Born and raised in Central Virginia, I was surrounded by horses, and horse people, right from the start. Though no one in my family rode, by the time my twin sister and I turned eight our parents had secured riding lessons for us at a local barn.
They weren't the sort of lessons where you showed up in jodhpurs and got on your pony. They were the sort where you showed up in anything as long as you had heeled shoes, mucked twenty stalls and then got a lesson, after which you mucked a few more stalls and swept all the barn aisles. And then hand-spread all the manure out in the fields, which meant rolling the tubs out balanced in wheelbarrows. And this was in the era when wheelbarrows only had one wheel, so you'd better know how to stack shit or you were shit out of luck. Literally.
Needless to say, I learned a lot, I learned it old school, and I learned how to laugh while I was learning. Two decades later, I'm still into horses, still learning and still laughing.
I also write, so it seemed natural to eventually meld the writing in with the riding. You know, just like you eventually meld barn chores into house chores. Like tying the two-year-old to the hot walker while you pick out stalls, or 'borrowing' the horse vacuum to brush up the living room carpet because the Hoover is clogged with horse, cat, and dog hair again. It's the little things that to leech into the big things and then suddenly, they become your life. And then you write about them. As one does.