A horse with no name....

Our special young friend C called me early this morning.... I could tell she was practically bouncing on the other end of the phone but couldn't for the life of me figure out her surprise.  Something tells me I should have known....

"I bought a horse..... I bought a horse!"    As I said, I should have known.

C loves any and all animals.  Especially horses. And after a summer-long job in Yellowstone that ended in September... a job that had her riding horse-back as a trail guide.... C really truly missed her Yellowstone horse and the daily riding.  She's been thinking and looking and searching for her own horse probably since the minute her feet touched ground in Houston after the flight back from Wyoming in early September.

C's horse is a butterscotch-colored 8-month-old horse that she bought from Habitat for Horses, where she spent countless hours over the years working with and taking care of their horses.  C's first post-college "big girl" job now has her working in an office, making enough money to not only buy her own horse but to rent stable space not far from where she lives and works.  She told me this morning that she'll be saving up to buy a horse trailer so she can bring her horse up here when she comes up for weekend visits.

Via my cell phone, C sent me a photo of her horse.... it's a male who has been gelded... cute as can be, with that butterscotch color that is just so pretty to look at. C says that she and the horse have already bonded, and now she needs to think up a name.  The horse had been given the name "Hatchet," which is a horrible name for such  a sweet-looking horse, and I suggested to C that she think up a new name that would suit both the horse and herself.

For half of the afternoon, we were texting names back and forth:
C:  Tomahawk?
L:  No... sounds too much like Hatchet.  How about a horse named Sprinkles?!
C:  It's a boy, not a girl.... plus I'd like a western name.
L:  Cheyenne or Comanche?
C:  Too many horses here already with those names. Something different. Arrow?
L:  Too common.  Apache? Navajo?
C:  No. No.  How about Wildfire, like that song?
L:  How about Copacabana, like that song?
C:  Get serious. I need a western or American Indian name.

I spent almost an hour looking at Internet sites for names for horses.  A lot of the names of Indian tribes sounded like they would work, and I sent some of those suggestions to C.  I also came up with names that reflected the horse's coloring, like Butterscotch, Buttercup, and Topaz..... C told me that the other horses would bully him if she gave him any of those names.  I resisted the urge to suggest that if there were bully-horses in those stables, then she needs to find a different stable.

C has now added "Biggio" to her list of possible names for her horse.  For the non-Texans, and non-baseball fans out there, Craig Biggio was a very popular player on the Houston Astros and C loved him for years and years..... so much so that every time she signed the guest book in our house, she would sign "C---- Biggio" instead of using her real last name.  (I love looking through the old guest books.... we have her signature starting when she was in the 2nd grade..... and now C is 22.... we were the only people she knew who had a guest book by the front door and C signed it every single time she walked into our old house, and she's still signing our guest book here.)

Anyway..... back to naming the horse.   My guess is that a sweet-sounding name isn't in the future for C's sweet-faced horse.  She wants something western, Texan, or American Indian.... something with meaning, something unique, something that will tell everyone that that horse is Miss C's, and no one else's.  I guess "Barry Manilow" isn't going to make C's short list of names.