Joe Kennedy

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

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Roanoke rheumatologist Catherine Daniel talks about Princess.

"She's a very special pony that was born at our farm in 1982 and I broke and trained her and we sold her in 1988."

Daniel, her two younger brothers and their parents, Dr. Ed and Betty Lesko, lived at Locust Hill, a Franklin County farm with a brick house 175 years old and red barns and mountain views.

At 12, Catherine Lesko was a little too old to ride Princess. "My brothers showed her successfully" in the pony hunter classes, she says, "and I kept tabs on her over the years. I would see her [at shows] in Charlottesville from time to time and I knew her owners in Maryland," but eventually she lost touch.

Things happened. She and her brothers, Richard and John Michael, grew up.

Catherine went to the University of Virginia and the Medical College of Virginia. There she met Charles Daniel of Lynchburg, a urologist.

They married and wanted to live in this part of the state.

The wheel turns

Two years ago, the Leskos sold the place to the Daniels.

The young doctors had two children then, Ann Ashley, now 5, and Lauren, who is 4. They also have a third, a son, Chase, who is 1.

Once she moved in, Catherine Daniel remembered how much fun Princess, a Welsh-Arabian cross, had been for her and her brothers.

She envisioned her children having a similar experience.

Horse and pony people remember animals as well as their friends.

Daniel looked around, went online, but hadn't found anything when Liz Courter, an assistant riding coach at Hollins University, spotted Princess on the Internet. Princess was living on a farm near Nashville, Tenn.

Daniel talked to the trainer to verify Princess' identity and bought her sight unseen in March.

The pony had been sold several times but never renamed. She traveled three days in a trailer to reach Locust Hill.

Settled in

Princess walked into her stall as if she'd never left. Her bridle and other tack still fit her.

"When she was born she was almost completely black," Daniel says. Now, Princess' coat has turned "flea-bitten gray."

On Thursday, the Daniel girls climbed aboard and slid off her like veteran riders. Princess didn't seem to mind. Her placidity ever-so-slightly undermined the pony stereotype as biting, kicking beasts.

Ponies grow as tall as 14.2 hands, and a hand is 4 inches in length measured from the ground to the animal's withers.

Princess is 13 hands, 1 inch.

She coexists peacefully with her barn mates, horses Shadrach and Blues Traveler.

Princess was the result of an impulse purchase that Ed and Betty Lesko made when their three children were young. Two weeks before Christmas one year, they bought two Shetland ponies, knowing nothing about how to train or raise them.

Over the years, they got into breeding, and horses and such took control of their 12 acres.

The farm and house were an impulse buy a quarter-century ago. The Leskos lived in Hunting Hills when they rode by the place and saw a For Sale sign. They looked at it, bought it and heard friends from town tell them they wouldn't last six months in the country.

Betty Lesko said Monday they wouldn't have sold Locust Hill to anyone but family.

Last Monday, Daniel took Ann Ashley and Lauren to the Roanoke Valley Horse Show, where Princess had won laurels years earlier, using her show name, Ego Amo Te, Latin for "I love you."

Her mother whispered those words to her as she tucked her and her brothers into bed each night.

At the horse show in Salem, Ann Ashley took a blue ribbon aboard Princess in the lead-line competition for children. Lauren won a blue while riding a smaller pony.

And Princess encountered "a little fan club of people who remembered her."

Princess is 24, "in great shape and I'm hoping she'll have a long life and teach my children to ride," Daniel says.

There may even come a day when they show her in the main ring of the arena, as their uncles did.

You just never know.

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