About
Because he's the reason I understand what Harvey is missing.
I've had Marshall since he was two months old. He turns 21 this month. That means I know the year his teeth gave him trouble, the summer he wouldn't load, the exact way he stands when his hocks ache and the look he gives me when he's decided he's done. None of that is written in any official place. It's just in me. For nearly twenty-one years, I have been Marshall's record.
And then Harvey arrived.
Harvey is an off-track Thoroughbred. He came to me the way a lot of them do — sound enough, sweet enough, and with almost no history. No real medical record, no training notes, a rumor about an old injury and not much else. I stood in the barn aisle that first week and realized I was responsible for a thousand-pound animal whose whole life before me was a blank page. And I thought about Marshall, and about how much of his life would simply vanish if it lived only in my head.
I'm Morgan. I'm an adult amateur — I came to horses as a grown woman with a job, a daughter, and a brain wired to make messy things make sense. I ride because it's the only thing that empties my head. I'm not a trainer or a vet. I'm someone who reads carefully, asks more questions than is strictly cool, and would rather look like a beginner than do something wrong by my horse.
Because of that blank page. I started writing everything down for Harvey — what he ate, what he cost, what the vet said, the date I first noticed each small thing. Not to be tidy. So that Harvey would never again be a horse no one could vouch for. Somewhere in there I realized the writing-down was part of the caring. Good records, it turns out, are quiet horsemanship.
I'm also learning western this year, which has been humbling in ways I'll tell you all about. I get things wrong constantly. I change my mind. I'll show you both. This isn't a journal about having it figured out — it's about trying to, honestly, in public, with two horses who are very patient with me.
Eventually all my notebooks and spreadsheets started to feel like they wanted to be something better. So I'm slowly building a tool called Horse Passport — a way to keep a horse's whole story in one place, the way I've kept Marshall's in my head and Harvey's in a binder. But that came out of this journey. It isn't the point of it. If it vanished tomorrow, I'd still be here, writing about these two.