I remember the drive to the barn that Friday. I don’t remember whose car I was in, but I remember there were a lot of cars—a whole caravan of cars carrying us barn girls. I remember the car slowing down as we approached the driveway. I remember seeing the news cameras parked across the street, but also the row of unfamiliar cars and people who had positioned themselves in between the cameras and us. I’m sure no one asked them to do it. But it was everyone’s last effort to protect what little innocence was left.

I remember stepping out of the car and looking up to the barn where I kept my horses. And for just a moment I pretended that everything was normal. Except that it wasn’t. There wasn’t anything there.

Four days earlier, on Monday morning, a fire swept through my barn, killing all 31 horses and ponies. The fire didn’t just take my two horses, but the school ponies I grew up with, the ponies and horses I learned to take over my first jump, who my friends and I galloped around bareback on summer days.  The fire took the one piece of stability I had in my life. It snatched the biggest piece of identity I had.  Horses were my life. The barn had always been there for me, and in a matter of hours it had been taken away.

We knew, as we stood at the bottom of the hill, that we may not have our horses, but we had each other.

I remember I was wearing a white cotton t-shirt with an image of my horse on the front. I braided my hair and tied the ends with ribbon, the way my mother used to before my short-stirrup classes. I looked 12, not 14, yet I felt many years older at that moment.

As I walked across the street, I linked hands with the other barn girls, and we began walking towards the paddock fence. Instead of my eyes being drawn to the blackened charred wood of the barn at the top of the hill, I was instead fixated on the flowers adorning the fence. 

While we had stayed away from the barn all week, other barns from all over our area had come to pay their respects. Girls I competed against just a week earlier had left carrots, posters, cards, horse treats and so many other mementos. As we made our way up the hill to the barn I could see the giant gravesite that had been dug had been carefully covered with a blanket and adorned with flowers. I then realized that many of the strangers who had blocked the press and directed traffic were parents and trainers at other barns. The kindness and love that I felt that day at the memorial service will never leave me.

That kindness and good sportsmanship I felt continued to pour out to us throughout the summer. As a barn without a single horse, we all embarked on a mass horse shopping adventure at the summer horse shows. Visiting these shows could have easily been painful for us. But everywhere we went there were other girls who were willing to let us ride their horse in a class, or show a horse for a day. These girls let us come back to the barn with them to help give the horses a bath and graze them in the sun afterwards. All simple acts, part of a daily routine of horse show life, but these acts of sportsmanship, of sharing something we all loved so much, were some of the most moving acts I have experienced. 

As I look back on that summer, more than a decade later, I of course remember the horses and ponies we lost on July 10. But I also remember the kindness extended to our barn, which allowed my friends and I to continue doing what we loved and become closer doing it. It goes beyond sportsmanship, for only another horse lover could know how much the act of brushing a horse at a horse show could begin to heal a broken heart. 

Aurora Matthews is a senior communications associate for a public relations firm outside of Washington, D.C. She grew up in Connecticut and boarded her horses and took lessons in North Salem, N.Y.  Aurora currently lives in Chevy Chase, Md., and still rides every chance she gets. Aurora is one of the winners of the Chronicle’s first writing competition.