Janell’s Missed Kodak Moments

You know those times when you’ve seen something wonderful and you say, “Gee, I wish I had my camera,” ? Here are a couple of Kodak Moments that I missed because I didn’t have my camera with me. Both involve my daughter Emily, because yesterday was her 23rd birthday. I would have put this up yesterday, but I was busy taking her out to eat at Olive Garden and buying her birthday present at Borders.

Emily was my primary horseback riding partner through her teen years. She had a horse named Jasmine and I rode on Bubba. (Jasmine was his mother.) Since Jasmine was the Girl in Charge, they usually walked in front of us for the first 5 minutes or so of our ride. I remember watching them from behind and admiring the way Emily looked in the saddle and the way Jasmine’s tail would swish around. When she rode, Emily usually put her long hair in a single braid and it hung down the middle of her back. Sometimes she’d sing. One of the songs I remember that she liked was by Jamie Oneal and the chorus went;
“When I think about rain, I think about singing
When I think about singing it’s a Heavenly tune
When I think about heaven, I think about angels
When I think about angels, I think about you.”
She was singing that tune one winter day when we went for a ride in the snow. Oh, it was a beautiful picture: It was in the late Spring, the snow was fresh and clean and the sky was a pure cobalt blue. I was listening to her sing and wasn’t really paying attention to where we were going and all of a sudden, Bubba found himself up to his chest in snow. That was the day I learned how to stay on when he was leaping.
I remember a time in the late Fall we were galloping through the stubble of a bean field and her horse stumbled and went down to her knees on the front legs. Emily was thrown forward and I learned what “head over heels” looks like. She scrambled to her feet, got hold of her horse and the first words out of her mouth were, “Are you all right?” Whatta gal.
Most of the time our rides were peaceful and without incident. We tended to walk more than trot or gallop and that’s still the way I ride. We rode a path that followed a tiny creek that ran south from where we lived. We caught glimpses of a lot of wildlife on those rides: geese, ducks, foxes, coyotes, deer, pheasants. And, once in a while, we could hear a beaver splash into the water by a grove a trees at one point on the creek, but we never did see one. We could always track the progress of their work on a dam until one year in August, we got 11 inches of rain in about 2 hours and that was the end of the dam.

She doesn’t ride with me very often anymore and she wears her hair too short for a braid. I’ll always regret not taking the time to get a picture of that. I guess I’ll have to store it in my mind.