Life with horses is a roller coaster. For every horse you have that exceeds your wildest expectations, you’ll have one that never measures up. For every horse that you take to the top, you’ll have at least one who gets almost all the way there, only to be felled by something unseen.

I’ve gotten several notes about Cleo’s rather conspicuous absence from my blog over the last few months. That’s because I’m still a little heartbroken about it all and have found it very hard to write about. She’s the One That Got Away.

Last summer after Gladstone she got hurt. I did the rehab, and she came back to Grand Prix work, but it wasn’t quite the same. She was 100 percent sound, no issues, but she was guarded in her body, protecting herself. She started making out-of-character mistakes. We had a good show at the Regional Championships in October, but not a great one. And when I brought her into the vet after, he diagnosed some permanent structural damage from the original injury.

Wanting to see if it would improve, or at least stabilize, I retired her from the FEI work and let my mom take over the reins. It was a fabulous few months—two artificial hips make my mom a very stiff, timid rider, and Cleo is both responsive (so her rider doesn’t have to have fits trying to get her to go) and comfy and squishy (so her rider can wrap her legs around and sit into her). Mom’s riding improved SO much, and Cleo worked very happily at second-ish level, and everything was fine until this spring.

Cleo wasn’t lame, but she wasn’t improving—the ligaments in question were continuing to stretch. Rather than make the damage progress more rapidly, I had to make the terrible decision to retire her completely. She’s only 12.

The good news, though, is that Cleo has a skill outside of the competition ring—she’s ridiculously fertile. I’ve written about her breeding last year to UB40, who we expect to meet in early June thanks to her recipient mare Sweetie. Just this week we flushed an embryo by Rousseau, and we’ll know in a week whether that took. If not, we’ll try again; if it does take, I’m going to try breeding her to Locksley I. And if that takes, maybe I’ll sell a kidney and try to repeat the UB40 breeding. Hey, it’s only money.

We’ve been toying with putting up a little shed row barn for overflow stabling since I moved here in 2007, so that’s become a priority—three or four stalls with a nice big paddock attached for Cleo to live out her days, joined at some point (hopefully not too soon!) by Billy, who is 18 this year and still kickin’, but will eventually get crunchy, too.

I know it’s the way the business goes. I know this is what I signed up for, the good and the bad, the very high and the very low. Doesn’t provide much in the way of solace. And I’ll have little Cletuses (Cleti?) to fill her shoes someday, but even with Ella and Midge proving themselves to be even better than her, there’s a void in my heart that nothing but time will fill.