Memories

Still going through my parents' stuff at our house.  There were clippings and a few pictures I sent to my sister, Gloria.  We laughed about some of them.  One of them was her announcement graduating from Oregon State COLLEGE, now Oregon State University, I think it was 1960.  I told her I liked the one of her riding a horse in a parade wearing regalia.  She laughed and asked me if I knew why she hated to ride horses.  She said when she was 3 or 4, when they (I wasn't present yet) lived at the little house, Aunt Zelma asked her if she'd like to ride her horse with her.  Of course she said yes and away they went, west on the Shitike Creek road.  When they turned around to go back home, Zelma laid Gloria across the saddle on her belly and whipped the horse to run fast. Gloria said all she could see was the road flying by, she was terrified! Zelma had no children so she probably didn't realize what she had done.

So, we started talking horse stories.  Pudge had a horse named Peg (Winnipeg).  Peg was notorious for not stopping when he started running.  We used to tie the toboggan to Peg in the winter and run him across the fields.  The toboggan would fly across the tops of the sagebrush.  One day Pudge asked Gloria to ride Peg so she could ride the toboggan.  Gloria was concerned about stopping him so Pudge told her to just run him into a fence, so that's what she did and he actually did stop.

That story led to another about Peg.  The fields just mentioned are just east of the 'town' of Warm Springs.  There is a housing development there now, where my house is.  At that time there was nothing but a field and it was cross fenced in a couple places.  The same thing happened to Pudge and me when we were riding Peg across the field.  We stopped at the fence, opened the gate, rode through, and closed the gate.  Coming back, we thought Peg would remember where the gate was but he didn't, we couldn't stop him.  He went right through the barbwire gate.  He stopped, we got off, and saw that the skin on his chest was sagging.  As I remember it, it was a slice horizontally across his chest, about 8 inches wide.  We took turns holding his chest together and holding his bridle, walking him home.  It was about 2 miles to home.  By the time we arrived home, it was holding on its own.