Pauline and the Cactus

When I was a boy about 8 years old, my younger sister Pauline and I would play together. The only thing we had to play with was the horse. We didn’t have toys back then, no one did. We just played with what we had to play with and that was our horse Daisy, I called her Daze for short. One day we decided to take Daze out to the pasture to ride for a little while. We only rode bareback. The only saddle we had was in such bad shape that we would rather ride bareback then put it on. I forgot how we caught her or put the bridal on her, maybe some one else did it. We were too short to get on Daze by ourselves so we would move her over to the fence on the corral and jump over to her. I got on first and Pauline jumped on behind me with her dress on. Girls always wore dresses. Our little legs would stick right out because Daze, being a full size horse, was too wide for little kids. But we loved her. She was so obedient and gentle, even to us kids. We decided we were going to ride out to the pasture. I can't remember now where we were headed, but all of a sudden Pauline slipped off! I don’t know how or why. Maybe it was because of her bare legs, slipping on the smooth hair of Daze, or maybe she let go of me, for that was the only way she could hang on. But she went down. And I mean down, right into a prickly pear cactus. You know the ones with the beautiful white soft petalled flowers and the sharp thorns. On the top of each thorn were the clasping thorns that would grab onto anything that walked by. She screamed with pain! It sounded and looked so fearsome that it made me cry. I could see that she was full of stickers on her bottom. I tried to pull them out but she wouldn’t let me. She wanted our mama. She couldn’t get back on Daze, so she began to walk the quarter of a mile back to the house bawling all the way and me bawling right behind her. It looked like it hurt so bad that I couldn’t help but cry too. Good ol' Daze just followed. When we finally got back to the house mom quickly began the miserable chore of diligently pulling all those awful cactus thorns out of her bottom. Even now, more than 80 years later, I can still feel the tears start to flow remembering how badly it hurt her.