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Allie Left YesterdayJune 02, 2010 . . . for her new home, which was also her first home: Hartland Morgans in Windsor, N.Y.! In mid-April I e-mailed Christine, who owns and manages Hartland with her husband, Steve, to let her know that Allie was for sale. She e-mailed back about an hour and a half later that she and Steve wanted to buy her back. Buying a horse was way, way down their list of priorities, but Allie was her dam's only filly. They didn't know this was going to be the case: Bess's breeding career was cut short when she foundered badly after being seriously overfed at a barn where she'd gone to be artificially inseminated. She wasn't sound enough to carry a foal after that, and within a couple of years she was so lame she had to be euthanized. Other than Allie, all of Bess's produce were colts, and all are geldings. Allie is 14 and never been bred, but she's sound, sane, and healthy, and Steve and Christine thought she was a pretty good bet. The local vet who did her rectal exam agreed. Getting a horse to and from Martha's Vineyard is always expensive, given the ferry fare for truck and trailer, esp. between mid-May and mid-October. Often it involves two haulers (one local and one not) and a layover of several days at an off-island boarding barn. But Christine and Steve have friends on the Vineyard who for years have been urging them to come visit. So they arranged to have the farm looked after, and Saturday they drove to Mashpee (in southeastern Mass., on Cape Cod but just barely), where Christine has relatives; crossed Vineyard Sound on Sunday afternoon and left their trailer at the barn where Allie's been living for the last year; and went off to spend a couple of days with their friends. Their ferry reservation going off was for 4 p.m. yesterday. You have to be at the dock a half-hour early, and post-Memorial Day traffic is getting heavier, so we agreed to rendezvous at the barn at 2 p.m. When I got there, Steve already had the trailer hitched up and ready. Christine had bought a copy of Mud of the Place and asked me to sign it for her; I forgot to bring my copy of her new poetry book, Appetite for the Divine (Ashland Press), which I haven't had a chance to read yet. Allie walked right onto the trailer, even though she hasn't been in one in two years. And they were off. The plan was to lay over with friends in Connecticut last night and then go the rest of the way today. (Steve said it was a nine-hour trip altogether, from Woods Hole, Mass., to Windsor, N.Y., and they wanted to give Allie a break.) The whole thing has gone so smoothly and we're all so happy about it that I know it's worked out just the way it was supposed to. (Allie's registered name is Hartland All for the Best.) It's going to take some readjusting and selling off/giving away/throwing out a lot of stuff, but I've been gradually withdrawing from horses over the last year or so -- I could write or I could ride, but not both (not unless I hit the lottery, which I don't play). The energy drain, the time and the money, has been making it too hard to do what I'm supposed to be doing. So on to the next . . . I've already had several "If you ever want to ride" offers, which I'll probably take people up on eventually, but for now horses are fading into my background and new possibilities continue to open up. P.S. 4:30 p.m. Steve just called -- they got home safely, and Allie was a trooper all the way. Not surprised, but it's still a relief!
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