Six is a funny number. It’s sleepy. Five has more oomph. Major milestones are always a dividend of five. A solid half or a quarter on your way to something. High five. Five fingers. When it comes to horse shopping (something on my mind a lot lately), five figures. Six is less ostentatious. Maybe even a little ominous. 666 doesn’t really fill you with the warm and fuzzies, but here we are. Tim died six years ago. He was 36…
I’ve always had a solid internal clock. From my childhood through college, I religiously wore a watch. It was one of those clothing items that I felt naked without. When I got my first smart phone and that became the item that our entire society can’t live without, the watch got phased out. Maybe that’s why I am usually aware of the passing hours. Tim would ask me a lot what time it was when we were out running errands…
Well y’all, it’s been a minute. The other day I chatted with L when she made a comment about her blog hitting a ten year anniversary milestone. That number seemed crazy to me. Ten years?! Ten years we’ve been writing about our horses? Surely I hadn’t reached that. But I looked, and I had. I started SMTT in 2010, though it had scattered posts back then. Still, technically I was at ten years. Eleven, really. There are a lot of…
I’ve had it with being a professional griever. Five years ago today, my husband Tim died. In case you’re a new reader, it wasn’t expected or peaceful or anything like a Nicholas Spark’s novel. It was a raw, real drug overdose. I found him. I called 911, and did the chest compressions even though the second I touched him, I knew. In the five years following that it’s almost comical the things that I’ve lost. All of the three dogs…
I never thought I’d live in a time when one minute I’d be reviewing the modeling on the number of deaths in Texas, and the next I’d think, I should really mow the grass before it rains. I don’t have to tell you how unsettling this juxtaposition of pandemic and “normal” life is. We’re all living it. The lucky ones, which I still currently am, have kept our jobs and work from home. Our meetings still run, deadlines arrive. We…
I am, to put it mildly, a bit of a planner. Some might even throw around the words “control freak,” although that sounds fairly harsh to me. I prefer meticulous, driven by detail, thorough. It’s no surprise then that I had a plan for my widowhood. In my grief, I doubled down in planning and control. My best friend was ripped away from me, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. With him went the safe, idyllic life…
When I feel like I’ve been robbed of something, I try to focus on the things to be thankful for. It sounds pious, but I assure you it’s not. Rather, I have to concentrate on the amazing experience that was Tim and Simon instead of feeling like I’ve had all my happiness ripped away from me. Because frankly, I feel like I’ve had all my happiness ripped away from me. Yesterday was my local horse show organization’s year end banquet….
There are a lot of things I want to express in this post, but I also know I don’t have a ton of mental energy to accurately do that. So, let me tell ya’ll this. On Monday, I picked up a package from my mailbox that was both unexpected and large. In it was the most beautiful book of my horse beautiful horse, which I sobbed over. Like, I sobbed so hard it took me three times flipping through the…