17!
17. Hardest horse you’ve ever ridden? ok..so...there were two. i only rode both of them once cause i just wasnt here for thatthe first one that i rode that was bad was named blaise, he was owned by a teenage boy and ONLY ridden in the winter for events. they hardly touched him before that. big roman nose, reddish coloring, one blue eye, huge head but a skinny neck and tiny body, the ugliest thing ive ever seen. its all good till we try and do anything but walking, and then he’s doing those noncommital ‘im old and fat’ bucks to tell me hes really not having it. tbh, that wasnt necessarily *hard,* bc i have good balance, but other times i’d almost fallen off it was bc the horse spooked or something, not bc it was mad as hell at me. the malice in those baby-bucks was what got to meand then there was skip. big beautiful black horse, his skin made of fucking iron. i was just riding him for a couple minutes at the end of a long lesson, but he was what reminded my trainer that eventually i need to learn how to use spurs, cause this motherfucker was *boneheaded.* he was dense as pudding. i could not get this guy to do anything, and thats partly on me, but partly because he is just very...slow and numb. in the end i was just sitting on this horse laughing and doing my best to get him to go and he’s practically asleepand banjo isnt a hard horse, he’s the sweet ex-barreler that everyone starts out with including me, but because he’s sweet and everyone starts out with him, jen hadnt got the chance to canter with him the whole time he’d been at the stables. once one of her lesson kids is advanced enough to canter, they usually move on to another horse. so, when she learned that i was Competent Enough (”you can kinda sorta ride!”) she used me as her guinea pig to see if he still had it in him. 15 minutes of the fastest, bounciest, most unbearable, confused trot ever, i got him to canter. it was a fine canter, absolutely not worth the build up of banjo saying “are you sure? ar eyou sure? are you sure? are you sure???” for 20 minutesim not counting chrissie in this even though she spooked more than someone with anxiety high on coke in a haunted house, bc that wasnt her fault, she was super old and crazy and the barn was very scary. she also recently passed away and im too heartbroken to ever speak ill of her she is my Soul i Love Her.
