This was the summer that never happened. Just after Loudoun Benefit Horse Show in June, my mom began to suffer severe complications related to her cancer. And just like that, I was plucked out of horse show land and dropped into hospital land.

After spending four months in equine fantasyland I returned home to my quaint, rustic, little farmette in Purcellville, Va. We use words like “quaint” and “rustic” to invoke a sense of charm, some far off nostalgia for tin roofs and chickens pecking around. But words like “small” and “old” are more accurate.

So try as I might, my inner show jumper took over and a few weeks into my time at the Winter Equestrian Festival (Fla.), I crossed back over to the dark side. A big thanks goes out to the Barkers for understanding that my ambitions were in another ring and encouraging me to pursue them. Through a miracle of networking, (a friend of a friend of a friend and so on…) I found myself standing in Margie Engle’s ring one balmy January morning.

This is not real life. Nowhere else in the universe can you rock a giant brim on your helmet that evokes everything from Donald Duck to Little House on the Prairie, wear multiple items of bedazzled clothing, and openly discuss the purchase price of your house in the Hamptons—all while riding your immaculately groomed horse that may or may not be a unicorn.

You might also be texting.

This is fantasyland.

Somewhere, in the dusty recesses of my brain, exists the equitation-obsessed, stirrup-less wonder of my youth. In my first week on the new job the rusty gears of my former hunter-self began creak and groan to life.