Joe Kennedy

Joe Kennedy is routinely named the region's best writer by readers of The Roanoker magazine.

Recent columns

• Farewell to those who made this space great
• Homeplace founder had recipe for success
• Pam's Snack Shack: Becoming her own boss

• Column archive

Last September, Hurley Ward reluctantly moved her riding stable from Crystal Creek Drive in Southwest Roanoke County to her Just the Spirit farm on Martins Creek Road.

She went from 28 acres to 8 acres, from low rent on county land to no rent on her own place and from county maintenance to mowing her place herself.

She lost some riders and gained some others, but Ward, a long-haired, sun-burnished horse aficionado, has not lost her gratitude.

She still lives her dream. For 14 years, she has independently taught riding, broken and trained horses, and tolerated the flies, the manure and the complications such a life can bring.

It's heaven to her.

Familiar tableau

Thursday morning, Ward and a handful of girls and young women were at the pasture they use for riding. Jumps were placed about, but nobody jumped.

Rather, the girls sat on their steeds -- from Ward's herd of five horses and three ponies -- and gave them directions while Ward showed off her location, farther out on U.S. 221, closer to Bent Mountain.

The air was thick with gnats, and big, black horseflies bothered the horses.

The horses gathered curiously around the stranger with the notebook, making him a little uneasy.

Ward, 52, has lived on this spot for 14 years. Her mother, Ruth Nicholson, formerly of Raleigh, N.C., lives with her (though she is recuperating elsewhere after hip replacement surgery).

Ward says she has more than a dozen students, ages 8 to adult. She teaches several aspects of riding and takes students who are ready on fox hunts and the like.

She also requires the students to care for the horses. Nobody hands the reins to someone else when the riding is over.

Pluses and minuses

Though Ward has to buy more feed because she has less land than she rented from the county, she says things are going pretty well.

She does miss the visitors who would stop and look at the horses at the other place, where Roanoke County plans to build a new library.

She leads a tour of the outbuildings, showing off old tools. She talks to her cats, visits with her four hens and a rooster and goes inside her pale yellow frame house that's surrounded by big trees.

Antiques and horse-related items are everywhere.

Ward graduated from North Carolina State in 1977. She has shown a horse at the highest level. And she is still teaching.

On Thursday, Lauren Powledge, 22, and Lindsay Maxwell, 17, helped Ward with the hay.

The air was stifling, the manure fresh, the round bale formidable. Ward backed her four-wheel-drive pickup to the entrance of an outbuilding, then sat in its bed with her boots pressed against the back of the cab.

Using her back, she pushed the bale toward a pallet set in the muck.

Powledge, from Roanoke, is a theater and psychology major at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

Lindsay, 17, is a student in the International Baccalaureate program at Salem High School.

They are out in the noonday sun, amid the bugs and dung, for "the love of riding," Powledge says.

"We ride for life," Lindsay says.

Horses are not something that one takes up casually -- those people generally don't stick.

Others revel in working with the animals, which can exhibit, Ward says, passive-aggressiveness and attention deficits.

Maybe that's the challenge -- that and the need to pay close attention to details.

Ward didn't want to leave Crystal Creek, but she is happy.

"I've come home," she says.

Riding stables can be chancy businesses, but she doesn't worry.

Ever the free spirit, she says, "The universe usually provides for me."

Joe Kennedy's column runs Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.