Yesterday, I took Christian to the doctor for his four month checkup. Because Christian is a fussy baby, I asked my pediatrician if I should give up dairy products or anything else that may be making Christian colicky.

“I don’t think it’s your breast milk,” the doctor said. “My guess is that he’s strong-willed. He cries to get his way. I like these kind of kids. They grow up to be leaders. I used to own a horse like Christian. Nobody could ride it but me. That was a great horse.”

“I had a horse like that, too,” I said, remembering Soda Pop. He sometimes acted up, but Soda was the best horse I ever had. I miss him so much.”

After seeing Christian’s doctor, I drove home thinking about Soda Pop. In fact, practically not a day has gone by this summer that I haven’t thought of Soda Pop. Summer does that to me. I dream: mountains, horses, Soda Pop.

Over a decade ago, I searched for awhile before I found Soda Pop. I’d gone without my own horse for years and it was time. Time to find the wings I’d forgotten I had. They say you never forget how to ride a bicycle. Well, you never forget how to ride a horse, either.

“He turns on a dime,” the gal said as we stood in a round pen near the Yuba River. I’d gone to look at this horse I’d found listed in the newspaper. “I’ve raced him a few times, and he’s super fast, but he’s too sensitive for racing. Down in Mexico they beat him up. See his scars? He needs a good, safe home.”

I saw the tale of abuse, the white scars around his mouth, across his face where the hair no longer grew. Yet, he was beautiful, a bay quarter horse, all muscle and bone and bright brown eyes looking me over in return. That’s the thing about owning a horse. In a way that horse owns you as well. If I bought this horse, we’d be in this thing together.

And this thing for me was beauty. I wanted beauty back. I was thirty-one years old with three kids, a house in constant need of cleaning, and an SUV that hit every soccer game, every school play, every military function. My hair was over bleached. Makeup too harsh. Breast implants had changed my figure. I’d lost all youthful beauty in my life. Where had it gone? I could hardly remember what beauty looked like. But I knew I could find it on the right horse.

The first time I rode Soda Pop (the horse I bought from that woman on the Yuba River), he scared me to death. For months my knees would shake before I stepped into the saddle. If a cow was around, Soda Pop would hunker down like a dog; then that spinning on a dime thing the gal warned me about would happen. I wore sports bras and prayed a lot. It’s a miracle I never landed in the dirt.

In my search for beauty on Soda Pop, I was finding faith again, too. Or I should say, Faith was finding me. But that story is bigger than this one. A testimony for another day.

Oh, the adventure of finding beauty. Soda Pop never disappointed me. Cliffs. Bears. Mountain meadows…

The real challenge of a mountain meadow is appreciating its beauty. The kind that can’t be manufactured by mankind. This beauty that had deserted my life for too long. Beauty coming back to me on Soda Pop.

And now about the bull… If I could sum up beauty on Soda Pop in one story it would have to be: facing the bull.

My dad’s bull had deserted his herd. The bull had gone on a walk-about, looking for greener pastures, the greener being more cows to breed.

So we went after him. My dad on a four-wheeler. Scott on Duke, a rawboned buckskin gelding. And Soda and me. Way up in the Sutter Buttes we rode. Up to where the wild things are. And the wildest thing that day in the buttes was the bull.

Two-thousand pounds of raging hormones. That bull wasn’t about to leave those new girlfriends of his, a bunch of teenage dairy cows. Soda Pop and I cut open the herd. The bull looked us in the eye and put his head down. He shook his big, black skull from side to side as if to say, “No. Not going with you, folks.”

The bull pawed the ground. My dad gassed the motorbike and made him really mad. Scott and I began moving the girlfriends. Dairy cows are real comedians. I could almost hear them complaining as we turned the heifers toward my parent’s ranch, “Oh my gosh, I broke a hoof… Stop herding me… you made me swallow my cud…”

Soda must have been thinking, you’ve got to be kidding me? You call these things cows? They’re Broadway actresses in disguise. Soda grew so disgusted with the dairy cows that he began to bite the slow-moving heifers on the butts. I held on and let Soda do his cowboy thing. He was the Mexican rodeo horse again. On his back, I was a broken woman in search of beauty.

It took us all afternoon, but we finally got the herd to my dad’s fence line. That’s when the bull showed his stuff. He charged my dad on the motorbike. My dad gassed the bike back at the bull (my dad’s a guy with little dog syndrome). Instead of a collision, the bull turned at the last minute and roared like a freight train toward the heart of the buttes. Scott spurred Duke after him. The bull turned on Scott and Duke. Duke reared sideways, hit a ravine, crashed down, and Scott went flying in a spray of mud. My dad on the bike raced to rescue Scott, heading off the charging bull. The bull again made a dash for freedom and Dad opened the motorbike to full speed. The bull jumped the twisting ravine and Dad tried to jump it, too. Unable to clear the ravine, the motorbike crashed into the side of the ditch. Dad went flying like a rag doll. In the process of galloping Soda to Scott’s side, I screamed in horror. I thought Dad was dead.

“I’m okay! Check on your dad!” Scott yelled.

I rushed Soda over to Dad.

“Get the bull!” Dad screamed from where he lay sprawled in the ditch.

Soda Pop was all for that. He knew the bull was the real target and was delighted to be done with those silly dairy cows.

I grabbed the saddle horn and prayed my heart out. Soda ran for all his worth to cut the bull off. In a beautiful act of horsemanship (Soda did it. I did nothing but hang on for dear life), Soda turned the bull back to the fence and pushed two-thousand pounds of fury through the gate. A lake is on my dad’s property. I jumped off Soda to close the gate in case the bull tried to double back. Scott rode up and my dad arrived on a broken motorbike. About this time we noticed the bull trotting around the lake…

“He’s going to jump the fence on the other side,” yelled my dad. Dad turned the limping motorbike around to try to head off the bull if the bull cleared the fence. But there was no way the broken motorbike could make it over to the otherside of the lake in time. The only chance to stop the bull was to swim the lake.

Soda must have been thinking the same thing I was. As soon as I leaped onto Soda Pop, he ran for the lake. We plunged into the water. This in the middle of winter. The bull ran faster around the lake. Soda swam hard. On his back, water washed over my shoulders. We reached the other side, then the corner of the fence, seconds before the bull arrived. The bull was bottle-necked in by another fence and the lake. Soda Pop stood his ground. Both of us trembled. It could have been the cold water. Or the adrenaline of the chase. But when you are face to face with a raging bull, it can really cause the shakes.

It seemed forever, but was probably more like a split-second that Soda and me and the bull went toe to toe there at the fence. Because of the bottle-neck of the two fences and the lake, the bull would have had to go over the top of me and Soda to escape back into the buttes. Believe me, that old bull thought about it. I could see by the look in his eyes. Water and sweat poured off Soda Pop. I may have sweated too, though it was fifty degrees out and I was soaking wet and shivering like crazy.

Please Jesus, turn this bull around, I prayed.

The bull gave a furious shake of his head, snot flying from his nostrils, then spun sideways and jumped the fence into my dad’s other pasture.

A minute later it seemed miraculous to me that Dad arrived on that side of the fence with a huge stick in his hand. He waved the bull toward his own herd. Fortunately, my dad’s herd of cows was in that pasture, and when the bull saw all his old wives, he willingly rejoined them.

Talk about a thing of beauty… dusk immediately arose on the horizon. A meadowlark sang out as twilight broke wide open. Winter moves that way in the buttes, afternoon abruptly turning to nightfall. Soda Pop and I rode toward Scott, who was riding toward us with a look of wonder on his face.

“You are so beautiful. I think you have moss in your hair. Can I marry you all over again?” he asked.

“I’m a mess,” I said, realizing how drenched and disheveled I was.

“Are you kidding me? You look like the girl I married.” Scott could not stop grinning. “Actually you look like that little red-haired girl from the pictures. The ones on your pony with your hair a wild mess.”

Tears hit my eyes. I’d set out to find beauty and beauty had found me.

I no longer have Soda Pop. Or breast implants. They’re both gone along with my thirties. How I miss that horse. He died five years ago this autumn, making dust angels in the dirt as he tried to rise when I kneeled down next to him to say goodbye. He got really sick. We did all we could and he still didn’t make it. God gives and takes away, blessed be His name…

I haven’t been in a hurry to replace Soda Pop. It’s only been in the past few months where I have really longed for another horse. So I’ve begun to pray that God will bless me again with another horse like Soda Pop. I’ll keep you posted on what happens…