Alas.

I had a fun lesson on Sunday with the horses, but the snow was too deep to ride, so while I practiced taking the saddle on and off and talked shop while picking manure out of Sunny's hoofs...

...I wished it were summertime.

I wished it were summertime and I was riding bareback on a warm chestnut horse through some meadowy woods while M. Ward played guitar and sang and there was no snow. Anywhere.

Alas.

But in a week from today, my mom and I will be alighting from a plane which will have picked us up in Philadelphia and flown us to San Francisco. And the weather will be warmer. There will be no snow. Fog is okay. There will even be horses, on some morning when we awaken very early and make our way to Half Moon Bay for the morning ride special. 

But my mom doesn't know about that yet.

In fact, she doesn't know about a lot of my plans.  Because, you see, she's just taggin' along.

She's just taggin' along because when I mentioned to her I was headed to San Francisco for a solo trip, she called me after a week and asked if I would like some company. I said sure.

"Really? Really? I'll just tag along," she said. "I'll just do whatever you're already doing."

"Oh," she added, "And I want to walk across the the Golden Gate Bridge and maybe do some camping. But if you want to visit a nudist colony, you're on your own. After all, it is California."