One my daughter's favorite stories that I tell is about the time I was on a family vacation to the Smokey Mountains as a child and we saw a hand-painted sign that said
Pegasus Ranch nailed to a tree on a country road.
This is the only way to find pegasus farms, I tell her,
because pegasus ranchers are notoriously secretive and they don't advertise on the internet. Her favorite part of the story is when we went for a pegasus ride up the mountain and her grandfather's pegasus could hardly fly three feet off the ground because he was so burdened. So, she was pretty thrilled on our recent vacation to New Hampshire when we came to "Paugus Road"
(a name easily read as something else when these fellows were waiting for us in the pasture on the corner):
Fortunately, we had a few apples in the car.
My wife and I gave a talk later that evening at the Squam Art Workshops just up the road. It didn't go as planned: we were tired from travel, the heat was almost unbearable, and the mosquitoes were attacking everyone. But when we finished talking, our daughter wanted to tell a room full of knitters the story of the pegasus farm, but when I handed her the microphone she grew too shy.
We agreed that magical horses like to hide their wings and horns when adults are around, but kids can see them if they look very quickly. My daughter had her camera, and I may have employed a bit of photoshop this morning while looking at her photos. Or maybe they really were magical horses.
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