The Horse Misterer

Who says Hick never buys anything for Val? Well...besides VAL. Yesterday, at 6:35 p.m., Hick sent me an email from the BARn.

"Bought you two horses"

I know Hick. No way would he buy me two ACTUAL horses. No sirree, Bob! Even though he has no qualms about buying turkeys and a mini pony and taking free goats for himself. So I knew right away he meant that he had bought me two fake horses. Not a giant (or life-size) horse carved from wood, like Li'l Val used to marvel at on trips to Silver Dollar City, in the woodworkers' shop. I figured Hick was fulfilling my childhood desire for fake horses.

Velvet Brown had nothing on Li'l Val. Okay. So she DID ride a wayward piebald to victory in the Grand National, and inherit living, breathing, pooping horses fictionally. But she started out with fake play horses. So hers were cut from magazines and glued to cardboard and kept in a cigar box and taken out every night for exercise before bed. But Li'l Val had fake play horses, too. Plastic ones, resin ones, ceramic ones, and a very special head that she carved herself, out of a bar of white soap. And while Li'l Val stopped short of giving her fake horses a rubdown after fake galloping...she DID hand-sew horse blankets for the larger ones from material scraps given to her for that very purpose by her mother.

Yes, Li'l Val's stable ranged from the high-end Breyer line of realistic resin models like a bay Arabian mare and foal...to the cheap Woolworth's dime store bag of hollow plastic thumb-sized black and brown and white horses molded with a saddle and a hole on each side for a cowboy or Indian's leg pegs to pop into. Li'l Val was a fake-horse aficionado.

Lucky for Val, Hick sent a picture with that email.

Yes, they are not large. They are breakable. But they are HORSES, by cracky, bought for Val by Hick! I sent him a text.

"Thanks. Did they cost $1700?"

Funny how Hick did not reply! So I asked The Pony if he knew that his dad bought me two horses.

"Uh huh. On our trip to Goodwill on Saturday."

"How much did he spend?"

"I don't know. Maybe 50 cents apiece? We wrapped them in paper so they wouldn't break on the ride home."

According to Hick later that evening, he spent A DOLLAR apiece for them. You will notice no shortage of items Hick has bought for himself at Goodwill or the auction. They sit on my former kitchen table, the one Hick moved to the BARn when he decreed that my mom's kitchen table, formerly my grandma's kitchen table, should take its place in our kitchen and then left it in the garage for a month.

A DOLLAR apiece! I guess Hick is not saving up to buy me a $3.00 change purse and two boxes of Sno-Caps any time soon.