Breaking Bread

Over their first shared loaves, Jill told Roomie about her last horse home.

One reason she couldn't resist that other new job then, was that the boss-to-be said the gig included accommodation, a "private cottage." Jill had told her friends it would feel so freeing to have like have a private, park-size, horsey, rural landscape to sing freely to everyday, without her pesky little sister making fun of her musical efforts all the time. "Just think, my very own place!" she'd exclaimed, thinking to herself about the cute potential co-worker she'd hoped still worked there. 

"What if that handsome Irish thoroughbred who caught your eye at the clinic turns out to be on the equine-team you are about to work with?" her friend Matilda had envied. "And I bet that cutie Jim remembers you from the show where you still had pink hair! When you were walking back and forth between Moxy at the dressage ring, Rue at the first aid tent and the activities of Bucker and the rest of the pre-training team, reporting on each to us others you went!"

Oh that day, groaned Jill, "I was so embarassed to have been running after Kelly Joe saying your dressage whip! Drop the whip! In an effort to remind her what she already knew. What if he saw that?"

She could still easily remember how when they'd arrived at the show that day, and she was walking into the barn for the first time. A magnificent, spotless building made with no nails, and how she'd said entranced "would somebody build ME a place like this?" To her surprise her famous-and-esteemed-facility-survey-companion said "Well, that depends what you want to do."

When she met the stable manager, who was a partner to the rider the place was built for, she couldn't stop saying how impressed she was with the barn. "It is so clean and beautiful that I would eat off the floor. Seriously, just lay planks across the beams up there and I'll move in. I LIKE a treefort bed, that's all I need." she only half joked, smiling at guy's handsome brother, who seemed to work there too.

Not long after, they did offer her the job, with accomodation. Her teacher put in a good word for her with the Olympic level rider Jill was ready to sign on with, but added, "I want her back when you're done with her."

Other phrases that stuck in her head were "if you need a couple hours off every day to write, I don't have a problem with that" and "but I'd like to see you riding every day though" (talk about win win).

After she'd accepted the new position as groom, she heard some stories that unsettled her. One was that usually, while the riders stay at the Ritz, the grooms stay in a hockey arena. On cots, together in one massive room where they don't even turn off the lights most nights.

She also saw a side of a show jumper rider that troubled her deeply. After the horse ate the oxer, because of said rider's error on the approach, and they had both hit the ground, she limped out of the ring leaving the also limping beast to the ring crew, having, apparently, lost all interest in him. Her friend refused to see the downside "You should have met her at the gate and made her an offer."

Her friend also told about an Oprah show she saw a while back, where they were releasing a survey of the 10 worst jobs in America. The speaker's husband at the time was a garbage collector which was the second worst, and which is why she remembered the show so clearly.... She teased Jill that she sometimes wished for a husband with the only career on Oprah-earth considered even more thankless, underpaid and grossly difficult than that one?vvCOWBOY is apparently the absolutely worst career of 'em all.

Roomie did not sleep well. Between the chipmunk and squirrel noises in the rafters and the horse’s freaking out in the stalls below the loft and some kind of supernatural fly buzzing into something all night she had awake and exhausted in my uncomfortable bed for hours and hours and hours.