In the Wee Hours of Morning

I live in an old farm house, nothing fancy but it has a great big old front porch. As long as weather permits I like to sit on the porch and drink my morning coffee. So I’m sitting on my porch about 5:15 this morning, I’m an early riser, drinking my coffee, and wondering about this kind of odd dream I had. I heard what sounded like horses hooves trotting up the road past the front of my house. Then I thought to myself, your dreaming, it’s just the garbage truck, and rolled over and went back to sleep. The thing is, it’s only Tuesday morning and trash collection isn’t until Thursday, and what was with the horse? In mid thought I notice the neighbors’ dog yapping away. I wondered what that little mutt was barking at this time. About a week ago he barked all night. Come to find out the next morning as I was walking my dog he had some cat cornered in a field and had been barking at it for hours. Anyway, I’m wondering what the little yapper has cornered this time when all of the sudden I hear horses hooves. Out of the dark I see this horse go striding up the road! Oh, insert expletive here, I wasn’t dreaming I did hear a horse! My next thought is that this road gets busy around this time of morning and most of the drivers don’t understand what part of 30 miles per hour applies to them. Some one is going to get hurt or worse. I jump up out of my chair, run into the house, down the hall to my sons room, throw open the door, (let me add here that as I threw open the door I was trying to remember if his girlfriend had spent the night. Oh well, I think, it’s dark, I won’t see anything I don’t want to see.)and say, “Come out here now and bring your rope, I have to catch a horse!” One more thing, my son is an adult, just thought I’d clarify. I run back to my room to put on my shoes. While lacing up my shoes I realize my son was sound asleep and is probably still trying to figure out what the hell is going on. But I didn’t think I had much time to go back and explain. Now, I didn’t have any rope so I grabbed the next best thing I did have, the belt to my robe, and out the door I went. As I’m running out of the yard another thought crosses my mind, this is also the time of morning when the school buses are running, it’s still pitch dark, the concept of a school bus filled with kids hitting a horse sent chills up my spine. What can I say, my mind wanders this way. Once out of my yard and heading down the road it also dawns on me, it’s darker than I thought. I can see to road but not much else. How the hell was I supposed to find that horse? Meanwhile, the little terrorist dog is still yapping away. I figured I’d follow the sound of the yapping and it would lead me to the horse. Sure enough I found the animal standing square in the middle of the road and it was a little spooked. I walked up to it slowly and stroked its nose. As I slipped the belt over its head I had to take a deep breath to calm myself. Not only was this a spooked, potentially dangerous horse, it was a really, really big horse. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve had any personal dealings with one of these animals so I’m frantically trying to reboot that information in my head. Because If I don’t get this right it could hurt, a lot. OK, OK, I think, first I have to get the horse out of the road. Like I said, the horse was spooked so getting it to follow took a bit of tugging and coercing. Just as I got to the side of the road a truck came flying over the crest of the hill doing a lot faster that 30mph. Directly behind the truck was, yep, a school bus full of kids. The horse tried to rear up while all 140 lbs of me is trying to hold the head of this 1500 lbs beast down so it can’t rear up and I’m having visions of me, flying through the air, landing in the field, hard, with something broken. I’m not feeling up to playing cowboy Jane at 5:30 in the dark morning. Right about this time my neighbors truck pulls up with my son in the passenger seat, rope and cell phone in hand. The neighbor informs me yesterday evening someone had left the gate open at the horse farm about a mile up the road and horses had been all over the highway. Then he tells me about how a few years back some guy had 12 head of buffalo escape that ran around town for two days before they caught them all. At this point my son says, “mom, I’m not helping you catch buffalo.” My son has a peculiar sense of humor. My neighbor says he will go up to the horse farm and try to find some one. I get on my sons phone and call 911. You know, those little blue tooth things are kind of cool. While I was talking to the dispatcher I could stand in the middle of the road and wave the cell phone around, (those little suckers are really bright when it’s dark out,) to slow down the traffic. Seems the owners had contacted the police and the police called them while I was on hold and patched them through to me. They had been out all night looking for the horse. I gave them directions and they were on their way so all we had to do was wait. Standing there in some ones front yard while the horse ate grass and we waited for the owners to come, I told my son it was too bad we couldn’t get the horse to actually walk with us. It would have been really fun to walk it up to the bedroom window where my other half was still sleeping and oblivious to these events and knock until he opened the curtains and say, “Honey, look what I found! Can I keep him?”