A Wonderful Day

How simple this title is today, but how meaningful it is to me.  I re-connected with a woman who has been my friend since we were just kids, she was 14 and I was 15.  We had an ugly parting at one point in our lives and have slowly come back together through life’s hard lessons and the grace of getting older and wiser.

I cannot explain how good it felt to see her. Like it was just yesterday we were together….it felt so right….we laughed and cried and laughed some more.

We were the lucky ones that got to have horses as teenagers.  A fun place to board them called El Rancho Neglecto and lots of adventures….even back then I think we knew how special those days were…this photo is not us, but this shows the type of happiness we felt each and every time we got dropped off “at the barn”. It was an old dairy barn and it is where we kept the feed….I had a little mustang mare that was 4 years old, broke but not trained and she had a beautiful 2 year old just barely broke Appaloosa gelding that went on to have a great show career…but he was a stinker!  lol   Good times and great memories…..

                                                 (Google)

Her main home is in Colorado, but she ended up with a beautiful ranch that she had sold some years ago down here in Arizona, coming back into her life.  This was a 40 acre ranch in Cave Creek, Arizona that many many moons ago I managed for awhile while Melisa lived elsewhere in the summers, as the heat was an issue for her daughter.

This is where we got together….

 

Cave Creek has become a total “tourist trap” as we call them here, but so much fun! One main road….with lots of fun places to eat and shop….

 

Back to the Ranch…..

Here are a few photos of how the ranch looks today, more going on, more horses than when I was managing it, that is for sure, a total of 85 boarders on this property now, but just as beautiful as always….

Looking out the back porch of the home on the property….

 

The main barn….

The mountains are all around this beautiful ranch….

Not uncommon to see these critter either up in Cave Creek….thanks goodness I didn’t see any of these yesterday….

Bob cats

Rattlesnakes

And years ago….right near the ranch…

Mountain Lions….

And these disgusting creatures…Javelinas… used to walk through the barn, getting the grain on the floor that the horses had dumped…

 

Pardon my French, but these were ugly nasty, mean tempered freaking little buggers!  You did not approach them!

And of course lots and lots of these….

Coyotes…..

               (all critter photos from Google)

 

For lunch, we went to our favorite Mexican restaurant in Cave Creek, still there after 20 years,

We went to our favorite Mexican restaurant  in Cave Creek, still there after 20 years, and sat at one of the tables that look out on to a large pond…our table was that area across the pond in this photo…

 

…..and for some reason the red ear turtles that lived in the pond decided to come visit us!

This is just at our feet with a pane of glass between us and the pond…this one little guy kept staring at me….

Such a  beautiful Arizona winter day….and so grateful for this chance to see each other again.

Oh, and this is her 5 month old Bernese Mountain puppy Kismet….

5 MONTHS old and his paws as bigger than my palms of my hands…he will top out a about 120 pounds….look at the size of those feet!  lol