Growing a Dream

Growing up I always dreamed of being a cowgirl.  I drew pictures of my ranch (out in Montana, where I had never been) and imagined snowmobiling through a blizzard to a warm-lit barn where the newest foal was being born.  I dreamed of riding in the rugged mountains, passing bugling elk and their calves while bald eagles circled the sky above.

This dream was such a part of me that after college I left everything I knew - the east, my family, my friends - and with my pick-up truck and faithful Labrador, Kota, at my side drove west.  I ended up in Wyoming and it is there that I stayed for 8 years before a series of events led me back east to where I am today.

While living on a beautiful ranch outside of Jackson, Wyoming, I was able to fully realize my dream.  Wrangling horses, crossing paths with grizzlies, fly-fishing the Snake river as eagles watched from above, snowmobiling through blizzards to feed the horses, crossing paths with mountain lion stalkers in the hay barn, and teaching children the love of horses.  The day before returning east my new rescue racehorse, Henry, and I took our very first ride together on a gray October morning through a meadow full of bugling bull elk and cows and calves who were gathering south from Yellowstone towards the Refuge before a long winter.

Four years later, I am living a new dream as a mother of two beautiful children, Max and Grace, and wife to the kindest, most wonderful man in the world, Jesse.  While we keep two horses here at our home in Stowe, Vermont, I had thought that my cowgirl days were over - a wonderful chapter in my life closed.  Now the book has been reopened and it is there that a new dream grows.  A dream that involves rescuing horses, mentoring children and healing a community.  A farm that grows hope, love, trust, friendship.  A refuge that allows children to dream and to never be afraid of letting those dreams come true.

Where love is spread, hope will grow.

Tracy