Because Shannon is badass, she bought me horseback riding lessons as a combined Christmas-birthday gift.

I love horses.

I love them with something approaching the ardor of an 8-year-old girl.

You spend time with horses and you realize that they have a connection to humans that no other animals save dogs can claim.  The history of their existence is inextricably tied up with ours, and you can sense that when around them.  Learning to work with a horse can open a window into the ways our species is and has been connected to the natural world all around us, a window all the more important given how rapidly we are burying our sense of that integration under bells and whistles and hustle, hustle, hustle.

I wanted some of that, and Shannon hooked me up.

And soon I found myself hooking up the horses.Because horses don’t just love carrots and apples.  They love mints.  So I went to the stable yesterday with the one candy cane I could scrounge up post-Christmas and a bag of  Nice! Mint Twists {Minty Wonderland} treats.  The bag really uses those frilly brackets.

First: Cuervo.  Cuervo is so much a safe school horse that he will practically plod along if you let him.  So you have to give him that squeeze of your heels over and over, and he starts to get very adolescent, dropping his head to the ground and stopping, pretending he has an itch, or slowly, slowly, slowly angling back toward the center of the ring—like you won’t notice—thinking he’ll cut the lesson short and get back to his stall.

Still, he’ll let me press my face to his, will study me, even trust me in the blind spot right between his eyes (aside from a few small blind spots, they have 350-degree vision), so I gave him the candy cane.

"Here I come."

"Yeah, peppermint palm!"

"Alright, lemme just get it back between my hind teeth here."

"Ahhh, gimme that crunch, baby!"

Second: Arizona.  Arizona is sweet as pie.  She’s got a little gap in the muscle where her neck meets her shoulder, a thumbprint-sized dip named The Thumbprint of God that lore says indicates a blessed horse who will protect its rider.

Arizona is my favorite.  I gave her some of the Nice! Mints (Ingredients: Sugar, Corn Syrup, Natural Peppermint Oil, Red 40, Red 3, Blue 1—obviously healthy) before class, and she drooled a puddle into my palm.  She can smell the mints through their wrappers and my pocket from thirty feet away.  Her eyes double in width.

"So good, so good, so good."

"The flash, Jay, damn."

Next to Arizona is Butte.  I don’t know Butte at all, but when I turned away from Arizona, she looked like this.

So she got her mints.

And last: Bronx.  Actually, maybe Bronx is my favorite.  He’s beautiful.  And though he’s not as sweet as Arizona, he’s constantly gnawing at the wood on his stall because he’s so bored, and that makes me feel for him.  Dude is smart.  He’s lucky to not be in European cuisine, but I don’t think he’s a natural school horse.  There aren’t many wild horses anymore, though.  He’s a horse out-of-time.

I suppose constant mint treats are bad for horses just like they’re bad for us.  Rotting teeth and all.  But on cold, wet days on Long Island, they’re definitely a hit.

"At last, some excitement."

"Ye shall know me by my glory."