Robust Rita

So I am not Tinkerbelle.  All of us horses think that maybe Tink is a little biased and you are not getting enough of the right information about us.  So the other horses voted me to be the horse rep.  I am Rita.  We know we are in the minority here on the farm,  And we are not all dazzling different colors like those fancy ponies are, but someone ought to be extolling our virtues anyway.  Besides, everyone knows that the lady likes brown horses with black points and she isn't keen on white feet, so what would you expect most of us horses to look like?  So anyway,  I live in a big pasture with five other mares.  The lady calls us the "Bay Bunch."  There is a mare named A and her daughters Jewel and Alexis.  A actually has a long name that she used when she was at the racetrack.   But it is too long to use around the farm.  And there is a funny three year old named Fleur Scho.  Her Mom, Red, lives next door with a bunch of young ponies. Red used to be the boss of everyone, so Fleur thought she was quite the princess when she moved in here, but we taught her a thing or two.  And then there is my Mom, Mari.  Mari's full name is Mariposa because the lady thinks she looks like one of those Monarch butterflies.  (She used to go see lots of those butterflies when she lived in Mexico.)  Mari could have been a race horse too, like A, except that she doesn't have some kind of papers that horses need to do that.  Her dad won a fancy race a long time ago called the Kentucky Derby.   But she never met her dad and she doesn't have any racetrack stories.  My Dad. Lafleur, died last year.  He used to live next door where that Red mare lives with the ponies now.  My full name is La Florita, which means little flower.   I am very pretty and only a little bit bossy.  When I was just a year old, I saw that the one gate to our pasture was open a little bit, so I stuck my head in there to see if I could reach some of the grass on the other side. But it didn't open any further, so I tried to yank my head back out and the gate grabbed my head and held on to it.  AHHH!   I threw my head around and the latch pin from the gate went right into my head below my ear.  OWW!   When I got free, I had a hole about as big around as my eye and as deep as half my hoof  in my head.  Lots of the blood inside me ran out the hole and then I could hardly walk.  And then my face felt funny and didn't work right.  So then I got better and now I just have some white hairs where the hole was in my head, but my nose is crooked and half of my mouth is kind of floppy.  I think it is getting more like it used to be tho.  The lady tells me to eat grass for therapy, so I am good at that.  After my Dad died,  a lot of horses and ponies moved around to different pastures and me and A moved out back and lived with two ponies named Taca and Bob.  That Bob!  He is pushy and noisy and I just tried to ignore him when I got back there, but he kind of grows on you after a while.   So I decided he could be my boyfriend.   And then when the trees started to get leaves on them, me and A moved back up here with these mares again.  So I have only seen Bob in passing a few times since.  The lady says I look pregnant, but you know, we have a lot of green grass and so she says ALL of us mares look pregnant.  We are a robust bunch.