Sally Evans, A'Seduction and her Dressage Team

Sally's Stories
 

Sal's lucky no.3 2007-2009

January 2010

Do you look back at life and say that you must look at successful people and learn from them, to create your own way of life and how you approach things?

But how or what is success?

Is that how much money these people make, or is it how they have had success with their horses? And then also,  how many horses have they had access to, to create that success? Do they have a stream of horses, and are the horses they have happy in their work and enjoy the life they have with these people? I suppose it depends on you and probably even how your parents brought you up, your morals, honesty and responsibility you entrust to yourself.
 

Life, it’s a complicated matter, isn’t it?
They say things run in 3’s
And well I guess, my lucky number is 3.
So I suppose sooner or later I was doomed to be on a set course
...
The last 3 years have certainly been very frustrating and sad.
Frustrating with the horses and very sad and depressing for my family.

The year 2007 was caught up and well, in my eyes, virtually written off, with the introduction of the Equine Influenza, which basically hit the horse industry of the east coast of Australia. It was hard and it put everyone into a stand still type quarantine. Nobody could go anywhere, you could not take your horses off your property.  Not that great, no way to make an income and you can’t go anywhere, no events, but you still have to feed, shoe, and care for the horses, but you can’t enjoy for one of the reasons you have horses, and that is to go and ride at competitions. From August 2007 till March 2008, the EI lockdown existed.

The year 2008 from January to July, my family was in some sort of discomfort, that’s what I would describe it as. My Father had health issues with some blood, lack of it from some sort of a tablet he was prescribed, he had to be rushed into hospital for a blood transfusion and other testing, and then some months later he was diagnosed with  bowel cancer. Almost at the same time, my Mum was diminishing into a world of Alzheimer’s. Mum was really finding it hard to realise and understand what was going on, and for Dad it was difficult to come to terms with this after having been married for 60 years. They were in love as teenagers, it was love at first sight, my Dad told me, and they had been together all the time, this was very difficult. This horrible disease is torment to other family members. In the beginning, it’s incredibly hard to have to be so patient with them, just to have a conversation.
 

Almost as this was erupting, my Sister Debbie was slowly being taken to heaven by pancreatic cancer, the same cancer that took Patrick Swazye, in the same year. This cancer is very hard to fight and live through, but Deb given her strong will and heart and determination, she did try everything in her power to overcome this, but by late April 2008, she was gone. Deb was diagnosed with it some 14 months earlier, and this has to have been the worst part of my life so far. Meanwhile I was trying to pretend I was keeping the horse in work and training him into Grand Prix level, but it was not really happening, as there was just too much on my mind. Emotionally deep inside, I was almost a wreck, thank goodness for my husband, Peter, he kept me sound.
 

I wish life could be as easy as these rain drops fall onto our beautiful boa tree.

We sold our second Basil baby, Arena. We delivered her to Mel Widdis near Armidale. Arena is a super smart girl, and I feel in my heart that she will train onto FEI, fingers crossed Mel will keep up with her, ha.  Our race horse girl, Milly, we call Mil which is short for million $$$, hopefully she will race this coming year 2010, that seems a good year for racing!! Mil has had her fair share of issues and we pray that she will be able to show her true sprinting form.

From 2007 to 2008, I was very lucky to be given the opportunity to make a lovely friendship with an American dressage rider Patti Brewer. I helped her train and compete on a horse named Lyric. Patti ended up winning a medium championship at our local clubs official championships, just two days before she was to fly home, and guess what, yeap, ‘all righty then’, she did it, she flew home with an embroidered  championship woolen show rug, the envy of her dressage friends in the States.
 

Ok, so the finale, the third and end of the 3 series of years of… uuummmm well, what do I say.  In 2009, we’re just starting to think that we were getting life back to some normality, after, oh hang on, I forgot to mention, just to finish off the year of 2008, we had a filly born 1st November, and it was a very sad morning, cause we lost our darling broodmare Freya, we think a hemorrhage,  and we ended up bottle raising our little girl Sandra D. Peter said the first two days we will feed her at one hour intervals, to be able to really keep a close eye on her progress, then over the next 18 weeks we  continued to feed her and eventually we slowly weaned her off her milk, and now she is healthy and a fun girl to be with.

Now on with 2009, really by now I am truly starting to focus on Basil and wanting with all my heart to go to Grand Prix with him, but I am not confident that we should try to go to the Sydney CDI 3 star event, even to compete in the national GP class. During last year, we really didn’t do that many competitions, and certainly my mind was not always on the job. My gallant, brave husband just insisted that we go and he demanded that I send in the entries, and that we prepare and focus on this event, which is in May. So we did and much to our surprise, our stallion, our boy, A’Seduction, known as Basil, we won that GP class, and we came home very happy and excited, the most joy I had felt for some time, and so proud of Basil. Only in your heart you wished it could have been felt and shared by Debbie and my Mum.

For this trip to the CDI we had decided to take our beautiful, but, getting old slightly going dementia dog, Joyce. She was pretty much blind in one eye, and fairly deaf, and that affected her balance a little bit. But if she could speak, she would have said that she just totally enjoyed being with us like the old days, when she was younger and we took her to every event we went to, Peter, me, Joyce and Basil. We set up this old foam mattress on the back seat of our car, covered it with a warm blanket, one from her bed at home, and she just sat up there with her little head between us and she just loved it. She slept in our cabin on that mattress, and she was so peaceful, and well behaved, it was as if she knew this would probably be her last trip with us and she was making the most of it and just fitting in and not being bothered by the new surroundings and routine.

Joyce just loved it. When we came home I think she just had so much fun, it was a lovely way for her to finish her stay here with us, it was a bit like when Debbie, my Sister, went on her final trip with her partner Ruth, they went on a cruise, I guess to just have some fun and some peace together, and then when they returned home it was only 5 weeks later that Debbie passed away, two days before my birthday. Joycey practically did the same, she came home settled back into home life, but she did seem to loose her balance a tiny bit more and also her other eye was going blind, and she started to wander a bit, like she wanted to go now. So two days before Peter’s birthday she passed away too, she was 16 years old.  Dear Joycey, we just loved her so much, we both cried all that night and so sad to have her gone. We buried her under the tree that Debbie gave us, so it is our special place to remember them both.
 

Everything was beginning to fall into place, and Basil and I were competing at Grand Prix and he was just starting to get a bit comfortable with it all. We were very excited to be preparing for the State and National championships, to go and compete at Grand Prix was going to be a highlight. Then disaster strikes again, I was riding Basil on the beach south of Ballina, I regularly ride him at this beach, we do some fitness work or sometimes we just go for a relaxing stroll along the water’s edge. I use this work as part of a stress relief from his dressage training, and he loves the beach. We would normally go say twice per month, and generally I let Basil tell me what he would like to do. Sometimes he wants to go for a trot and canter, and sometimes he just wants to walk, and most recently he has been walking up to the water and walking into it till it is above his fetlocks, and then I believe he meditates, as he just stands there in the water staring out to sea, totally ignoring other things. His eyes go really tired looking like he is so relaxed, and he takes these deep breathes, it is like he is on some marihuana. This time I was doing our fitness training, and then we stood with his legs in the salty water, but unfortunately, he got a fright at some large logs that had been washed up along the shore’s edge and when I returned home he had a swollen fetlock. A scan revealed some soft tissue damage, and he would need to have a rest of 6 -8 weeks… yeah well… that’s been my luck the last few years. So you just go with the flow, just keep plugging along, nothing you can do now, it has to take its time.  So that was the end of that year for us and competitions.