More applause, more smiles, and then a flurry of movement as we all got up to finish packing up in preparation for heading home. On the muddy walk back to the campsite and the horse trailers in the chilly downpour, I thought about Liz's brief words. They triggered a memory of the recent funeral of a friend. One of the speakers at the service said the name of person who had died. Everyone always talks about the years.
Nobody ever mentions the dash, though.
But it's the dash that matters. It's not really so important when life begins or even when it ends. I realized how perfectly that applied to my little horse named Shades. It is the dash that counts, those four years between the then and the now. It wasn't always so.