Treasures in Dust

Notes for a memoir end up in a mental "odds and ends" drawer.

Once upon a time I was a little girl who thought that heaven was the chance to ride a horse forever and ever. I came to Egypt in 1988 with my husband and kids and while we were in Alexandria a friend of my husband gave me an untrained Arab mare who was about 4 years old. At the time, I was forty years old and responsible for a 9 year old son and a 6 year old daughter and I hadn't ridden a horse for 20 years. Like an idiot, I started riding again, and I spent the following 24 years as the wingman of the smartest most opinionated Arab mare in the entire world.

Ten years later I was living in Cairo with her and about 17 other horses on my farm that I built after my husband had died and my kids had gone off to university in the US. I've only bought a couple of horses in my lifetime because there have been too many very good horses looking for safe homes near Cairo. The usual track for a horse seeking a home here has often led to the stables near the Pyramids of Giza, which are truly hell for horses. I have never sold a horse, and the horses that were working for me giving visitors rides between Abu Sir and Dahshur are still living out their retirement on the farm giving kids pony rides and taking adults out to see the farmlands in peace and comfort. They are a sort of karmic debt in my eyes.

From about 2003 to 2015 I was living in paradise. I was tracking the dirt roads between Giza and Dahshur with my GPS, looking for interesting and beautiful trails and villages, riding 4 to 8 hours on various horses with clients, friends, and my staff. Someone could say that it was too bad that I was in my 50s while I was doing all of this, but I had spent the previous fifty years doing a lot of fun things as well, and I had never in my life thought that I could spent twelve years doing NOTHING but riding horses.

The revolution in 2011 slowed tourism down immensely for big bus tourism but we still had some adventurous types coming to visit Egypt until the counter-revolution took over in 2013 and clamped down in 2015. At that point riding in the deserts became quite problematic and we changed to rides in the countrysides. Having our beautifully trained reliable horses was more important than ever, because the dirt tracks of the countryside hosted all sorts of traffic, from the usual donkeys, camels, and water buffalo, to motorcycles, tuktuks, and dump trucks.

We moved more into education from tourism during the new military era, but our horses are, for the most part still with us. Most of them are now in their late 20s but they are still fit and happy to care for riders going out to see the countryside, or give lessons. When Covid crashed the economy of anyone who had livestock, we looked at our horses, who are easily our most expensive expense, but these are our friends who gave us everything in their youth and who hold the wisdom of their later years to safeguard our current friends and clients.

But when I count the years of my life, the Golden Years will be the years I shared with my horses