Free Horsekeeping by Roxanne Bok Page B

our guide barked in Cockney English: “Those of you who fancy a gallop go on ahead. If not, hold your horses back and trot along.”
    A few of us nervously cantered off. Horses sense incompetence in a nanosecond, and incompetents are useless at containing a thousand muscled pounds of herd animal hard-wired to stick with his buddies. So off everyone explodes in a pack resembling the Derby, faster and faster because once they get going, horses love to race. A few bodies go flying, and I had dismounted more than once to help collect the rider-less horses that wandered off to eat the emerald grass amongst the picnickers. One Japanese woman, who spoke no English but communicated fluently through the universal language of hysteria, refused to get back on—who could blame her—and the two-leggeds led the four-leggeds in slow and dismal return to the stables, those quaint cobblestones clopping a more gothic music.

    Once Stateside, I rode occasionally at local barns in Connecticut, content to hermetically seal myself in riding rings concentrating on how to walk, halt, turn, trot, and, to a limited extent, canter. But I had only minimal technique and had yet to tack up or groom a horse. My son, on the other hand, started riding at eight. He immediately possessed balance, rhythm, confidence, respect, and listening skills: an ideal rider young enough to take the punishment, like when the grumpy lesson horse Sultan bit Elliot’s finger. He cried, hard, and I berated myself for encouraging him to feed the friendly horse. He also weathered his first fall, again courtesy of Sultan, a slow motion topple when the trot abruptly halted, and that mercifully I didn’t witness. Shook up, but with more respect, he climbed back on.
    After each of Elliot’s half dozen lessons, we would hold Jane up on the saddle and walk her a few paces.
    This was the sum total of our checkered past in the horse world.
    And now we owned a horse farm?
    What had we done?
    Buyer’s remorse took up residency in the stalls of our brains if not our hearts. A horse farm is reputed to be a black hole for losing money, a close third to roulette and the lottery, maybe tied with inn-keeping, a business Scott and I know a little something about. Since 1990 we have owned The White Hart Inn, the local watering hole that shelters leaf-peeping tourists and parents visiting their kids boarding at the resident prep schools, not to mention the regulars who imbibe at the popular tap room bar. Over two-hundred years old, it holds court on the village green as the foremost historic landmark in town. Its twenty-six rooms and restaurant have served the town well. The broad columned porch anchors a comfortable building with a patina that welcomes the casual and the posh. It seems everyone has a story about their experiences there, and no matter where Scott and I go in the world, we find six degrees of separation circling back not to Kevin Bacon (who has a house in the area and is an occasional customer), but to The White Hart Inn.
The White Hart “family” echoes a soap opera and it is probably best we do not know even half of what else goes on alongside business, but, all in all, inn-keeping has been fun. We further integrated into the community and, though the business will never support us, it steeled our nerves to our next unplanned adventure of horsekeeping.
    In three months we would close on the horse farm property and have to hit the ground running with repairs and renovations on that May 1 st or lie dormant over the long winter. Not the types to postpone gratification, intuitively Scott and I objected to years passing with the farm horseless. But even the basics were undecided: should we lease the farm outright, maintain total control, or some combination?
    What we needed was an expert: a competent, take-charge, honest, likable farm manager who could ultimately run the business but start immediately advising us how to set it all up. Logical yes,