[Wondergirl]

When I was asked to write about a favorite horse, I figured that would be a quick twenty minutes and I'd be done. But it turned out that it wasn't quite that easy. Having owned fourteen horses and taken care of, ridden, and worked around closer to a hundred, picking one to write about required some actual thought. I opted to eliminate the ones I write about all the time in my blog and my books and set about reminiscing about the others.

The impossible became possible when I walked into the living room and looked at the photo on the wall. The picture is a head shot of my Quarter Horse mare, Fancy Free Dreamer, looking regal and elegant with three prize ribbons hanging from her bridle.
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It was probably taken at one of the first shows we entered together before I lost interest in picture-taking as winning ribbons got to be old hat. We did quite a few shows during our big Year of Showing, when I lost my mind and agreed to do thirteen shows in one season. I have a daughter. She had a horse. 'Nuff said.

Fancy was a special girl. She was twelve, a barely-broke broodmare with a permanent worried expression who was being removed from the breeding program because she'd begun throwing twins and the trainer didn't want the expense of dealing with dangerous births. But when I saw this green-broke mare go over a jump course she'd never seen, doing something she'd never done before without batting an eye, I had to have her.

The first ride was pretty bad. I opted to put her on the longe first as she was a little nervous and I liked my body parts intact. She immediately panicked and flipped over against the wall of the indoor. Checkmark something else she'd never been trained to do. We both recovered quickly, and I was in the saddle before common sense caught up with my enthusiasm.

In our defense, she never once bucked or threw me (though I did do some elegant head-plants on my own) it only took a year for me to get her to walk out of the indoor under saddle and only a few more months of walking for miles side-by-side with her with a pocketful of apples to get her past her fear of the trail. But once she learned, Fancy was the boldest, kindest horse I've ever known. There was a stiffness in her lower back that made her twist her hind feet as she walked (“perky hocks” the broker called it…ha!), and no one else would ride her jackhammer trot, but there was something about her that I just loved, and she was my best friend and happy companion on all sorts of romps from cross-rails to barrel racing, from equitation to ponying babies on the trail and racing all comers bareback.

After only nine years without so much as a hiccup I had to make the awful, terrible, devastating decision to euthanize her when cancer took over her gut. It was probably the hardest thing I'd ever done. To this day I still imagine I see her in pastures as I drive through the countryside. She was and is my “Heart Horse.”