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.