Horses and Humans
I'll never forget it...my first time riding Virginia. I was just a little country kid from GA who'd been recently transplanted in southwest FL. Much had changed. I'd come from a dense agricultural environment. My family had spent most of their lives on a farm. Much of what we ate, we either grew, hunted, or fished for. My two favorite hideouts and favorite places to be were the nearby sale barn and the dam supported creek tucked a little deep in Georgia's woods that I was forbidden to go to. Who can say no to a good-sized creek in the dead of of Georgia summer that had plenty of room for me to swim along with enormous carp, snapping turtles, soft shell turtles, lamp eels, catfish, beaver, and water moccasins. Yep...water moccasins were the reason I was forbidden. My grandma declared all my childhood that there was a water moccasin bed in the creek. I could never tell her that all the years I'd been sneaking down there to swim, I'd never saw one. However, I saw plenty of rattle snakes on the way there and heard talk of old folks about gators and cougars in the area. We kids knew how the old folks around there were...scared of everything having to do with fun. Therefore, we simply couldn't listen to everything they said. I was a complete country Georgia boy in every sense of the phrase right until tragedy struck.
My mother remarried and we had to move to southwest FL with my step father. I'd spent most of my life up until this point absent of a relationship with my biological father so getting a new dad at the age of 14 was not just uncool; it was traumatic. A nearly 15 year old proud GA boy isn't the easiest to tame with law and order coming from another man and I can assure you that every rule, law, and command given felt like an attack against my freedom, my customs, my identity, and my very own soul. I played my part as best a s I could having many one on one talks with God who functioned as my everything in those days and currently. I needed a way out. I needed more control or even just a sense of control in my life. Everything I was seemed to be taken away with the exception of my southern drawl that Floridians constantly reminded me was ever present. There was no room to be a country boy in southwest FL as my mother warned me months before moving there. She explained things would be very different and I would not have the freedom I had in Georgia. Kryptonite...that's what lack of freedom is to me but who could know at that time... all I'd ever had was freedom. There was but One who knew. God. During a time I was boiling over and didn't know how to remove myself from the fire I was sitting over, I was introduced to Horse named Virginia.
Virginia was a former race horse...Arabian. Sorrel. Boy, was she fast and extremely smart. It was my aunt Cheryl's horse. She'd recently started boarding horses to live out her own dream. I'd never ridden a horse other than once a year at those dusty old county fairgrounds back home. There's no one in their right mind that would have paired me with Virginia except for my aunt Cheryl and God. Well it worked. We were a match made in Heaven. She wanted to run...and run really fast. I was the only one who would let her go. I instinctively understood. I wanted to go as well. I ached to taste freedom again and God allowed me to have it with Virginia. I, too, had regained a measure of control. I could tell a thousand pound animal to go left and right...she'd go left and right. I could tell her to go backwards...she'd go backwards. I don't remember much telling her to go forward. She knew what I wanted and I knew what she wanted so we just went and went fast. Virginia and I did this for years. Interestingly, my time with her didn't change the function of my home life. Rather, it changed my patience to cope and endure my new home life. And what are we without patience? You guessed it: beneath our circumstance...not above. I am grateful for my Heavenly Father who gave me Virginia to ride above.
