Dancing with the bright sun down the narrow gravel road, the horse moves into a high step and then pulls his head sharply to the ground. The rider, instead of flying over the head of the horse, nonchalantly pulls the reigns back up. She then smiles at me.

I’m guessing they’ve been through this routine a time or two.

This is the first warm day of early spring in Iowa and more than a few folks — who I suspect shoveled snow just once too often this winter — are feeling their oats.

I stop clearing out the mulberry trees from the fence line and admire the muscles rippling on the horse’s flank. Lord, they are big animals. More imposing than any vehicle on the road. And they have all the right features — keyless start, four wheel drive, renewable fuel, and an added fertilization option for no extra cost.

Julie Warner, a retired airline attendant, is out with her horse, Amigo, on this spring day in Iowa. And Amigo is feeling the warm weather with a certain joie-de-vivre.

Eventually Julie pats his neck and dismounts with a laugh.

“I’d rather be walking a horse than riding when they start acting like that.”

And Julie begins to work him in a circle in the middle of an intersection of two dirt roads, running him one direction then the next, faster and faster.

Then they slow to a conversational walk.

“Got Amigo as a two year old and he’s nine now. He’s a quarterhorse. And he was quite good, but got hurt before his last race. So I bought him. He’s one I have to work every day.”

“He sure seems spirited,” I cleverly remark.

Julie pauses and scratches under her hat.

“I ride with a bunch of ladies from the Davenport and Cedar Rapids area. And, bless their hearts, they ride what I call ‘recliners.’ It’s a pretty horse they can pull out of the pasture, get on, and they let the horse go down the trail like a train, nose to tail. That’s what these pretty horses do. I don’t want that.”

Julie looks at me, smiles, and shakes her head.

“And you can’t ride pretty,” she says.

What???

Our world loves pretty. Pretty shiny objects and pretty shiny people and our made-for-Instagram pretty shiny experiences.  My lord, just check out where everyone spent Spring Break. Bright sun, beautiful beaches, and more bronzed people than fried foods at the Iowa State Fair. No one posted about their spring break in Boone, Iowa.

Right?

Although, when I think of experiences, I think of the time my family moved from Michigan to a house next to a small hog barn in the country outside of Iowa City. My dad and brother and I drove ahead in a van with a load of furniture. I was 10 years old. My dad was a busy man, a mathematician deep into the brand new world of computers, and time alone with him without all eight kids was unusual.

So we unloaded the van and sat on the low-slung front porch in the summer heat. Shirts off. Sweating.

My dad brought a watermelon out of the house.

He broke the watermelon on the edge of the porch because we had no knife, and my brother and I each took a ragged chunk. Soon we were spitting black seeds high in the air while the juice ran down our chests and the hogs snorted from the barn.

A small moment in time.

But then my dad died young. And my best memory? The picture of my dad and my brother and myself spitting watermelon seeds from a low porch on a hot day in the Iowa country.

Not much of an instagram post. Nothing to do with the sun. No one had bronzed skin. Not a beach in sight unless you count the mud in the hog pen. But the value of the experience?

You can’t ride pretty.

Then Julie climbs back up on Amigo and gives me a smile. And, like all good philosophers, she rides off into the sunset.

Joe