(You'll have to pardon my filthy windows. It rained last night and,OK, I admit it: I just don't wash them very often. If ever.)
The sound of hooves on pavement as the carriages make their way from the nearby stable to the streets of the Magnificent Mile is, to me, one of the most comforting sounds I can think of. It probably goes back to an obsession with horses and a few years of riding lessons in my youth, but it's one of the reasons I fell in love with this neighborhood in the first place -- a little bit of country in the big city. Add to that the baby rabbits in my garden, the red-tailed hawk that patrols the stable grounds for rats, coyotes in Lincoln Park, and I can almost forget I'm living in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the country. (We even had a cougar venture into Roscoe Village this spring, which brings up a ton of encroachment issues and it still gets me upset to think about what happened to him that we won't go there this fine morning.)
What I'm actually looking forward to, though, is the next few weeks, when they outfit the horses with bell harnesses for the Christmas season. Which makes their late-night return to the stables almost magical.
It almost makes up for the 3am drunken bar patrons and the car alarms that go off then the El goes by...
2 comments:
how cool is that! i'm a horse lover from way back. worked at pony land as a kid, kept begging for a horse, but never happened. the american royal is in town (big horse show)...i head over there just to pat a few horses and fill up on that lovely horsey scent.
Who washes windows? Well, I guess if you really wanted to look out of them...
I'll bet the sound of the jingle bells and clopping make it seem even more holiday-ish.
(Breaking into a few bars of "Over the River and THrough the Woods..")
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