How I met Johnny....

Many of you have wondered if the pictures of the horses are mine or not. They do not belong to me but I was their part-time/full time care giver for about a year. This is my story...

We moved to middle Tennessee 2 years and 10 months ago from Massachusetts. My husband's job transferred us here. We have never lived anywhere else but in New England, both of us raised in Connecticut and had been living in Massachusetts most of our married life. We took this move as an adventure, and it certainly has been that.

I feel in love with the Tennessee landscape of cattle, donkeys and horses. I just love animals so to see them in my landscapes everywhere I went was so joyful for me. I look out my back deck and I see horses and hear them in the distance. I have never been around horses except for holding my son on a pony for a ride, that's really it.

When I leave my neighborhood you pull out on to a main road, this road is full of many small farms, some have sheep, cattle and mostly horses. A few miles from my house there is one farm in particular that I always admired when I passed because there were baby horses in the pasture with their Moms, and I just love anything "baby". The home is simple and surrounded by 14 acres of horse fencing. This went on for a year, always looking in the direction of the simple farm as I drove by. I then started noticing a very large horse in this pasture and it kept getting bigger with each week. I finally said to my husband that I have seen the largest horse ever or thought maybe it was pregnant, so he too watched when he would drive to work. One day he came home and told me she had her baby. Right away I wanted to go and see and off we went. We pulled of the main road and parked on the side street next to the house. I jumped out and went right over to the fence to see this new little baby. My first thought was that it was dead, so still, it was just lying in the dirt on this warm May afternoon. I soon saw the rise of it's chest and was relieved. For the next 2 days I would stop once or twice and stand by the fence, sometimes the baby was lying down sometimes standing up. On the third day a man was outside on a riding lawn mover he then approached me and introduced himself as "Johnny Baggett" and told me this was his home and these were indeed his horses. We talked for at least an hour and I learned so much about this man in this short time. He welcomed me to come and visit anytime and to go down to the barn and get in the shade if I wanted. I also learned that the baby was called a foal or more correctly a "colt", new horse lingo for me. I fell in love....

I will continue this at another posting as I have so much to say....