I was horse crazy from an early age. In this my paternal grandmother, aka Grandma, formally Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis Little,¹ played a major role. A longtime horsewoman, she had three sons, none of whom had the slightest interest in horses. Then along came I, first child of her oldest son (aka Dad, formally Robert Shaw Sturgis). Grandma pounced.

It didn’t take much pouncing. Being a girl, I was susceptible from the start. One of the first movies I ever saw – maybe the first – was Tonka, the mostly fictional backstory of a real horse that survived Custer’s defeat at the Little Big Horn. It came out in 1958, the year I turned seven. Did Grandma take me to see it? Very possible, since at that point my mother was occupied with my next younger brother (b. 1952, about 16 months younger than I) and the brother after that (b. 1956, who would have been barely two).²

I got a horse for my 12th birthday. I could go on (and on and on) about the teenage years that followed, but I have no T-shirts to show for it because at that point T-shirts were either work clothes or underwear and overwhelmingly worn by men. Message T’s didn’t go mainstream for another decade. Suffice it to say that my life revolved around horses (including my town’s 4-H), school (which I loved and was very good at), and becoming a teenage Arabist. After graduation, I moved to D.C. for college, became a city girl, and assumed I’d left horses behind.

However, as noted in “1979–1981: Biking to Alexandria,” I did call my trusty Peugeot 10-speed my “urban horse.” Like any self-respecting and transportationally desperate suburban kid, I got my driver’s license as soon as I could,³ but I didn’t own a motor vehicle till I was 37.

In 1992, seven years after I moved to Martha’s Vineyard, fate intervened in a big way. My real estate agent girlfriend knew I had a horsey background and so enlisted me to help a client of hers move her two horses from where they’d been boarding (Misty Meadows) to her new place about a mile away, across the road from what was then Rainbow Farm. (Since 2009 it’s been the Grey Barn and Farm.)

The two horses were Nevada, an 8- or 9-year-old Andalusian mare, and Foxy, a yearling half-Arab filly – the “red pony” who gave the soon-to-be farm the name that’s on these three T-shirts. The client was Karin Magid, who was returning to the Vineyard after years living and working in England with her filmmaker husband; they were now divorced. I’ll leave the real estate agent’s name out of it because she died in 2018, by which time she’d long since moved off-island and we’d been out of touch for well over two decades.⁴

Karin rode Nevada, I led Foxy, and girlfriend followed in her Toyota Tercel wagon. I had just returned from a science fiction convention outside Toronto and was still in my travel clothes: blue culottes and a rose-colored top. Girlfriend had probably picked me up at the boat. As a teenager I wouldn’t have been caught dead dealing with horses in get-up like this.

Meeting Karin and reconnecting with horses changed my life but it didn’t happen overnight. My job as Martha’s Vineyard Times features editor kept me busy, especially during “the season.” President Clinton and his family visited the Vineyard for the first time in August 1993, and the Times office became Madhouse Central. The Clintons, understandably, spent most of their time doing R&R in seclusion, which left (what seemed like) half the national press corps either trying to spot them or roaming the island in search of scoops. Yes, I have a T-shirt to commemorate the occasion. It’ll be up next.

I was also very involved with Wintertide, where the stupendous Singer-Songwriter Retreats masterminded by the inimitable Christine Lavin took place in September 1992 and September 1993. Then that fall, two Oak Bluffs town fathers, encouraged by a couple of fundamentalist ministers, tried to get two of the first kids’ books about gay/lesbian families pulled from the Oak Bluffs School library. I had a hand in resisting that too, most notably in organizing the successful Banned Books reading that took place at Wintertide in January 1994.

After that, however, I had both the time and the opportunity to get back into horses in earnest. By then, Ali, a Morab gelding, had moved in as a semi-permanent boarder. He and I hit it off. I did some informal lessons with Karin but more often hit the trails with her or whatever house guest was eager to ride and competent to be allowed out unsupervised.

Naturally, since I was pretty much freeloading, I mucked out stalls, picked paddocks, and cleaned tack. It seems you can take the girl out of the barn for many years, but you can’t take the barn out of the girl. Much more about that later. I have lots of horse-related T-shirts.

Karin and the Red Pony were also instrumental in getting me back into dogs. When I was growing up, my family usually had two dogs and two cats. Everyone in town had at least one dog. During my D.C. years, dogs were out of the question, especially if you got around entirely by bus, bike, and on foot. Moving twice a year on Martha’s Vineyard wasn’t conducive to dogs either, but then through family connections⁴ I slid into a housing situation that included a Lab-Doberman cross named Jackson. Cris Jones, my housemate/homeowner, was working in southern California most of the year, coming home only in summer and sometimes for winter break, so I looked after Jackson.

Early in 1992 I moved into the guest house at the Wooden Tent, where I lived for the next decade. My connection with dogs continued. In 1993 Karin’s bitch Nanu, a Samoyed–border collie cross, had a planned litter by Bear, a local long-hair (“woolly”) malamute. I became a sort of foster dog-mother to two of them, especially Tigger, whom Karin kept and of whom I have lots of photos. Tigger and I went for walks and on other outings; he sometimes even stayed overnight.

I’d been convinced that I didn’t know enough to have a dog of my own. Gradually I realized that yes I did, and what I didn’t know I could find out. In the fall of 1994 Nanu got pregnant by Bear again. This pregnancy was unplanned, but no one was upset about it. They were born on December 17. I got in line for a puppy.

Being semi-freelance and semi-unemployed, I spent hours upon hours with the puppies as they grew. (I have pictures. OMG, do I have pictures.) This was the “Star Wars” litter: the five boys all got Star Wars names, but only one of the three girls did because there was only one girl in Star Wars: Leia. Before the pups were three weeks old little Han Solo picked me. He then became Rhodry, after the protagonist in Katharine “Kit” Kerr’s Deverry novels, which I was tearing through at the time.

At six weeks, he moved in with me. Before too long, Edie and Kathy, my neighbor/landladies, had acquired a Portuguese water dog, Rosie,⁵ and fenced in their backyard. Rosie and Rhodry became best buds and were frequently in and out of each other’s houses.

Before Rhodry, I knew very little about Alaskan malamutes, but since Rhodry very much took after his dad looks-wise, I started learning more. By the time he passed in February 2008, I’d decided that my next dog would be a malamute. We’ll get there eventually, I promise.

P.S. Here are two later Red Pony T-shirts. The one on the right says “The Red Pony / Martha’s Vineyard ” on the back.

NOTES

1. Her maiden name was Bennett. She divorced George Sturgis, who died in 1944, seven years before I was born, then married David M. Little, who died in 1954. At least one photo exists of little me walking hand in hand with “Uncle Dave,” but I have no memories of him. Grandma’s preferred monogram was RTL, no Bennett and definitely no Sturgis. The “T” stood for Thomas, specifically Isaiah Thomas, Revolutionary War era printer and patriot, of whom she was a descendant (so, you’ve probably guessed, am I). ↩︎
2. A little over four years later, Grandma took me to see Lawrence of Arabia on its first run, in one of Boston’s classic old movie theaters. The rest of the family went to see How the West Was Won. Clearly the U.S. West had lost ground to the Middle East in my esteem; spending time with Grandma was also a plus. Lawrence was released in mid-December 1962, so this was early in 1963, my sixth-grade year, before I turned 12 in June.
   By then I was already interested in the Middle East, having done a fourth-grade school geography project on the sultanates and sheikhdoms of the Arabian peninsula. I’m almost sure I read T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom for the first time in fifth grade, after finding it on a high bookshelf in Grandma’s den. This does seem somewhat precocious for a ten-year-old, but I just checked some dates. I was an avid subscriber to Landmark Books, a history series for young readers. Alistair Maclean’s biography Lawrence of Arabia was issued as part of the series in January 1962, and I probably read it shortly thereafter. This was smack in the middle of my fifth-grade year. After that I would have recognized Seven Pillars in Grandma’s den, and the abridged version, Revolt in the Desert, right beside it. ↩︎
3. This was delayed a few days because shortly before I was scheduled to take the test at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, I got run over by my then two-year-old colt. This wasn’t his fault. His stall opened into a small paddock. Being December, it was dark. It was also feeding time. He was out in the paddock; I was standing in the doorway and didn’t see him coming. I came to in the opposite corner of the stall. I probably wasn’t out more than a few seconds, but my head was ringing for a few days. My driving test was put off till it stopped, but I still got my license well before winter vacation. ↩︎
4. My father, an architect, had even designed the house I found myself living in. The “family connections” were too complicated to explain here. Buy me a beer sometime and I’ll explain. ↩︎
5. Their first PWD, Gina, had died very young, I think of a congenital condition. Rosie, thank heavens, was healthy and lived a good long life. ↩︎