Chapter 1

I first saw her teaching some pre-teen/tween female riders basic riding skills and thought “Wow she’s not much older than the students”. I found her to be visually extremely pleasing and her voice was a smooth contralto - not sultry or sexy but clearly happy as in keen and eager. Her students were all very attentive which meant she had to have a good personality as kids spot posers/losers in seconds. I was married to my first wife at the time and we were starting a new tack shop on this horse ranch. If I had known how many hours this second vocation would consume and the cost to my personal relationships I would never have started. It ended up contributing to the end of my marriage, the death of a child and the estrangement of the surviving child - my son.

Anyways I poured my heart and soul into that tack shop only to have it fold and vanish when the divorce came along. I will tolerate many things from a spouse but an STD followed by a knife attack just pushed me out the door and down the road.

We split the few funds in the bank, sold the house and only broke even on it when the real estate company manager went to bat for us with the bank to get the early payment penalty removed. In the end, she got $114 and I go $113. The real estate agent who we thought was working for us, lied and got us to accept a much lower price than we first asked. The poor retired couple from western Ontario promptly drove the new British green Jaguar into the driveway the day after we moved out.

Did I mention that the house was the original house area, was poorly renovated over the years, and was built with 3 courses of bricks in the walls as well as rough 2x4 studs with no insulation - at all. We had decided to renovate the house to be what we wanted in a house. Our general contractor told me after it was all said and done that before we started, he thought we were very foolish to spend more on the renovation than we paid for the house, but upon completion, we really had rescued the house. As a result, we had the best house in our small town but it was way over-priced for the local market.

Meanwhile back at the horse ranch, we had been taking riding lessons for some time and then the ranch owner developed cancer and died. His widow was agreeable to us putting a tack shop into the upstairs area at the end of the indoor riding arena. It wasn’t until a few years later that her newly teenaged daughter starting coming upstairs and spending a lot of time wandering around the shop but not buying anything and I twigged to just how vulnerable I was. So ... I went to talk to the widow about it and asked if she could keep her daughter out of the shop unless the mother was there - she agreed.