Who Would Have Thought?

My husband and I met at an Arabian horse farm. He worked there part time starting colts, and I was offered a job finishing and showing. I didn't take the job, but I did get the guy.

On our first date we went to a movie called "Casey's Shadow" in a car he borrowed from his brother so that I wouldn't know he had an old beater station wagon. Little did either one of us know that our lives would parallel many of the events in the movie. As our children tell their friends to this day, we were not conventional parents.

We had two boys, and he had two girls by his first marriage, and one summer we picked up the girls for their visit, and all the kids got chicken pox. I was working as an office manager and secretary for a cardiologist, and the sitter wouldn't keep the boys, so hubby worked out of the home and took care of the kids. Somehow along the way, his brother talked him into training race horses, which he had done briefly in the past.

He bought a pink tractor for $50 and made a horse walker to cool the horses out, built some stalls, and created a training track. He bought an old truck to replace the station wagon, and even came up with a two horse trailer to haul to the track. Then we made one of the best purchases ever - Custer, a 23 year old horse that anyone could ride. He became the pony horse and babysitter for the boys.