I convinced Husband to accompany me on a ride after work on Tuesday. The weatherman warned me it might be one of the last nice autumn days for a while and I felt the need to take advantage of it.

Plus, I dreamed the night before that I was riding a fast horse like the wind through the tall grasses in endless pastures and I suddenly felt the urge to make that dream come true.

An evening ride wasn’t a hard thing to convince my dearly beloved to participate in. Especially if it meant he could pretend he was looking for cows and actually getting work done. So off we went, the two of us, seeking the only kind of marriage therapy that works for us–a little ride together through our world.

The breeze and the light were perfect and my horse was just the right amount of lazy.

Suddenly I felt a wave of creativity as the sun crept down toward the edge of the earth.

So I asked Husband if he would be opposed to a little “sunset photo shoot” along the horizon, you know, because he has always made such a nice silhouette.

As usual, he humored me and I quickly planned out a method of capturing the romantic vision I had of my husband riding his bay horse at full speed across the landscape.

I got off my horse and crouched down among the grass as my husband followed my directions to “run your horse back and forth in front of me for a while until I say stop.”

So he did.

Thrilled with the results of that handsome man and his handsome horse romantically frozen in a moment of speed and power inside of my camera, I hollered at him “Go faster!”

So he went faster, back and forth, working on his horse, going nowhere in particular, just back and forth across the sky.

But from behind my camera they could be going anywhere, that man and that horse.

I felt like an artist with the power to freeze time, the gift of my camera allowing me to catch that horse’s mane as it reached toward the sky and his feet as they gathered beneath him.

“Go faster!” I hollered from my spot behind the camera.

So Husband made that horse go faster. 

Watching them move across that landscape was beautiful and romantic and rugged and western and kind of like a John Wayne movie scene…all of the things Husband can be to me sometimes.

“Stop. Come back. Come here!” I yelled, suddenly struck with another idea.

The idea that if my husband could be all those things as a silhouette, I wanted a shot at what I could be as a dark, mysterious woman on a horse against the backdrop of a setting sun.

Husband stopped his horse in front of me and I handed him my camera.

“Can you take some pictures of me now?”  I asked as I climbed up on my horse who was lazily munching on the tall yellow grass. “I’m going to go really fast. See if you can get my hair blowing in the wind as I ride off into the sunset.”

Husband took my camera and snapped away as I worked to channel the dream from the night before, the one where I leaned into the neck of my horse and kicked him gently as his hooves moved faster and faster across the landscape, gaining speed, pushing forward, becoming one fast blur as our hair whipped together in the wind.

Only, it seemed my horse didn’t have the same dream.

Nope.

His dream involved less running through endless pastures and more grazing through them.

And about half-way through our second pass across the photo shoot area, Husband yelled “Faster!” and the horse between my legs, the one I envisioned behaving like Black Beauty as I channeled my inner rodeo queen, began to behave more like the mule in that John Wayne movie with the nun.

And in one swift jump and kick, that horse demonstrated the major, glaring difference between me and my dearly beloved:

Silhouette or not, you are who you are.

And I am not a sexy silhouette.