I don’t mind mucking stalls. In fact, I rather enjoy it. It is a mindless activity that gives me the opportunity to slow down and clear my mind. It is a great form of meditation.

So there I was in my backyard, my little piece of heaven, mucking stalls. I had my thoroughbred, Baron, the love of my life, and my daughter’s pony, Me Too. My daughter just had a baby so Me Too had come to live with me. After all that pony had been through, my daughter wouldn’t trust anyone else to take care of her.

I was marveling at the story.  Of all the fancy horses and ponies my daughter had ridden as a teenager, Me Too was the one she bonded with.  She was the one I said I would never own, because she could be so nasty, even dangerous on the ground. I remembered how she tried to find another pony to love after Me Too was sold, but it was never the same. You can’t replace your heart horse.

After not seeing the pony for seven years she was living in North Carolina, I was still in New York. She called me and told me about these crazy dreams she was having about Me Too every night. Every night it was a different dream.  I told her you need to pay attention to recurring dreams.  She said when she was home for Christmas she was going to see if she could find her. She didn’t know why but she had to make sure the pony was all right.

As I was mucking I was thinking. I was thinking about that bond that we can have with horses. It’s hard to describe if you’ve never had it. I was thinking about what an unhappy teenager my daughter was and how the pony echoed the cry of her heart – Me Too. They understood each other. I was thinking about how time and distance couldn’t keep them apart, how amazing that the pony came to her in her dreams night after night – “Come get me!”  That cry was so strong she had no choice, but to respond. It was impractical and impossible and it made no sense.

Dreams are like that. We talk ourselves out of them instead of saying “What if?” All of my life I wanted to live on a horse farm, but here I was trying to make a farm on a half acre in a subdivision. When my whole life was in suburbia, moving away to live on a farm made no sense. It wasn’t practical. It seemed impossible. I admired my daughter’s tenacity, her unwillingness to give up. And here I was looking at her pony, Me Too. What would life look like if people really followed their dreams? The story of my daughter and Me Too needed to be told.

It came like a download. I put down the pitchfork, went into the house, sat at my computer and wrote the initial manuscript for Jump the Moon. Just like that I became an author. What I didn’t know, -well there were a lot of things I didn’t know – but that day what I didn’t know was that 20+ years later I would actually be a published author, that there were more children’s books to come and that I would be living on the farm that I always dreamed of inspired by the girl with the long blond hair and her pony, Me Too.