By CRYSTAL WENKER
“Hey Kid! Run to the house and get Adrienne, tell her Valentine is having her baby!” A woman’s voice shouted off to my left, sharp enough to snap me from my imaginative play world back to the cool concrete floor I was sitting on in the center aisle of the old barn we were in. I looked up to see her eyes impatiently fixed on me…as if I should have any idea what she was talking about.
As a clueless 7-year-old kid fumbling around the horse barn unattended, I barely even knew who Adrienne was. This might’ve been the first time any adult at the barn had spoken to me directly. The woman’s tone was urgent, and I gathered this was no time for introductions or questions. Befuddled, I darted off in the direction of the house.
This is my first memory at Adrienne’s barn. My mother had started riding there a few weeks prior and I was a frequent tagalong, not because of an interest in horses, but for a lack of childcare. In fact, I didn’t know anyone or anything about horses. I wandered the seemingly endless fields airily, trying to stay out of the way.
Slightly confused as to why I was selected for the task of going to find Adrienne, I jogged awkwardly down the long walkway, past the trees toward the house, deliberating along the way what to do if no one answered the door. Having never been entrusted with such a responsibility before and being mildly terrified of the recipient of my message, there seemed to be a lot of unknowns on how best to execute this directive.
I was a little more than halfway to the house when I saw Adrienne come out of the side door, beelining for the barn; apparently, she had already been informed of the news. I was instantly demoted from important envoy to persona non grata. I stopped shuffling and slumped a little, feeling a mixture of disappointment and relief that I wouldn’t have to actually talk to Adrienne. I headed back to the barn and loomed around a corner stall, resuming my previous invisible status, but staying within earshot.
“It’s a damn gray.” I heard Adrienne huff in a disappointed voice. I remember wanting so badly to go and see the new baby horse but was sure I would just be in the way.
Adrienne was a petite, shapely woman with a large presence. She had deep-set brown eyes under full and often furrowed brows. Her refined and feminine bone structure was punctuated by a relatively large mole that sat on her right cheek. In my childhood mind’s eye, she was fierce, beautiful, enigmatic, and intimidating. She was all of it. She remains to this day as one of the strongest, most significant, and impactful female figures in my life’s story. She served as a galvanizing force into my early womanhood.
As a kid, I discovered every nook of that old barn and every corner of the fields; I licked salt blocks, hid in the hay loft and chatted with every horse that would listen. A large portion of my childhood memories took place at Adrienne’s barn just outside of Louisville, Kentucky. I wouldn’t trade those memories for the world.
I can remember getting into everything with Adrienne’s daughter (typical trainer’s kid), who was the same age as me. We were both largely unsupervised. Once we gave all of her stuffed animals a bath in the sink, completely flooding the upstairs bathroom. The brunt of the blame fell on me, surely, I was a bad influence; that little spa day got me banned from coming inside the house for a whole summer.
At 10 years old I was busted riding my mom’s not-so-broke mare alone and bareback by an adult rider. The woman questioned me, then swiftly turned and walked away. Right after she left the mare dumped me. I scrambled to catch my mom’s horse and return her to her stall, relieved that I seemingly had no witnesses and had gotten away with the offense.
Moments later, the woman returned to tell me that Adrienne wanted to see me immediately, she was waiting for me down at the house. My heart sank to the bottom of my belly and my legs turned to noodles, I felt sick. I’d been ratted out. The walk from the barn to the house was a very long one that day, I could feel her eyes burning the entire trip down, I knew I was in for a tongue lashing. Adrienne could be scarier than coming off any horse.
Adrienne’s personality, while fair, was not generally a warm and fuzzy one. She was funny, quirky, and a little old-school. Once, at her Halloween party, she set out a jar of starving leeches she’d kept for horse hirudotherapy on the table next to the appetizers. I remember the watery “plunk” sounds as they flung themselves at the sides of the glass when people reached for snacks.
You compulsively wanted to impress Adrienne, but also slightly dreaded becoming the focus of her gaze. Nonetheless, wanting to be on the receiving end of her praise and the need to win a fleeting moment of her undivided attention followed me well into adulthood. I genuinely believe that, in her younger years especially, she had this impact on people wherever she went–not just at her barn and certainly not just on me.
Chasing after life and fleeing a crumbling family structure led me both away and back again to Adrienne’s barn through my adolescent years. By the time I had reached my early twenties I had moved around quite a bit, but landed at Adrienne’s barn yet again at 22, this time with a baby on my hip. A single mom.
The last time I had left the barn she had plainly said that I should not leave, she used words like “talent” and “potential”. Adrienne did not give compliments easily, and those were not words I had heard much of before then. I think she knew that. I have often pondered on the “what if?”, playing out scenarios on how my path with horses would look different today if I had stayed then.
As Adrienne stood looking at me and my baby, there was an unspoken acknowledgement that paralleled our surface level chat over doable lesson times and prices that afternoon; I would no longer be able to pursue horses the same way I had in the past. Things would be different now that I had very real responsibilities.
It was not long until Adrienne offered me a job at the barn, $12 an hour cash and free riding when time was available. My first barn job. You would have to understand the position I was in at the time to understand how exciting this was for me. I was desperate to ride again and there wasn’t any other scenario in which I could afford it. I felt I was being offered the chance to finally learn everything and to belong to something–it was an opportunity. I was living with my grandmother at the time, I had no help from my son’s father and was not on any semblance of a career path. I figured any conventional non-horse job I could get would pay the same or less after taxes, plus I would hate it. To me, this was a path.
I worked for Adrienne and her daughter for one year and it was all-consuming. There were at least 50 horses to care for. I assisted the vets and farriers, helped with starting the young horses, managed barn schedules, and monitored treatments of various equine ailments–to say I learned a lot would be an understatement. In addition to caring for boarders and Adrienne’s and her daughter’s personal horses, we were running a breeding program. The fantasy of “barn life” from my childhood and teenage years was completely wiped away, but as exhausting as it was, I loved what I did every day.
But the reality was Adrienne struggled. She struggled financially, with time, with her personal relationships, and with the upkeep of her own health. I could feel her taking more of a back seat to her daughter; she was no longer building, just maintaining. As time passed and she grew older, it seemed Adrienne felt the weight of all the sacrifices she had made to the barn and to the horses.
In earlier years, Adrienne and her husband would host dinner parties for the adult clients and have sleepover parties for their daughter. I felt so lucky when I was invited. The house was beautiful then, it was an old Tudor style house built with gray stone sometime around the turn of the century. It had dark maple wood floors, apart from the library, which boasted checkered marble flooring and adorned a beautiful winding cast-iron staircase. But after years of financial hardship, when Adrienne hosted parties and was out of ear shot, the “lesson moms” would gather in clustered corners and make petty remarks. I would overhear the women sniping at the state of her wood floors or snickering at how old and worn her furniture was. They were like vultures, it felt unfair.
The first time walking back into the house after I had begun working at the barn (my first time since childhood) I looked up and noticed what looked like black mold in the corner of the ceiling covered with plastic. Adrienne sheepishly admitted the hole was from when her daughter and I had washed the stuffed animals in the sink, flooding the upstairs bathroom. She had never gotten the water damage fixed.
It was then I felt my perception of Adrienne begin to shift and it was formative for me. As a young woman I began to see her less as some terrifying enigma and more as a fellow woman. Adrienne was a single mother like me, fighting for her dream and livelihood while carrying tremendous burdens. She had to sell off a large portion of her property to stay above water, the fields were by no means “endless” anymore and she struggled to keep grass on what pasture she had left. The reality was that since her husband had left years ago, she was trying to do it all herself, and it was impossible. One thing had to come at the cost of another.
After a year of working at the barn I announced that I had decided to leave Adrienne’s again, this time to attend a hunter/jumper equine program at a college in Montana, where my mother was living at the time. Once again, Adrienne told me I shouldn’t leave. That was her way; Adrienne didn’t ask you—she told you.
Each day when our paths crossed, she’d list all the reasons I should not go. “I know how they do things out there, you are better off staying here” she’d say bluntly.
At the time, I believed that attending any equine school would put my education and achievements on paper, paving a path to career success. I had dreams of becoming a horse trainer myself and felt I needed to go away to prove myself and be taken seriously. So again, I left Adrienne’s barn after she had, once again, told me to stay.
I was only gone a few months when I received news of Adrienne’s accident. She had been found lying unconscious in the outdoor arena after a freak incident on a beloved old horse that belonged to a young girl. No one was near the arena while she rode, so no one could say for sure what had happened, but Adrienne wasn’t wearing a helmet.
When the barn hand working that day found her, he had no way of knowing how long she’d been lying there. The horse she’d fallen from had remained quietly standing just next to her. At the time, her recovery seemed unclear, but in the years since the accident, Adrienne has had to relearn how to walk and speak, heal several broken bones, and recover from a severe brain injury. When looking back on it, the thought has occurred to me on many occasions, would things have happened differently if I had been at the barn that day? What if I hadn’t left?
Another year passed and life in Montana as a single working mother while also attending equine college proved unsuccessful, so I returned to Adrienne’s barn one last time.
This time, I worked for Adrienne’s daughter and saw very little of Adrienne. The barn had changed significantly. There were far fewer horses and only one steady barn hand working ruthless hours. The daughter had wisely set up new arrangements to stay afloat, bringing in other trainers who ran their own lesson programs and boarded their lesson horses at the barn. Adrienne’s daughter had always ridden the promising show horses and handled the business dealings, she was less adept at directly handling the daily needs and care of the horses at that time–it was clear they needed help.
By then, Adrienne could walk again with some assistance but was still struggling with speech and memory. She talked about my mother’s not-so-broke mare from when I was a kid as if the horse was still up at the barn, she wanted to make plans to put her into the breeding program. That mare was long gone, and there wasn’t a breeding program any longer to put her in anyway. Clearly, she was mixed up. Adrienne would confide in me that she would be well enough soon to help me with my riding again, “Soon we will pick up where we left off” she would say, as if seeking reassurance. I would offer an encouraging smile, sometimes while fighting back tears.
Adrienne was no longer the intimidating force she had been, but as sad as it was, her daughter and I agreed that the harshness in her eyes and stress lines in her face had completely disappeared. It had come at a terrible cost, but her sharpness seemed to be replaced with peacefulness and presence in the moment. Prior to the accident, it was a very rare thing to get that version of Adrienne. Post accident, when you spoke to her you felt her full attention as her eyes focused on you and she poured all her energy into the connection. It was sad, beautiful, visceral, and hopeful. It was all of it.
I have not been back to Adrienne’s since. That was over 15 years ago.
Though she might not realize it, Adrienne was my first horse trainer, but she was also a mentor, employer, mother figure, heroine, and a friend.
Every time I climb onto the back of a horse, I hear her voice at some point during my ride. Sometimes it comes as a thought of gratitude when I receive praise for nailing something she taught me long ago. Other times, it’s a simple silent recognition of finally understanding something she once said, or even didn’t say. As time goes on, I guess I can say I feel her more than I hear her, and in that way, I carry her legacy with me.
Our paths can take us away and back again to the things, places, and people we are meant to learn from. There are rarely any straight lines in life, and I’ve learned not to dwell too long on the “what ifs”. Hindsight can be a powerful lesson, but only if you can filter it through the context of time and truly seek to learn from it – another one of the many lessons within a lesson that comes from following the path of horses and is one worth holding onto.
This was a submission to the 2024 Equestrian Voices Creative Writing Contest sponsored by The Plaid Horse. The goal of the contest is to promote fine, literary prose involving horses and the equestrian experience. This contest is open to writers of fiction and non-fiction, regardless of any previous publications, and awards 16 prizes. To learn more about the 2024 contest click here.
