I horseback ride once a week on the dear old steeds at the therapeutic riding barn in a lesson set up just for interested volunteers. This is not enough to get me in any kind of riding shape, but it’s enough to keep my equestrian synapses (and courage) from withering completely away.
The other student in the class this week was a guy who has been volunteering with the program for a while, and we’ve ridden together a time or two. I know him to be a former eventer–meaning he competed in dressage, stadium jumping, and cross country jumping over solid obstacles. I dabbled enough in the same discipline to know it’s not for sissies (or for me).
So there’s my barn buddy on Lola, a darling warmblood mare who’s more whoa than go in terms of personality. Ridin’ Buddy had Lola traveling in a nice forward trot circle, and then he asked her for the canter. That mare jumped into the canter and went skipping around like the 17-hand chestnut show girl she used to be. I later learned that my fellow volunteer had not cantered on horseback for twenty years.
Oh, my stars and garters. To get back in the saddle at all is hard, to get back in the saddle when you were that accomplished, after that long… I was cussing, I was so pleased and excited for my fellow student. He was grinning like a kid, and Lola was all full of her gorgeous-mare self too. The moment was special, and I got to be there. I’m filing that one away in my mental jewelry box.
Another moment that goes in the jewelry box is the only time I caught a wave body surfing. I would have been eleven or so, and never before or since have I managed to be in the right place at the right time to feel the ocean lofting me along like a happy porpoise, but I recall the sensation now after more than half a century. Wheeee! is an understatement.
I recall the moment when my name was called at the Maggie Award ceremony in the George Romance Writer’s 2009 conference. I’d submitted The Heir as an unpublished manuscript and 400 people clapped and cheered when the book won. This astounded me, and it was that win that eventually convinced a publisher worn out with Regency debuts to give just one more duke (ducal heir) a chance.
I have been thinking more about my mental jewelry box lately, maybe because we’re heading into the darker, colder, “hermit-er” time of year, maybe because I am so disgusted with news and social media that I’m re-playing my personal highlights reel. Very few of my most special memories are of big, planned events. My wedding day was 
busy and tense, my daughter’s wedding day was the very day my mom died.
But from time to time, when I’m not expecting it, life has handed me a dose of unforgettable sweetness, and those gifts have kept on giving, when I take the time to focus on them. The friend who sent me two dozen roses when I brought my daughter home from the hospital (“A dozen for you, a dozen for her…). That day my college advisor roared at me for even thinking of becoming a paralegal when he knew I was destined for law school…
Sweet, surprising, and I get to keep them all. Do you have little gems twinkling in your mental jewelry box? I’m sure you do!
“I get to keep them all.” I won’t, unless I write them down and put them somewhere someone can read them to me or remind me of them. I received a big bunch of daffodils from a friend who realized what a remarkable event my first, last and only honors recital meant to me. I am not a performer.
“Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world.” As close to weightlessness as I’ve ever experienced, too.
Yes, I should have been writing them down, too. But I’m thrilled when a happy memory comes to me out of the blue – something I haven’t thought about in years. Little jewels plucked from the past that brighten my day.
Make it three people here who won’t remember unless I write it down. Then I can’t find the notebook or the piece of paper that I wrote them on!
Marianne, congratulations on your recital!
Hmmm, one mental gem was when I found part of a trilobite by a small lake. Right then I knew I was standing where an ocean used to be. If I had everything to do over again, I would have been a paleontologist, instead of majoring in computer science. That was one of the fields where you could get a job fairly easily. This was back in the 70s.
I did get to go on field trips with a group of other enthusiasts for years, until my knee troubles got too bad for the rough terrain.
I like the idea of the mental jewel box. Actually one of my jewels is my wedding day. It was cobbled together in three weeks, no wedding gown, mismatched outfits, random flowers, paper bells and chains twined around the lights in the church basement fellowship hall, potluck food. It was lovely. A long-ago childhood memory is of my parents sneaking a glass topped vanity table with a pink fluffy skirt into my bedroom the night before my birthday. I was wide awake but pretended to be asleep because they were giggling and bumping into things and shushing each other and enjoying themselves so much. My trip to the Scottish Highlands is one such memory as well, such breathtaking beauty and feeling strangely at home, even though I’m sorta kinda Scottish mixed with Irish and English and German! But it felt like a place I belonged. Waiting for lord Julian!!!
The closest I come to your jewelry box is that I used to have a calendar on my wall with big boxes and I would write down important events. I gave that up years ago but I transferred all the events to MS Word files I label as my “diaries.” I did miss some things, however, since I never wrote down the exact date in the early 1980s when I visited the original Chippendales in LA where I lived at the time. It was quite an experience but I spent a lot of the time just talking with one of the waiters who was a Greek-American student at UCLA just like my then-and-now partner. I keep up the events but now include things like a significant Hurricane passing by my neighborhood, as well as family births, weddings, and deaths. So I’m also a write-it-down-to-remember person.
In my jewelry box: water fight with my dad, camping, turning the homemade coffee table into a merry go round (under 10 years) getting to be in a community theater production of South Pacific, going to a prom, enjoying my time in Boston AT the time I was experiencing it! My 2 daughters on an uncountable number of occasions. The biggest most amazing thing was the rare occasions when I was working with a special needs child and they “get it” a wondrous event. Ii really need to add the amazing feeling when my pets realize I am down and come to comfort me
This has made me think of going to the lake as a family when I was a kid. My dad used to throw us up and over his shoulder and it was the most fun of the whole summer, those hours my dad somehow found in his schedule. You could buy popcorn and the minnows would investigate your tastiness if you stood still long enough, so I would chomp away trying not to move, knee-deep in the lake waiting for another round of up and over my dad.
One time when I lived abroad I finally was getting the knack of the language and understood every word in a tv sitcom (1 hour!) and I announced as much when it ended. It became a party with my host family. We cut up and fried some french fries and had beer and music and it was delightful, I felt proud of myself and celebrated.
I’ll need to consciously recall some more gems and savor them, thank you Grace for the reminder.
Thank goodness a publisher “took a risk” with The Heir. Your works opened an entirely new Regency world, one that I eagerly await with each book.
The Heir was Bill’s favorite of your books. He was reading it again when he died. Your books brought so much comfort during his dark, pain- filled nights.
Thank you.