A horse is a horse, of course…

So, this isn’t MY story, but it was so hilarious, I just had to share it. Besides, my last entry was about horse races, so I am just keeping with the equine theme. Claire is one of my very good friends from grad school and we currently work in the same office suite, so we see each other all the time. I hang out with her and her husband, Matt, a fair bit and usually always have an entertaining story or two to tell from a trip or party with them. This particular story literally had me falling onto the couch in her office, laughing so hard that I had tears running down my face and I was gasping for breath. It is such a hilarious story, I am not sure writing it out gives it the same justice of either of them telling it in person.

Matt and Claire live in a lovely home that they built new in a subdivision about six or seven years ago. They live in the suburbs, and are only a few minutes from two major interstates, and their subdivision is off a main road, off a big road/ highway. It is a subdivision…. Near a middle school, some shopping centers, 15 minutes from downtown C-town. While it may have been the country 40 to 50 years ago, it is most definitely a suburb now. This description is an important distinction because if it WAS the country, this would have made so much more sense!

Matt and Claire live in their adorable little house, in their cute little subdivision in suburbia with their two dogs… Katie and Carly. LOVE these dogs, they are medium to large sized and are very sweet and well behaved. Unless, of course, there is another animal around (this is highly entertaining when we all go camping at the beach and the raccoons come out, but that is another story). So, it is about 3AM a few months ago when Katie and Carly start going nuts. I mean, the way Claire describes it, it was like they were leading the doggie version of the Army’s Reveille wake up song. The dogs are barking away, they are running from the master bedroom upstairs, down the steps to the giant front window, back up the stairs to the bedroom and repeat (about a million times). Finally, Matt, being the good husband he is, goes to see if they are okay and make sure that some random squirrel wasn’t intentionally giving the dogs a midnight terror. Five minutes later, he gets the dogs back upstairs in the crates and collapses back into bed.

Claire: “What was it?”

Matt: “Nothing, go back to sleep.”

Claire: “No, really, what was it?”

Matt: “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Claire: “Tell me.”

Matt: “There is a horse in the front yard.”

Claire: “Matt, seriously, what was making them go nuts?”

Matt: “If you don’t believe me, go look.”

 So, Ms. Claire hauls herself out of bed in the middle of the night, goes down stairs, walks out the front door to stand on the porch and stare at… a horse in the middle of her front yard. A horse, with no farm near by, in the middle of their subdivision, in the middle of suburbia, in the middle of the night… sounds odd, right? Yep, it was a pretty, light colored horse, rather large, and just eating the grass in the front lawn, about as happy as it could be. Claire, being the intelligent person she is, logically thinks, “I must be hallucinating.” So, she moseys on down the steps and into the front yard and reaches out and pokes the horse. Yep, it was a real horse and it went right on eating the grass in the front yard. So, Claire turns around, goes back in the house and up to the bedroom, climbs back into bed, and tells Matt: “There is a horse in the front yard.” Matt: “Yep.” And they both go back to sleep (the dogs, kind of, they calmed down though).

The next morning, the horse was gone, the grass was most definitely eaten and they never saw the horse again.

I personally would have called animal control, but I don’t think their brains actually went there in the dead of night. To this day, which is months later, they still don’t know where the horse came from or what happened to it… but the grass was eaten and Claire actually touched the horse, so it DID happen. I can’t even claim this is a Southern thing, but it sure is funny! I may have to record her telling the story sometime and post it, because it quite literally had me in tears AND singing the theme song from Mr. Ed all day long!