Come Together

SOMETIMES IT’S EASY to get bogged down in negativity, especially coming out of 2020. We’re going through a pandemic, many of us haven’t seen our families in almost a year, and all the fun activities we used to do (horse related or not) have been rescheduled, canceled, or set aside for the time being.

- Nichole Chirico

But 2020 also made me realize how lucky I am to be part of such a caring community that’s able to come together in times of need to help each other out. During the beginning of the year and the start of COVID-19, I read about people donating hay to fellow horse owners who were affected by the virus. Later in the year those same people came together to assist equine facilities that were affected by the wildfires that blazed through the West. Regardless of what the problem was, the horse community was always there, ready to help.

One of the scariest moments of my horse-owning life came in October when I got the phone call that a new wildfire had started and was headed right in the direction of the barn. Within minutes, I was in my car calling anyone and everyone I knew in the area who might have a trailer or a place to keep 48 horses.

I’ve been through a lot with my horses: colic surgery, tornadoes, blizzards in the middle-of-nowhere Texas that resulted in highway shutdowns. But being from Illinois, wildfires were something I never really experienced.