His name was Up Above.
My
mother named him when she was about six – and she spent every day of every
summer on him.
She
grew up in Boston, which was not an environment particularly suited for horses;
my grandparents, though, had a summer house in the town of Jaffrey, New
Hampshire, right in the shadow of Mt. Monadnock, and Up Above was there each
June to greet her.
“Why
on earth did you name him that?” I asked her once.
She
grinned at me. “Because when I was in the saddle, I was up above the rest of
the world – made me feel important.”
I
get that, I really do.
That’s my mother, Martha, on the left, and
her sister Hope (who named her horse Radio, for some reason!) on the right. Up
Above and Radio boarded at a nearby farm during the off seasons, but spent
their summer days in a stable on the property my grandparents owned.
The house was on Thorndike Pond. There was a
dirt road that went around the whole thing, and the two sisters spent their
summer days riding.
My
mother told me they’d make picnic lunches, then be off for the day. They’d stop
somewhere along the route, let the horses drink from Thorndike, tie them to a
nearby tree, then eat their lunches on the shore.
They rode in horse shows in the nearby town
of Dublin – I’ve got programs from the Dublin Horse Show that show my mother
winning ribbons in various classes.
I
love this portrait: my mother, with Up Above, taken (she told me) at the Dublin
It
always makes me smile.
