From the very beginning to now

Hard to believe it all started here, there on a porch railing.  We threw a rag rug over the railing and tied some rope to a porch upright and started dreaming!  As most of our childhood memories I remember the porch being bigger.  It was painted a glossy gray.  It was my friend Laurie’s grandfather’s house and we spent lots of time playing on that porch.  truthfully I found a recent photo of it on line but I can’t use it.  That porch was from the fifties, I lived in the tenement railroad apartment building next to it.  At that time those homes were on the edge of the ghetto, now images that I have found show how run down and in the midst of Waterbury’s inner city ghetto that address has become.   Unless I find a photo from my childhood you will just have to imagine it.

Where the dream came from I am not quite sure.  I was probably 5 or 6, living in Waterbury Connecticut, the child of working class Italian immigrants (well my mother anyway,  my dad was first generation Italian American).  My only access to horses would be when we would take rides in the “country”, which would be the rural suburbs of Middlebury, Southbury, Woodbury and there I would see them,  standing in lush green pastures, behind white rail fences.

There was a riding stable in Woodbury where for a small fee you could put your kid on a horse and have them led around a paddock.  The few times that we stopped, and this chubby little five year old was treated to a ride, were the pinnacle of my horse exposure and experience!

I imagine they must have had real lessons and actual students but taking riding lessons in Connecticut was so beyond anything I could have imagined at that age!  Middlebury, Southbury, Woodbury where doctors and lawyers and captains of industry lived!  Their kids took riding lessons.  I rode porch railings.  And I read.

I had no horse blood in my family. No one rode, no one understood.  No one scooped me up on their horse and held me as they rode.  I did not bounce around in the saddle with my mom or my aunt or my uncle or my dad.  I was not propped up as an infant to sit on a mountain of a horse to learn at that early age that anything was possible!!  That I could do anything!  Nope I learned all that much later…in fact I am still learning it.

Horses, something of their magic touched my little soul and I brought it back to the city with me.  Closed my eyes while I rode on the porch railing and dreamt of my own horse.  Little did I know where it would eventually lead me!