When I was young, our family holidays were spent at a farm retreat called Eight Bells, several hours from Cape Town. For me, the entire trip revolved around one thing: the horses.
I wasn't an experienced rider, but I made up for it with sheer, unbridled passion. The routine was always the same—we would walk the horses slowly up the paddock, then turn around for the ride back. That was the highlight, when the horses would pick up the pace into a trot or, if we were lucky, a gentle canter.
I was usually assigned the "mellow" mares, the ones with sweet, nursery-rhyme names like Tinkerbell and Buttercup. They were patient, steady, and—in my memory at least—pure white. I felt like a king on their backs, even if we were mostly just following the trail.
But then there was the farmer’s daughter.
She was eleven to my nine, and she inhabited a completely different world. While I was bobbing along on Buttercup, she was mounted on the stallions—beasts with names like Storm and Fury, as black as mine were white. She didn't walk or trot; she galloped.
I can still see her vividly: charging across the paddock with immense, effortless confidence, her long blonde hair flowing behind her like a banner. She was magnificent. To a nine-year-old boy on a horse named Tinkerbell, she wasn't just a neighbor or a fellow rider; she was a force of nature. I watched her from the back of my slow-moving mare, completely enthralled by the speed, the power, and the sheer "otherness" of a girl who could tame a horse called Fury.
She belonged to the wind and the open field. I belonged to the track and the steady rhythm of hooves. And somewhere between Buttercup and Fury, between walking and flying, a small boy first felt the pull of a bigger, wilder world.
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