We announced the 10 Blogger Contest finalists yesterday, and now we’re bringing you their awesome entries from Round 1 here on Bloggers Row. I will be posting all 10 entries over the next few days, so be sure to check them out and leave your feedback in the comments.
All entries will be reprinted without editing for fairness’ sake. Thanks again for your support and readership, EN! We are so thrilled to have such quality entries this year.
Entrant: Lynn Marie Garvin, 25
Bio: Lynn Marie is an accomplished obsessor of clean water troughs and pristinely swept aisle ways. She regularly lurks at dressage warmups and on cross country courses taking photographs of complete strangers and then slinking back to her car as if nothing creepy at all has occurred. She has imaginative competitive upper level eventing daydreams in her car when that song by Bastille comes on the radio, but don’t think for a minute she isn’t regularly reality checked by her OTTB mare when she actually gets on to ride.
Accolades: Can blow bubbles with world champions but prefers to keep it casual to not intimidate the amateurs. Known to wear a cape. Preferred gait is skipping because it’s faster than walking and kind of like jogging’s fabulous gay brother that everyone admires for his fashion sense and self confidence.
Entry: $995
She was a terrible racehorse. In eight lifetime starts, the chestnut filly named Castle Cat made $995 and never placed higher than 4th. In her last race on November 9th, 2012 at Laurel Park, she was dead last, several furlongs behind the pack, proving at last that she was not motivated to win races.
The first time I saw Castle Cat was through the great and powerful combined forces of boredom at work and the internet. She was listed as free to a good home through a thoroughbred rescue called TPR, and there was no mystery why. She was a chestnut mare. She was so over at the knees that I could’ve set a beer on her right leg and used her as a side table. She looked more like a weedy coming three year old than a four year old and was so tucked up and angular that she would have been mistaken for a red furry wasp if she was small enough to fit in a hive.
I was irrationally obsessed with her. I sent the link to her profile to a couple of trusted horse friends. I stalked the TPR facebook page. I did the unthinkable: I contacted her foster and said I wanted to come see her.
This was a poor choice because I was a 23, living in a shoebox room in central DC, newly employed as an entry level legal assistant and saddled with a moderate amount of college loan debt. I had spent the last ten or so years of my life pretending to like school while working at eventing and dressage barns for amazing people in NJ and WV and for a short, incredible time, FL. I was hopelessly in love with a sport that I had very little true riding experience in. My horsey friends told me not to do it, she was lame, she had unfixable conformation flaws, she was a red mare for heaven’s sake.
Did any of this stop me? Of course not.
Approximately a month later I led Castle Cat off a stock trailer and was given her Jockey Club papers. My very first horse, something I had been waiting for what seemed like my whole conscious life.
I had her on a week trial but it was a done deal that first day when I rushed her into a stall and threw a secondhand blanket on top of what was a woefully inadequate cooler. The hour long stock trailer ride in early March weather had her shivering so much I half expected her little eyeballs to pop right out of her head.
I’ve spent my whole horsey life experience as a barn hand, more or less. I am hard wired to take close and intimate care of every animal I am responsible for. There is nothing quite like the feeling of walking away from a stall freshly cleaned and bedded, two scrubbed and filled water buckets, and a hay rack crammed full of hay, a happy little filly all tucked in for the night. I love that, I always have, and always will.
The first day of my life as a horse owner was more exciting than I ever could have imagined. After riding her and not getting bucked off, after pulling her mane, brushing and currying and picking up her feet and poking and prodding, all of which she tolerated without taking a swing at me, I sat in my car for a second and waited for the bolt of lightning to hit, because no day could ever be so perfect.
