{"id":2653,"date":"2026-08-13T06:47:38","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T10:47:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/?p=2653"},"modified":"2026-08-13T06:47:38","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T10:47:38","slug":"sound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/sound\/","title":{"rendered":"Sound"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/span>The first time I ask Lyric to trot under saddle, she is high-headed Thoroughbredness, a little more sideways than she is forward. There is no rhythm, her trot steps staccato accents, her jigging almost in time with her mouthing of the bit, squeak of my saddle adding polyphony to the shifting song.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>I hum, sing a little, much as a jockey would have soothed her on the track, and she settles, trots almost in a straight line, trots almost in a cadence.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>We repeat the process during her second ride, her settling faster as I work my way through songs I know by heart, singing melodies, then harmonies, filling in the gaps in between lyrics by humming the accompaniment. Her ears flick back, listening, relaxing.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>During our third ride, I feel it. The one-TWO, one-TWO, unnatural trot accent that shouldn\u2019t be there. Dotted sixteenth notes. Marcato. Syncopation. I push her forward, and the accent worsens. Give her time to work out of it. She doesn\u2019t. Sigh, dismount, look for heat or swelling. There is none. My new horse is inexplicably lame.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>The next four years are lameness exams and diagnostics and six vets, none of which can find the root cause. Then, vet number seven, a racetrack vet, spots the issue before Lyric has made a full lap on the lunge line. Her right front fetlock, fractured while training at Belmont, never fully healed.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>And there it is on the x-ray, a slim line slicing vertically through the joint. Almost imperceptible at the top, it might as well be a yawning cavern through the bottom of the fetlock. A marcato, printed upon her bone.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>The vet sends Lyric\u2019s x-rays to surgeons up and down the East Coast. No one can tell if the fracture will heal or not; she\u2019s been walking on it for five years. But all the vets agree that the joint is unstable, and Lyric needs surgery to place a screw to hold the two halves together.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>She ships to Cornell, where they\u2019re able to do the surgery with her standing. And then, the week of Thanksgiving, Lyric begins 90 days of stall rest with 10 minutes of hand walking per day. It would be enough to drive most Thoroughbreds insane, but ever the perfect patient, she resigns herself to life in her stall and requires no sedatives.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>I can see the racehorse in her during hand walking sessions, the arch of her neck elegant yet immensely strong, the hum of energy in the leather lead as she obediently meets my stride but constantly reminds me that she\u2019d like to go faster. We have several snow storms, and I shovel us an oval track to walk beneath the oak tree in my backyard. After an ice storm, the trees are glazed and the afternoon sun warms the ice just enough so that it\u2019s lightly raining around us. It sounds like we\u2019re walking through a windchime, the ice almost metallic as it hits the ground, cracks under our feet.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>I sing to her, use songs to time our walks each day. My breath plumes in front of us in December and January, my fingers numb despite the thickest gloves I can find. The songs set our tempo, and she and I walk in matched stride, creak of snow a lilting rhythm, steady, steady.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Though it is often bitterly cold, I\u2019m entranced by her beauty, snow framing her dark bay coat so that she seems glow, hints of red sneaking out from strands of her mane. She is, by definition, a plain bay with the tiniest of white socks just reaching beyond the coronet band of her hind feet, but she is also strikingly beautiful. She\u2019s inherited her shoulder from her grandfather, A.P. Indy, and her broad chest and hindquarters hint at the power she had on the track. It\u2019s that power that broke her.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Lyric\u2019s fracture heals, the marcato on her x-rays now the tiniest line that I can barely find, even when the vet points it out. I let myself hope that we can start up our rides that spring, but when I ask her to trot that May, she is lame again. In fact, she\u2019s worse.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>For three more years, we resume our cadence of lameness exams, x-rays, and countless failed rehabs. I start bringing Lyric to Rood & Riddle, hauling three hours each way, in hopes that new eyes will spot the issue. During our fifth visit she has a bone scan, and I wait in the reception area to drop her off. There\u2019s a vivid photo of Songbird winning the Alabama Stakes at Saratoga. Her bright bay coat looks like Lyric\u2019s, and she is captured in full flight heading to the wire, her power suspended on breathtakingly thin legs, and I can almost hear the percussion of her hooves as she snatched up the dirt. I think about the single step that cracked Lyric\u2019s fetlock and altered her life.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Lyric\u2019s bone scan gives us no answers, but the next year, an osteopath discovers her pelvis is rotated out behind her. She fixes it and explains that Lyric\u2019s muscle memory will cause the limp to continue until she relearns to use the leg. And suddenly, I am once again rehab riding my mare, but this time, it\u2019s different. This time, she doesn\u2019t break after the first, second, or third ride. This time, she is actually getting better.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>It\u2019s not glamorous. In fact, the first thirty rides are downright ugly. Lyric has to relearn to bring her right hind leg beneath her body, and since she\u2019s never really been ridden post racing career, she doesn\u2019t know how to accept contact or lift her back to help that leg come beneath her. I\u2019m trying to teach her these things out of necessity, and she has every right to toss her head, fuss, refuse, and fight with me.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>But she doesn\u2019t. Lyric tries every step of every ride, though I\u2019m sure she thinks I\u2019m asking the impossible. I ask her to lower her head at the walk again and again, focus on getting her to move forward, the one-two-three-four rhythm building. Then, I soften my pinkies and she moves into a trot, and for half a stride, it\u2019s even, before the dramatic one-TWO resumes.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>We do it again. I sing, setting us a tempo, and send her down the long side of the arena. Almost imperceptibly, the evenness is there for the tiniest bit longer.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>For a month, we continue this pattern, Lyric confused and trying her best, me attempting to post to her syncopated, varied rhythm. I try to anticipate the moment where she\u2019ll become uneven again so I can bring her down to the walk, but we are unbalanced and uncoordinated. I start to wonder if I\u2019m simply torturing her for nothing, if I\u2019m better off letting her just live out life in the pasture.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>But then there\u2019s a hint of progress. It\u2019s two even strides at first, then three. Then Lyric can trot while I sing a whole verse. I almost can\u2019t believe it when I make it to the chorus of \u201cTiny Dancer\u201d and we\u2019re still trotting in rhythm.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>I start to introduce the canter, using it as a tool to bring Lyric\u2019s right hind under us. The first time I ask her to canter, she launches like she\u2019s coming out of a starting gate, trying to get her hind legs sorted out. The first three strides are huge, and then she settles, rolling underneath me in a tri-pl-et rhythm. At first, she sways to the left, rocking off of that troublesome right hind, but as she grows stronger, she starts to travel straight. And then, she\u2019s unstoppable.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>It takes a year of strengthening before Lyric stays sound for an entire ride, but when she does, it feels like magic. I\u2019m learning to ride her, too; I\u2019m lightening my hands and just helping to balance her, now, rather than fully supporting her. I breathe deep, internalize a tempo, and somehow, she hears it too, slows her trot stride, and reaches deep under herself with both hind legs.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>I focus on moving in rhythm with the even swing of her back, do my best to match her motion and energy so that we move in harmony. Her hooves glide over the sand, her ears pivoting back toward me when I praise her, the squeak of my boot against saddle leather keeping time, keeping us true. The wind wraps past my helmet as I almost imperceptibly lift my inside rein and ask her to canter, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. I perch above her, my powerful mare just rolling along beneath me, each stride reaching for the ground. And in the moment when she pushes off, and we are suspended, we are one, arcing balanced together through the air, the ground stretching out somewhere beneath us, the quiet touch back down becoming just another beat of the song.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0The first time I ask Lyric to trot under saddle, she is high-headed Thoroughbredness, a little more sideways than she is forward. There is no rhythm, her trot steps staccato accents, her jigging almost in time with her mouthing of the bit, squeak of my saddle adding polyphony to the shifting song. \u00a0I hum, sing … Continue reading Sound<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4227,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[6855],"tags":[],"issue":[6885],"class_list":["post-2653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-fiction","issue-6885"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-22 14:20:18","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4227"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2653"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2665,"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2653\/revisions\/2665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2653"},{"taxonomy":"issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue?post=2653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}