Angry feelings
When my husband came out of his home office that day and announced his Swiss-based promotion, one of the first things I said (I might have yelled) was: “And what are we supposed to do with the horses, did you even think about that?!?!”.
Gosh, the happiness and proudness over this promotion crumbled then and there. Now that all is settled, I feel a bit guilty about that. Not too much, mind you, just a little.
Turning that anger into something productive
Anyway, the first thing I did was look into exporting Sophie to Switzerland. I quickly had to abandon that. She has bad feet and would never come anywhere close to sound out of that experience.
So I put a post on my Facebook page, stating all the good, the bad, and the ugly about Sophie. But lo and behold, someone was interested in her nevertheless. A fellow barn owner had shared my post and friends of hers wanted to meet Sophie. We live in a small town with only one big employer, so of course, the lady had worked with Gaël at some point and they knew each other. They came with many good recommendations. And they were so kind and understanding.
Meeting Sophie's new humans
When they came to visit Sophie, the weather was appropriately in tune with my mood, it was a pretty stormy day. I pretended to be all cool and business-like. Like selling my heart horse was no big deal at all. Secretly, I was looking to find flaws in them so I would have an excuse not to sell Sophie to them. I know, the logic in that is nowhere to be found.
We chatted a bit, took Sophie out of the pasture and saddled her. She wasn’t thrilled about that after a year of only ground work, but she’s a good horse so she tolerated it. She is used to a very soft (too soft?) hand when I ride her and this rider was a bit firmer. She was being a bit recalcitrant about that when …
!DEAFENING CRACK AND BOOM!
You can’t imagine this, honestly! A tree had fallen down, right next to the arena!
Of course, Sophie was going all crazy, that corner of the arena was suddenly off limits, she wouldn’t go anywhere near it. She settled eventually, thank goodness. But hey, you can’t say the buyer didn’t get a good insight into the horse he was getting 😄.
After his ride, he insisted I got on Sophie. I did, we had some fun (I never really rode Western and the saddle was a bit big 😄) and she went into the damned corner for me. But riding her was the worst thing I could have done. Gone was the bravado, in came the tears.
Sophie's new home
Anyway, Sophie has a wonderful home at Starry Meadow Farms. She lives in an actual herd, she’s trying to be boss, I’m not sure how successful she is at it but she’s loving it. The owners let me visit her whenever I want, which I did a time or two to check on her. But it was always hard to drive away so I decided not to go anymore.
I dissolved my equine photography business here in the States before the end of 2020, just to avoid any administrative hassle while living in Switzerland. What I didn’t count on was that I would desperately miss photographing horses. So I asked these nice people if I could go one more time and photograph Sophie and the herd. Kind as they are, they immediately said I could.
It was a foggy morning and as you can see, I got some nice moody shots out of it!
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