“Marescara” – yeah, it’s a little out there. But, strangely enough (or not), there’s a story behind it.
Rewind to 2001 and my first horse of my own – a bay overo Paint mare named Coorina. Now, Coorina is “famous” for a few things – having her own model horse, winning me more blue ribbons than I deserved, being as high maintenance and princessy as a mare can be, growing the winter coat of an alpaca meets baby goat, having two kickass foals, the list could go on. She was most notably in my story, the horse who got me back on a horse after the riding accident that nearly killed me in 2001. I was a petrified 9 year old who progressed from walk/trot on a lunge line, to showing, to eventually showing in some of the biggest arenas in the country. She was calm and collected and a saint when I was up top, and prissy and prim on the ground. There would be No Mud on These Toes, thank you very much.
But anyone who met her, whether they knew her show record or not, immediately noticed one thing: her face. That dishy, almost Arabian looking face. No, the mare didn’t have a drop of Arab in her, but somehow she won the genetic lottery and picked up the prettiest face I’ll probably ever see on a horse. Add on top of that it was a white bald face and you get the picture. Yet, she didn’t have what so many bald face horses have: blue eyes. And the reason why was because she had… mascara.
Obviously the mare didn’t have an oversized tube of Maybelline in her stall (actually that would not surprise me), but she had dark eyelashes among a white face perfectly framing dark kind eyes. Hence, she had mare-scara.
It was a running joke of a term for a long time and once she retired to be a full-time momma, it wasn’t one we even mentioned much. I moved up and on to my next mare, Lucy, who had a much more classic face, Coorina raised some fancy and fun little babies, eventually I went to college and graduate school. And it was then, in my first semester of graduate school, I got the call nobody ever wants – she was gone.
I wasn’t riding at the time except hit or miss catch rides and it sucked most of the wind out of my sails. I spent the rest of grad school and even my first year out in my post-graduate fellowship not sure I was ready to jump back in. It wasn’t until I moved to Indiana that I decided it was time.
It was then, 2017, that I found Doc and decided to pick up blogging again, this time to seriously document our journey eventing in the midwest. Would it have made more sense to name my blog after some eventing term, my name, or just about… anything else? Absolutely. But it just felt fitting to name it after the mare who was the very first one to give me wings, to restore my confidence, to remind you to always do it with a little bit of sass and most importantly: to look damn good doing it.