Let me take you back to the very beginning. Back to when my life didn’t revolve around one very special mare…

I was seven when the fever took hold of me. I was delirious and couldn’t think straight. I also develpoed an inner itch that could only be surpressed by the presence of a large, hooved mammel. I had LGHS, Little Girl Horse Syndrome. It’s a very terrible disease that usually infects girls between the ages of five and nine. They’re still not sure of how it spreads, but some theories are subliminal messages through TV, magazines, posters, and worse of all, coloring books. Girls who already have LGKS or LGPS (Little Girl Kitten Syndrome, and Little Girl Puppy Syndrome, respectively) are more likely to contract LGHS. The worse part is, it never goes away. If it’s ignored, the dreams and images begin to haunt the child and the fever will only get worse.

The only treatment available is a prescription of riding lessons. However, some argue that the side effects may be worse than the disease itself, including wanting to play Stable Pals instead of Barbie, littering the fridge with permanent marker drawn pictures of Lightning the Stallion, and his girlfriend Sugar. Her friends will grow tired of playing the part of the pony and will no longer want to play with her. By this point, the only way to give a creative outlet is to have the prescription doubled, and in some cases tripled.

As I said, I began to show symptoms of this terrible disease when I was seven. My parents tried to ignore it and delay the inevitable with promises of riding lessons when I was just a little bit older. It wasn’t until I was nine that I received my first prescription. I was to receive one lesson, for one hour, once a week. This could only be done if I also took an additional ninety minutes to groom and spoil my lesson horse for that day.

In addition to the above mentioned side effects, I began to daydream about horses during school hours, and at times when I should have been focusing on homework. Back then the only theory for how to treat this was for my parents to threaten to take away my riding lessons if my grades did not improve. This backfired, as I became so concerned about loosing my precious lessons, that I lost complete focus for my studies. Later research proved that this was a normal result and doctors recommended that such a treatment not be used.

At age twelve, my parents had had enough, and cut off my lessons. What my parents didn’t know was that my prescription had a very high risk of dependency, and I was hooked. I couldn’t live with out it. I was a miserable child; almost nothing could cheer me up. I didn’t want to see anything that had to do with horses for fear that it would send me into another crying spell. My grades sank even further over the course of a year until finally the last effects of the prescription had worn off. I was still not a happy child, but I was also not a sad child anymore. And my grades slowly began to rise again, as I had nothing left to do other than school.

High school was the first time in five years that I’d been in a public school. I didn’t interact well with other students; in fact I would have been satisfied to just sit in a corner for the next four years. Then something happened towards the end of freshman year. My parents took me out to the old schooling barn for my fourteenth birthday, and my lessons started once again.

My favorite lesson horse, Shasta an Appaloosa gelding, was still there, as was the oldest horse in the barn, Honey, a dull palomino mare. New horses had come in and some had left. I found that the almost two year break had done wonders for my riding. Within two months I had caught up and passed where I had been before, and Shasta and I were bonding better than ever.

My disease soon sifted into an addiction for my riding prescription. I had the dose upped to twice a week and was cleaning stalls on the same days to get one lesson free. The crazy thing was, I liked cleaning stalls. I liked to shovel horse manure. I still like it. I love it in fact. I’d love to shovel horse manure for the rest of my life.

You see what kind of malicious infection this is? It takes perfectly normal little girls, and turns them into horse manure shoveling people, who can talk non-stop about horses for weeks on end. It’s a hard life to live, but at least it is survivable.

Eventually my instructor had to move barns to a place where it was almost impossible to ride. I stopped taking lessons. Fearing another withdrawal like I’d had before, my father decided we should buy a horse. And so the hunt began.