Ever since she was a little girl, my mom wanted to own a horse ranch with a white board fence. Life, of course, doesn’t work out the way we imagine it will when we’re young — that’s a truth I’ve been struggling with myself lately — but she did manage to get an approximation of her dream, at least. There’ve always been horses around the Bennion Compound, even before I came along. When I was a kid, she dabbled a little with breeding her mares. (I learned the facts of life by watching three foals enter the world, and one, sadly, that didn’t quite make it.) And yes, she even got her white board fence, across the front of a hay pasture she and Dad bought from one of the neighbors. It wasn’t Southfork by any means, but it was pretty good for our circumstances.
At its largest point, our little herd numbered five head, three of which were papered Arabians. But that was long ago, and time and entropy have taken their toll. This morning, my parents had to make the difficult decision to have one of Mom’s two remaining horses put down. Her registered name was Misty Dawn, a derivation of her mother’s name — Desert Mist, or more familiarly, Misty — and her sire’s, Dantu (that’s pronounced Dawn-Too, for the record). But we’ve always just called her Dawn, naturally.
