Welcome, Trigger!

I wanted a horse LONG before I ever got one. I drooled over every horse I saw. I read every book and magazine I could about horses. I scouted out riding stables on vacation. Now that we have these facts established, we'll delve into actually owning a horse, which happened after I got into high school.

At the time, I was always looking in the want-ads in the newspaper, looking at "horses for sale." Finally, there was one! The price was reasonable, and the town wasn't too far away. So we made a call and my folks and I went to look at the horse. We got to the farm, they saddled a nice palomino named "Trigger," and I rode him around the farm yard. We seemed to do fine, except for him spooking at the rattly windmill. (Should've paid more attention to that, but it didn't seem to register in my brain, due to overload of exhileration!) Still, he overall seemed to be what we were looking for, so the deal was settled, and they delivered him, I think the next day.

Well! I went home from that visit so happy I could hardly stand it. I was going to finally own a horse! WOO-HOO!! We quickly put a corral up, and put hay and water in it. This was in our "back 40" --- an extra bit of yard beyond our garage.

Trigger was then delivered to us, and made his home with us for 4 years. That's 4 years full of enjoyment, adventure, challenges, learning and a few "scrapes." It didn't take long for Dad to build a neat little barn with the corral, and later on, my brother put his own carpentry skills to use and expanded it for hay storage. I have to say it was a really neat set-up what Dad and Brother built.

The first day I had Trigger, I was on "cloud 9." I groomed him, I led him around, my aunt next door took a picture of us. Various neighbor kids had ponies, so we all got out and rode around the neighborhood. At one point we were all just sitting around on our various steeds in the road by our driveway. One of the boys was right by Trigger's head. All of a sudden, Trigger turned his head towards this boy and let out the loudest "WHINNN-EYYYY!!!!!" right in this boy's face! This boy leaned as far away as he could from that ear-blasting onslaught, but he still got the full effect of that loud horsey greeting, or whatever Trigger was saying! Hopefully, it was "I'm glad to be here!"