I cried happy tears five times this week, four times over Artemis 2 and its crew, my emotional support astronauts, just like anyone else who was paying the slightest attention. Moon joy indeed. But the fifth! On Wednesday Mary, my riding teacher, took my arm to correct my hand position slightly, and exclaimed: “Your wrist! It’s like a brick!” We spent the rest of that lesson and the next focused on making my wrists as soft as possible. It was a fault in my riding that was hard to see but easy to feel: easy for Mary to diagnose, and easy for Lenny to complain about.

He’s such a funny, stubborn, sensitive horse. As soon as I concentrated on soft wrists, soft wrists, to the exclusion of everything else, he stopped tossing his head, reached into the bridle and gave a contented sigh. And stayed there, soft and round and happy, until halfway through the next lesson, when I had to halt in the middle of the ring to have a very big emotion.

It felt like I was riding a made horse, a horse Pam or Carrie had trained, not my own opinionated little mustang that I have been riding for seven years. It isn’t just my wrists, of course. It was a thousand thousand pieces we have been working on forever, and this was a tiny addition, but it was a load-bearing tiny addition, a phase change. Before and after.

Outside of the tiny circle of people who ride Lenny, and people who teach me and Lenny, and obviously Lenny and myself, all this effortful and painstaking work doesn’t matter and will disappear when we are both dead. But we did this, together, my stout little chestnut gelding and me.