one of the horses in the hospital.

So I open this particular mare’s stall kind of cautiously, kind of nonchalant. (Horses can sense when you’re tense, you know.)

Instead of taking her to the lameness area and crowding the crowded, I decided to walk her up and down the alleyway of the barn.

As we walked, I began talking to her. And when I did, her head began to lower and her strides became slower.

Then I wondered to myself, “What has this little mare gone through that makes her so on edge? How did her owners treat her? Did she even know her owners? Did she just have a trainer?”

When I ran out of things to say to her, I turned on the radio so there wouldn’t be complete silence.

I performed my best Garth Brooks voice that I could.

I tried to keep up with The Band Perry’s new song. (I mumbled more than I sang.)

Our walk came to an end.

I put her back in her stall.

She turned and put her head in the corner as I closed her stall door.

A different song began playing as I stood there watching her.

Like the ones before it, I started singing this one too. She turned and looked at me when I sang the first words, “You know they say, ‘You can’t go home again’” so I kept singing.

She turned away from the corner she had confined herself in and began walking toward me.

She placed her head next to my hands that were hanging onto the bars of her stall.

I gently stroked her fuzzy cheek with my index finger, all the while still singing, until the song was over.

That morning I found more meaning in Miranda Lambert’s “The House That Built Me” in a freezing cold barn with a horse I had never met before, than in the privacy of my own vehicle where I’d sang it a million times before.

You never know who needs you.

You never know whom you may need.

So smile a little! Laugh a little! Sing a little! Dance a little!

It just might change someone’s whole world.