It’s hard to believe that I first stepped foot onto Buckwampum Farm just a little over a year ago, “fresh off the boat” from the wild, wild West and wide-eyed with the promise of exciting adventures on the East Coast. I feel like I have been with the family Buck Davidson has created at BDJ Equestrian for so much longer than that, and yet I feel like no time has passed at all.

And that’s the beauty of working side-by-side, day in-day out, with the hardest working team in the industry: you develop relationships that are thicker than blood and you fly through the calendar in the blink of an eye. I swear it was only a few weeks ago that I took Wort out for his first run of the season down in Ocala and I couldn’t wait for the beautiful summer months in Pennsylvania. I was just starting to make friends with a rambunctious and rather unremarkable little brown horse, uncertain if I had made the right decision to take him on as a project. And now here I am already with Fair Hill behind me, Wort on the back side of his winter vacation, the BDJ farm in full swing down in Florida again, and grinning from ear to ear that my little brown horse kicked butt at his first CCI*. Where did the time go?

The time went lots of places. It went to Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, New York, Quebec, and dozens of places in between. It went to cleaning stalls, braiding horses, building jumps, driving trailers, scrubbing waters, pulling manes, and polishing tack. It went for gallops up Nelson’s hill. It went on miles and miles and miles of trot sets. It went to late nights and early mornings and back again. It went to heartache and disappointment and doubt. It went to success and excitement and breakthroughs. It went to sweat and tears, to laughter and hose fights. It went to petty arguments and practical jokes. It went too fast. 

Now here I am on the close of one chapter of my life, sad to see it go, but so excited, too, to see what the turn of the page brings. Early this month I said a fond farewell to my BDJ life in order to set out on my own and hang my shingle at Redtail Ridge Farm in Ohio.

It breaks my heart to leave my newfound family behind and it’s nerve-wracking to leave the security of having constant access to an incredible coach and support team. But I am also eager to go out and take everything I have learned and put it to use in my own program, adapting it to my own style and needs. Of course I will still be looking to Buck for help and guidance as I go out into the big wide world, and I am sure I will continue to turn to him for years to come. I will be calling my BDJ team for emotional support and horsey questions, too, I am sure. They will always be my team no matter where our travels take us. 

So I am raising a rhetorical toast: here’s to a year I will never forget, people I will always love, and a future I can’t wait to meet.

After uprooting her life on the West Coast for a chance to work with Buck Davidson and BDJ Equestrian, blogger Katy Groesbeck is now stepping out on her own and setting up shop in Ohio. Follow her adventures along with her trusty steeds, Wort and Ruler, as she gets KG Eventing off the ground and makes her way into the world as a self-employed professional horsewoman in 2015!