Nope. Not my life.

I grew up in the suburbs, in a tiny house crammed in amongst a million other tiny houses. When my family moved from the apartment in New York City to a house with a lawn in New Jersey, I was convinced I'd be able to have a horse (we had land, after all). But of course, Northern New Jersey is really no less urban than Manhattan. Our yard was measured in square feet, not acres. No horses for little Emily.The dog, however, substituted, and I built little jumps out of fallen down pickets from our fence.

My mother tried, she really did. She looked into getting a horse for me, but the world was just too foreign--and too expensive--for immigrant, raised in New York City parents. In the end, I was consigned to weekly riding lessons at a stable nearby. It's still there, and when I visit I like to wander in the barn aisles and get a whiff of the place.

It's smaller than I remember, more crowded. At the time, I thought it was luxurious and huge and the horses all gleamed and were perfect. But standing ringside as two instructors taught lessons at the same time in that small-ish indoor arena, I remembered that the ponies were stubborn, I had my first fall off a palomino who bucked, and that sometimes I just wanted to get out of the arena and gallop, gallop, gallop! I also remember counting down the days between riding lessons. In my childhood journal, I wrote pages and pages of practice letters asking the owner if I could have a job. I envied his daughter, who had her own pony (she's now an Olympic contender). I would have gladly traded my parents for hers.

I'm glad to see the place is still operating. It's just as it was, filled with little girls who were born in the wrong place--the suburbs, not the country--to parents who can't really understand where "this horse thing" came from. As I'm wandering through the barn, I hear them talking to each other, their small fantasy lives unfolding. The horses, for that two hours on a Saturday afternoon, are theirs alone.