In your wildest Christmas daydreaming have you ever imagined yourself walking into a stall to meet a new horse for sale and instead finding yourself face to muzzle with your dearest and long-lost equine friend? And while time seems to be suspended and you have temporarily lost the ability to speak, you are informed by a friend who is in on the scheme that he is not in fact for sale but belongs to you?

Dare to dream because it can happen. It happened to me in April of 2003 when, through an incredible set of circumstances, my husband, Danny Harris Jr., presented me with the surprise gift of 29-year-old Why Not Farley. I had sadly outgrown and sold the one-of-a-kind small junior horse exactly 20 years earlier.

Our story together began in 1978 in Germantown, Tenn., when my parents Charb and Suzanne Miller broke all of the rules and bought a green, 4-year-old, Quarter Horse for me at age 11. I was the typical horse-crazy young girl who had managed to drag my unsuspecting parents deeper and deeper into the horse business once they made the fateful decision to give in to my incessant begging for horseback riding lessons.

Once getting a foot into that proverbial barn door it was not long before I managed to convince them that I needed a horse to take to the local shows. As it
happened, Farley was the horse who fit into our very limited budget.

It could not possibly have been more wrong. I was green, and he was greener. He was small, short strided and not a great mover, to be generous. And yet a funny thing happened along the way to the horse show debacle you must be picturing in your mind right now. This little horse turned out to be an extraordinarily gifted jumper and was push-button easy to ride from the very beginning.

By the spring of 1979 we won a low hunter class at our first A-rated show, beating several professionals and much fancier horses. I still have a faded newspaper clipping and photograph from that class. That picture perfectly captured the essence of our early time together–me with my boots too short and hair flying from underneath my hard hat, hanging on to the braids for dear life, while Farley is the very image of classic hunter style with his knees squarely up under his chin and a kind, willing expression in his eyes.

Thanks to his incredible attitude we were competing in the small juniors within a year of that low hunter picture. Photographs from that time show me with much more sophisticated turn out and equitation but very much the same wonderful horse. He knew his job and was perfectly clear that my only real tasks were to steer and then get out of his way over the fences. It was a system that worked well, earning us much success at the horse shows we could afford to attend each year.

Two of the things that resonate in my mind were how we would always do particularly well when Gene Cunningham was judging and how once we won a big equitation class when Farley was the only horse who walked a jump correctly as asked for by judge Victor Hugo-Vidal.

I’ve heard it said several times by some of the best horsemen and women that I have known that all good horses have some quirk, and Farley
was as good a case in point. His ground manners were atrocious, and he was incapable of standing still in the paddock area, doing his signature nervous jig until you got into the ring and picked up your gallop. He would eat anything, including McDonald’s hamburgers, and we used to entertain ourselves at home by feeding him Space Dust candy and then laughing at his facial contortions and look of surprise as it popped and fizzled in his mouth.

Moving On
But in the horse show world most good things must come to an end, and by 1983 I was hiking up my stirrups so as not to pull rails with my own feet. Farley went on to do the children’s hunters with his new owner, and I finished out my show career over the next four years on my new, much larger Thoroughbred named Matter Of Interest.

I watched Farley be wonderful for a succession of owners throughout the next two decades. Several times he moved out of the area, and I wondered if I would ever see him again. But he kept making his way back to Germantown, and the news would always travel fast to me at Saddles N’ Such, the tack store I have owned since 1991.

In his older years Farley became a school horse extraordinaire and taught numerous Germantown riders to jump with confidence. He even foxhunted for a while and by all accounts was as trustworthy in the field as he had been in the ring. By 2003 he had once again been out of state for a while. I had lost touch with him when my father took the phone call at our shop that led to our reunion.

A friend in Union City, Tenn., named Jackie LeDuke had heard through the grapevine about an old, chestnut horse named Farley for sale in Kentucky. Jackie and her husband Randy had both taken lessons on him years ago and had a real soft spot for him in their hearts. Jackie knew exactly where the horse belonged, so after calling my father and after conferring with him and my husband, she immediately hitched up her trailer and headed to Kentucky and then back to Germantown, where she dropped Farley off at a local stable to wait for me.

I cannot think of any words of thanks that are adequate to convey my sentiments to the LeDukes. They are horse people in the truest sense of the word, and it is good to know there are still people who will go above and beyond the call of duty to take care of a horse who has touched their lives in some way.

The Ultimate Surprise
In order to get me out to the stable they enlisted the help of my friend Betty Haser and her husband, Jerry. For the last eight years Betty has loaned me her gray Quarter Horse, Nifty, to foxhunt. (She convinced me to hunt with her and got me hooked on the sport. I now put to use in the “real world” all of those skills that I worked so hard to acquire through showing, and I finally see the purpose behind Mr. Hugo-Vidal wanting us to be able to walk that jump all those years ago!).

So when Betty enlisted my help to look at a trail horse that might be a possibility for Jerry, I was more than happy to assist. The story went that Jerry, who is a pilot for FedEx, had been talking with another pilot who had this “perfect trail horse” that he wanted to sell Jerry. Betty related this with some urgency and said she really wanted me to help look at this horse because she was worried that Jerry was just going to go right out and buy the thing. Now Jerry is a very talented man, but to be honest, he has spent far more time in the cockpit than in the saddle, so fearing for his safety I agreed to skip church that Sunday and go right over to look at this horse.

I’ll never forget walking down that barn aisle with the two of them and seeing a chestnut rump over the stall divider. “That horse is exactly the same color as Farley!” I exclaimed. And when I opened the stall door and that chestnut horse who was just the same color as Farley raised his head and looked at me, my heart nearly stopped. Overwhelmed by the shock, my mind was scrambling to figure out how Farley could possibly be the horse that my friend wanted to buy. That’s when someone said, “Say hello to your new horse!” and the reality of the situation began to sink in.

This horse, who has given so much to so many riders, deserves to live his last years in comfort, and I am incredibly blessed to be the one to provide it for him! I owe so many of the good things in my life to him–without him I would never have been half the rider that I am today. I thank him for taking me to a level where I could be competitive in the juniors and to work at the equitation and medal tests, all things that will make me a safer and better hunt rider for the rest of my life.

Now he is a safe companion for our 6-year-old son, Danny, and is teaching him to enjoy horses, walking patiently and waiting for Danny to remember the right cues to walk, turn or stop.

Why Not Farley will be holding court with the Harris family and accepting visitors and treats for the rest of his days–and that is just as it should be! My Christmas wish for all of you is at some time in your life to be blessed by a partnership with such a special horse.

Nicole Harris