This morning I daydreamed of my beautiful Virginia home, while I hurried breakfast and went out to ride Kit. I craved having a barn/stable/stall/crosstie to use for grooming and tacking. (Greg’s setup does not include a barn or shed; they use their horse trailer for storage as well as transportation.) I thought of the great footing on my Aiken line down by the Jordan River, while I tried to navigate between rabbit holes and ground squirrel holes in the corner of the field where I tried to work. I had a yen for some soft green clover as I stalked across the pasture through a healthy crop of tall tough native weeds to turn the mare back out (beside her nemesis Heidi, who, by the way, is realizing that having Kit as her one-and-only-friend may be better than having no-friends-at-all.) As I trotted along the cinder path in Greg’s development, I thought longingly of living in my Rappahannock 'hood with dozens of horsey neighbors to ride with on any of hundreds of miles of trails every day of the week.
I went so far as to yearn for Washington DC traffic later as I negotiated the 101 highway from Santa Barbara. With apologies to Yeats, this six-lane behemoth, slouching towards Los Angeles to be born is a rough beast. It wasn’t so much with introspection as longing that I pined for crew cuts and swingy bobs from back east, in lieu of the dreds and rasta hats that prevail here from downtown Burbank to the beach boardwalk.
