Personal Narrative: My Experience Of Working With Horses

Mud flew up all around the field, hitting my clothes and face like cold clumps of clay. It also shot onto Stormy, the black horse I was handling. Gem, the other horse, was kicking up the mud from bucking and running around the field. Stormy was getting nervous, too. She was breathing heavily and her eyes were rolling back. I tightened my hold on her lead rope and prepared for Stormy to spook and run me down.
“Whoa!” my dad yelled at Gem.
Gem was acting up to test us. Horses often try to get their way by running around, and the dark brown horse was startled by the wind ripping through the countryside. After years of working with horses, I had learned how to develop a close bond with them. Horses feed off the emotion of their handler. I had
to keep my cool because if I became nervous, Stormy would get even more upset. This wasn’t hard because I've been through worse. I've fallen off horses, I've had horses stand up on me like they do in western movies. I've also had a horse knock me down and run over me fortunately, I was fine. Jem eventually got her act together and we guided both horses safely to their stalls. This was just part of my everyday life on a 12-acre farm.
My family and I used to live in a typical suburban neighborhood. We owned a horse at someone else's farm. However, when I was 14, my parents decided they wanted to run their own barn. I had done some barn work before and thought that the workload would be fairly easy. I couldn't have been more wrong. I went from taking care of my horse to spending about 12 hours a week caring for five horses.
There is never an end to the challenges of living with horses because they always need something. The horses require a special mix of medicine and grain that changes quite frequently. When it comes to mucking the stalls, I have to pick out every piece of manure with a pitchfork, then flip through the shavings to look for wet spots. I hate this task when it’s hot outside, but I have to do it; otherwise, the horses will get sick.
Most days, I do my barn work after school and then complete my homework. In addition, I volunteer at an air museum on Saturdays for about seven hours. Life gets even busier in the winter when I participate in stage crew.
However, working on a farm can also be very enjoyable. One of my favorite parts of the day is when I'm in the barn picking stalls and I have time to simply enjoy the silence and think about whatever I want to and not worry about anything else. I also enjoy filling water tubs in the fields in the summer because I get to enjoy the beauty of the land that surrounds me.
All of the hard work I have put into taking care of the farm has taught me a lot about life. I have learned that there aren’t impossible tasks, just ones that take a lot of time and effort. Even when I’m tired, I just keep going until the work is done. This attitude is what has helped me create a strong and positive work ethic that I don't think I would have seen in myself before I move to the farm. I've also learned how to be more responsible and how to balance my time between all of my jobs, while still making time for my hobbies, such as building models and writing. If I had the choice to live on a farm or return to the suburbs, I would stay right where I am because it is the best way to learn everything I need to know about life.