by Darcy Dean
After waiting for what felt like forever for enough snow to fall, it was finally time. Snow was still falling from the sky but there was enough stuck to the ground for us to be able to go for a sleigh ride at least for a little while. We got Trigger, our little pony, out of his pasture, put his harness on, and hooked him up to the sleigh. It was time. We stomped our feet and rubbed our hands together to generate warmth and to rid our extremities of the cold creeping into our bones. Our breath left us in little puffs that drifted off before dissolving into the frigid air. Although we were freezing, Trigger was eager to go; he loves to pull the sleigh and he has an incredibly thick winter coat, so we soon set off. Trigger started off a little bit quickly at first, but he soon settled into a rhythm and the ride smoothed out. The snow that was still coming down was a slightly blinding, but we didn’t care. We were going for a sleigh ride.
My Great Grand Uncle, Date Myers, bought the sleigh out of a barn in the Shenandoah Valley in the 1970s, and he restored it himself although he didn’t do a particularly good job. He kept a small horse down the road from his house. When the weather permitted, he would get the sleigh out and play with it. We have a picture of him from a 1975 bank report. In it, he is driving through the bank’s drive-through on the sleigh in the snow. Around the year 2000, he contacted my dad because he wanted to get rid of it, but he wanted to see it used again. We were the only family members we knew who had horses, so he contacted us. We went and got the sleigh. It sat in a shelter for a couple of years, and we didn’t do anything with it. When I turned two, my parents decided to get me a pony named Magic. They sent him to driving school so that he could be my pony and drive the sleigh. The woman we sent him to introduced us to a man named Rusty who agreed to restore the sleigh again for us because it was in bad shape.
Mr. Rusty restored the sleigh beautifully. He painted it bright burgundy and red with shining gold accents. We also got Magic back. While he could drive, he didn’t really enjoy it and he was not great at it. It also didn’t snow that year, so we didn’t get to use the sleigh. The next year, we got a cart so that we could practice driving even if it was not snowing. It didn’t snow that year either. The next year, I was turning four, and Magic was not especially energetic or inclined to do a lot of work or go fast. What do you think that four-year-old me wanted most in the world? To run and go fast. We kept in touch with Mr. Rusty, and he informed us that he knew of a pony that knew how to pull a sleigh and was an excellent driver. Mr. Rusty said that he would be perfect for me. His name was Easily Triggered, and his nickname was Trigger. We visited him, and we knew from the moment that I jumped on his back and took off that Trigger was going to be ours. Trigger loved to drive, and we took him out often. That winter, we hoped and prayed for enough snow to drive the sleigh. Sure enough, on January 30, 2014, we had enough snow to go for our first sleigh ride.
Skip forward a few years after our first sleigh ride, and on January 21, 2022, the weatherman had called for two to three inches of snow. There were about three and a half on the ground. It was a beautiful powder snow. The kind that was excellent for packing and was almost blinding in the sun so there were more than a few snowballs thrown while we were waiting on our turn in the sleigh. Everywhere you looked, snow glistened from the ground, the trees, and every other surface available. Mom was the driver of the sleigh, so she got to go on every run that Trigger took but the rest of us (my brother, my dad, and I) all took turns because there is not enough room for all four of us to fit in the sleigh together. Another unfortunate occurrence that took place was that there was no ice underneath the snow, so the vibrant red runners cut right through the snow onto the bare ground below us. Other than that, we all had a ton of fun taking turns on the sleigh that day and listening to the sound of Trigger’s jingle bells.
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