I hate December. It’s cold; it’s dark, and it’s time spent twiddling my thumbs waiting to get to Florida. When I’ve had serious upper-level competition horses, December is a bit of let-down time. I take the last two weeks of November and the first few weeks of December to just fluff around, and then the last two or so weeks to build back up to hit Florida in good form. But with the young horses, there are really no peaks and valleys, just slow and steady work.

So we tread water. Fortunately, my horses are all being terribly good and smart, so trundling along isn’t a travesty. Puck wins the award for Most Improved. I’ve been at home for most of the last two weeks and on a normal schedule, so I got to just work him like a normal horse for two weeks, the first time my wild travel schedule has allowed. It was delightful.

I’ve settled into a weekly routine that seems to be working: Tuesday and Friday leaning on the canter work; Wednesday and Saturday focusing on the trot, and Thursday and Sunday hacking and stretching as the weather (and his exuberance level) permits. Puck has found this amazing gear at the trot, with super power and expression, but I don’t want to go bananas with it and have him end up hurt.

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Photo by Kimberly Loushin/Chronicle of the Horse.

Elvis is 7. He’s had an accomplished career in the young horse divisions, including being long listed for the World Breeding Dressage Championships for Young Horses. He understands collection beautifully; he takes a half-halt; he is respectful of the leg and is steady in the connection.

And he’s also been in my care for six weeks, a lot of which I’ve spent traveling, so I’m still absolutely at the beginning of our journey together, and it’s not fair for me to make any sweeping statements, but he’s got basically two options in the trot: wide open or wide open-er. When I try to make any changes to his outline, he loses rhythm. When I try to activate the hind legs in isolation, he jacks his knees up higher. I feel like I can do the Prix St. Georges, but I can’t just trot around in a quiet and boring fashion.

Puck is also 7. To say that he’s been complicated to get to this point would be an understatement, but now, with the exception of the occasional burst of youthful exuberance/juvenile delinquency, he’s fairly rideable. I can pick him up in the bridle or let him down, and the trot stays the same. I can make his canter quicker or floatier. I can ride him short or long in the neck, compressed or stretching in the back, strong or light. Of course I can’t really do anything—I’m thinking he’ll show third level if he shows this winter in Florida, but it’ll be a stretch of his abilities to put movements together—because I’ve focused more on the basic rideability (and also, admittedly, not dying) than on the upper-level work.

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Somewhere along the line, I heard the term “disaster fatigue.” It was in the mainstream media, at a time when there had been a few devastating natural disasters and a few mass shootings in the same time period, and the newscaster I heard use the term put it in the context of a slowing rate of donations to the Red Cross: The population was so exhausted by the barrage of calamities that they couldn’t feel the pain of them anymore and as such weren’t moved to donate to organizations to help the victims.

A few weekends ago, Danny colicked, badly and quickly. He was so dire so fast that he wasn’t able to get on the trailer to go to a clinic. We put him down.

I was on vacation.

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I drove up to spring Elvis out of quarantine myself, rode him once, and then left for a week with about a kabillion students to our regional championships. (We had rides from training level to Grand Prix, won a bunch of stuff, and experienced a 40-degree temperature change. Fun was had by all!) I then came home, rode everyone for a few days, and then tweaked a disk in my back. And then my coach, Michael Barisone, came for a clinic. I could barely post the trot, and I’d ridden Elvis three times on U.S. soil. Perfect!

All joking aside, clinics are not an opportunity to demonstrate perfect rides and perfect riding; they’re about learning and to learn at whatever place a particular horse and rider happen to be. The timing was actually rather great (well, the back thing has sucked; I’ve rested and iced and anti-inflammatoried and seen the awesome Dr. Holly Moriarty of Haymarket Chiropractic, and I’m feeling pretty good now), because I’m still learning what normal is for Elvis, and it was really illuminating to start the process of connecting his look to his feel.

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I was in the Netherlands with my friend Belinda Nairn looking at horses for two clients. We’d found what we were looking for for the first, and we had some extra time to kill, so off we went to preview horses for the second client, who was arriving the next day. One was a 7-year-old gelding—younger than I wanted for a kid with NAYC ambitions—but with a kind eye and a business-like manner. The owner rode him first and did a fine job, and while he wasn’t really lighting my hair on fire, he looked quality enough, so I hopped on.

And it was like coming home.

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Photo by Tylir Penton Photography.

School is back in session, and the leaves are starting to turn. It’s fall, which means it’s officially been a year since both Puck and Swagger entered their working lives with me. I’ve always believed it takes a year to get to really know any new horse, trained or prospect; then add in to the mix the fact that young horses are constantly evolving, and really knowing them as individuals is an ongoing proposition.

But I’m very confident in my lay of Puck’s land now. In the beginning, he was a pretty colossal jerk, with a teenage anger management issue combined with 17.2 hands of enthusiasm that moved and accepted the aids (or not) like a bull in a china shop. Puck’s approach to life was to just power through everything, usually by grabbing the bit and bearing down on it with all his might, and if I was successful in getting a word in edgewise, he’d get mad and hit the brakes.

It made for an exciting first few months. And with any new horse, you don’t really know how far they’ll take their disruptive behavior until you’ve lived with it a while. I had a horse screw up my confidence pretty badly a while back, and I’m not a kid anymore either, so I didn’t totally trust him for a while.

Over the winter, he started to let me in. And then we went to a few shows this spring as a non-compete, where he really reverted to his bad boy ways off property, and I started to worry. But in late May, something changed; all of a sudden he wasn’t so angry. He’d let me apply and remove pressure. He became willing to try life just outside of his comfort zone, and more than that he became able to make a mistake and not get pissed as a result.