Category Archives: Memoir

I’m not sure what’s happening to me. Inching up to the septuagenarian mark and losing two beloved horses in two years had taken a toll.  Maybe this is what happens....

"Do I have enough money for Taco Bell? No, I don't," says a trending #horsetok sound on the Internet right now. "But you know what I do have?" it continues,...

procrastination is theart of keepingup with yesterday —Don Marquis, archy and mehitabel, 1927 I opened a box of Breyer horses from my childhood the other day. I could say it...

The other day in the barn aisle I heard a totally unfamiliar noise. It was the sound of a child throwing a temper tantrum.  I stood there for a moment,...

"'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse," is the famous line from the poem A Visit From Saint...

Horse people know more about what is going on in the sky and in the dirt than most. We have multiple weather apps on our phones and check them often....

It’s been kind of a year of death for me, but if I am honest with myself, it’s always a year of death for someone. We’ve all endured the heartache...

One of your first lessons as a writer is using specific details, so the idea of show, don’t tell is burned into me. I shiver when I see it done...

I arrived home less than 24 hours ago and it feels strange. Strange not to be out driving around the English countryside or the Welsh or Scottish countryside for that...

I was unsure what to expect when I entered the New Forest. I assumed I’d see ponies and trees and maybe a few roads winding through the area and that...

Of all the Airbnbs in the UK, I had to book this one; a cute one-bedroom house with a clothesline. I knew I was in the county of Hampshire, but...

A million Christmases ago my mom gave me a Newmarket quarter sheet. It was my Santa present, which is to say the best present of the day. It was beautiful....

Like many young adults in their mid-twenties, Alicia Shread, 25, from Clarksville, Maryland, is focused on building a prosperous career. While horses were always a hobby for her, after spending...

“Twenty-two percent of millennials say they have ‘no friends,’” claimed a Vox article from 2019. While that stat was pulled from a poll of fewer than 2,000 people, the truth...

It is well chronicled here on Horse Network that I, Gretchen Lida, have depression. I can be a sad sack who happens to love horses. Like clockwork, the worst spells are usually...

He’d been purchased some years ago from a Mennonite family. When my boss went to see him, he was looking for something safe and reliable; he asked if Lucky was...

"You look cute in that," the person I love said when he first saw me in barn clothes. There was hay in my hair. The ratty t-shirt and jeans I...

While at the Dublin Horse Show in 2018, I got a sense of how many horses occupied Ireland and felt staying an extra week would allow me the time to...

After 20 years of riding other people’s horses, I finally have one of my own. As I latched her stall door for the first time, a familiar sense of worry...

We hung on tightly, leaning forward as the horses climbed. Already we’d gone through more difficult terrain than I could have imagined—bogs that sucked at the horse’s feet, mud that...