first job

Thinking about my first job (shit shoveler) while doing my dream job (essay writing) and simultaneously double dipping with my paying job (searching Google Docs for a bio and headshot to share with someone STAT).

In real time. This is what I’m doing. Like now.

My first job wasn’t complete abuse of child labor laws, but let’s just say I was likely 9 or 10, my cousin Mark a year older, and we were tasked with cleaning stalls at Double H Ranch, the horse farm down the road where Mark kept his pony Smoky, and I, my possessed pony, Secret.

We cleaned stalls, cleaned horses, and cleaned tack, to “help out” and feel important.

We loved it.

All of it.

Mark and I practically lived there, all summer long, and weekends during the school year. We fed, watered, groomed, tacked, and took out trail rides, for free, then for $5/day, which eventually grew to $2/hour. Johnny taught us everything: how to ride, how to tack, how to groom, how to care: and never made us feel like the annoying little kids I have no doubt we were.

I was a typical barn rat: up at the crack of dawn for feed up, then trail rides all day on the weekends, and done at sundown, or when the sun was halfway down the mountain (lower Berkshires, Dutchess County mountain, not mountain-mountain).

We told time by the sunset, and knew we were late when I heard my father’s booming voice from a half mile away: “Kathy – GET HOME NOW” echo and bounce off said mountains, knowing from the tenor of his boom, he had already yelled once or twice, and rang the big bell from the back deck to summon me home for dinner.

I loved it: the horseshit, the flies, the hoof clippings dogs would grab, the hayloft, the steaming pile of manure out the back where we dumped wheelbarrows of shavings.

I can still smell the big scoops of sweet grain, where Johnny Rosi, the guy who ran the barn, taught me which kernels to eat: “people food,” he insisted. Sweet and tacky, but while he munched away between Marlboros, spitting corn kernels out while exhaling smoke rings and singing to Creedence Clearwater blasting through the barn. I was less enthusiastic. I wanted to be cool and say it tasted good, I spit it out in the stall as soon as I was out of sight.

Imagine me, still years from a training bra, tacking up 5, 6, maybe 10 horses and leading a bunch of New Yorkers (city folk: New York, New York, not small town woodchuck New York) into the woods for a 1-hour trail ride. Teaching them to walk, trot, and canter; getting on and off to open and close gates; grabbing reins of grown-ups who won’t listen, then lead-line them back to the barn.

And your guide, yours truly, still believed in Santa.

It’s a fact. Definitely not OSHA-approved, but I led these trails rides, cleaned these stalls, tacked these horses, and did it basically full-time, before hormones hit, and I discovered boys and cars, then traded the barn and horses for teenage angst.

To this day, when I walk around Agway or Tractor Supply, I mosey to the horse section, open and inhale Fly Wipe, Absorbine, Lexol – even Saddle Soap. With one sniff, I’m 10, back at Double H, and remember what life was like, once upon a time, horse shit and all.