All Americans are not cowboys, but sometimes we think we are. This story comes from the summer when a group of us rented a villa outside Panzano, Italy for a week. The villa was on a working farm.
The owners lived in the other wing of the house and grew grapes and olives. They had two little girls and an extremely friendly dog who loved to visit at mealtimes. They also kept a couple of horses, Oskar and Luna, for riding. Our group enjoyed looking at the rolling hills and watching the horses graze while we sat on the terrace sipping wine.
One day half the group went to San Gimignano. The rest of us decided to have a lazy day at the villa’s pool. Sally had broken a bone in her foot six weeks before we left for Italy. She had walked through Rome, Florence and Siena in an orthotic boot, so she thought a day at the pool would be a nice break.
Sally, Scott, Nancy and I were sitting on the terrace reading and relaxing when we heard a clopping sound. Oskar and Luna were standing in the yard looking at us, and the fence was down. Sally jumped up and caught both horses by their halters, while I tried to find some rope so we could tie them up. There was no rope to be found, so Scott closed the farm’s electric gate to keep them from straying onto the road. The owners were away in Florence for the day, so Nancy called them on their mobile phone and reported the problem.
Oskar and Luna were patient with us, but they didn’t stand still, and they had big, heavy hooves. One of them shifted his weight and stepped on Sally’s broken foot! She yelled and let him go. The horses drifted to the front yard, and Sally put an ice pack on her foot.
Then a real Italian cowboy arrived, on a motorbike. The owners had called him to come fix the fence and get the horses in. He had a ponytail and a tan, and wore cargo shorts, sunglasses, and hiking boots. He was quite handsome. He said something like, “Los cavallos escapa,” and we said, “Si, si.”
The horses had broken their water pipe and were thirsty. So our cowboy fixed the pipe, repaired the fence, put the horses back in their field, and buzzed off on his motorbike.
Fortunately Sally’s foot was only bruised, not broken again. She elevated it and daydreamed about the cowboy.
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