An Old Friend

This is Pippa.

Apparently the only pictures I have of her are lying down in winter.

Pippa is owned by the same lady who previously owned Cisco. They lived on the same acreage for the first 3 or 4 years of Cisco's life, and would have been turned out together at various times. At some point Pippa went to the barn that I board at to be used in the lesson program.

I'm pretty sure that Cisco saw Pippa last spring before we moved to the new location almost a year ago, but I don't remember. Pippa recently moved over to the new place and lives on the other side of the arena from Cisco, so she is not within sight on any of our daily meandering. He definitely hasn't seen her in a year.

On Tuesday night I took Cisco into the arena for a ride. He was a bit full of himself. For starters, the temperature had dropped 15 degrees from the previous day, so everyone had more energy than they had last week in the heat. When we got into the arena, there was a dressage lesson happening at one end and a jumping lesson at the other end. There were so many things to gawk at.

Since Cisco was on full-on gawk mode, I did a bit of ground work with him before hopping on. This led us down to the far end of the arena, where the lesson horses are tacked up. Which was where he saw Pippa.

He stopped and stared. And then got excited. You know the scene in the movie Elf, where the elf sees Santa for the first time in the store at New York, and he's all "I know him, I know him!"? That was Cisco.

via GIPHY

Which became the theme for our ride.

For the most part I stayed out of the end that Pippa was being ridden in, because, well, it looked like a gong-show in the making - 3 kids under 10 all riding medium ponies. Not a good choice to ride my excited green horse through that mess.

Every time that we passed the center at the same time as Pippa he bulged towards her. Heck, every time I changed direction he bulged towards that end.

Again, he wasn't terrible, just a green, distracted horse. Considering he started off the ride snorting at every walk stride, I think he held himself together pretty good. I chose not to canter, as I was trying to stay out of the way of the person who was having the dressage lesson (we apologized to each other after the ride about trying to stay out of the other person's way!) and our canter is nowhere near ready to ride in this type of situation.

At the end of my ride I led Cisco over to where Pippa was standing to let him say hi. She nickered at him, he did his best studly under his breath nickers to her.  And then Pippa wanted to stay with Cisco, so I had to remove him since the kid on her back wasn't done riding yet. Oops.

On someone's blog recently they were questioning whether horses remember other horses from their past. This isn't the first time that I've walked a horse past an old friend and they stop and stare and the nickers start, so I'm pretty sure that they do!