[1]IT WAS A cold March day and the horse paddock at the SPCA was full of mud. I stood shivering at the fence in the drizzle as my breath billowed gray mist over the top rail. In my hurry to get there Id left the house without a hat or gloves, grabbing only a windbreaker from its hook above the basement stairs on my way to the garage. If I had stopped to think, I would have responded as I usually did when hearing a plea for help for animals sick and suffering at the hands of humans: I might have done nothing, or I might have sent a check. But this time when my friend Judy called to tell me the SPCA had just confiscated forty abused horses from a Standard bred farm and needed help housing them, I ran for my jacket and jumped in the car. I dont know why this time was different, why in an instant I chose to do something Id previously avoided. I was not accustomed to going to the rescue. Mine was never the face friends saw smiling over them as they woke up in the hospital after surgery. I wasnt the one they called to drive them to get their stitches out or to pick up the results of lab tests or X-rays or anything medical. I had a horror of sickness, my own or anyone elses. With such an aversion to illness, why was I standing at the fence watching twenty emaciated broodmares with their foals stumble in the mud? Why did I answer that call? Perhaps it was just a knee-jerk reaction to a deep and abiding love of horses, a love passed down to me by my grandmother, a formidable, sometimes cruel woman who had become my guardian when I was five. As always, I cringed when I remembered my grandmother, and at the same time I envied her a now-vanished world full of ocean liners, Pullman cars, and best of all, horses. When I was growing up, there were still carriages and odd bits of harness in the stable at her home in South Carolina, lovely old carriages that hadnt been driven in thirty years. Id look at them and feel cheated that I hadnt lived in a time when horsepower provided the only means of transportation. In my grandmothers attic was a trunk full of riding clothes, hers and her mothers: brown leather field boots that laced up the front, handmade in England; wool tweed riding jackets with leather buttons and small tailored waists; linen breeches with leather leg patches; and wide-hipped jodhpurs with fitted calves. There was also a coachmans heavy wool livery with silver buttons engraved with an H for Hartshorne, my grandmothers maiden name and my middle name.When I was six or seven Id go through the contents of this trunk, carefully lifting out the brittle fabrics with the frayed edges and the disintegrating linings, and once, one of the coach-mans buttons came off in my hand. I turned it over and on the back it said Superior Quality. I put the button in my pocket, and thirty-five years later it hung on the bulletin board above my desk at home. Its small and round and evokes more images than a feature-length film. One touch and Im tugged into a world

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Excerpted from Chosen by a Horse: How a Broken Horse Fixed a Broken Heart by Susan Richards
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