My First Buck

Date: Timeless 100% LED- certified glow.

Non-dimmable by design. (And for the record? NO ONE dims this lightbulb.)

Every Lighthouse Starts with a fall.

It’s a beautiful kind of ache-the moment you realize the life you imagined wasn’t wasted, it just changed form. I didn’t lose it; I distilled it. The house, the animals, the noise-all of it turned into light. That’s what a lighthouse is: every former dream melted down into something that guides instead of gathers.

I have plenty to tell you about how I went from lighting candles to becoming a lighthouse-but today, I want to tell you about the buck. Not the deer kind, my dad took me hunting too-but the other kind. The horse buck.

I remember the day- the smell of hay and horse shit on the road to my uncle’s farm-the kind of air that sticks to your hair and your childhood at the same time. That road always felt like summer, freedom and a little bit of trouble. Now, all these years later, the sun hits me, like it remembers too…..

When we got there, my dad told me he had a birthday surprise. A pony. My own My Little Pony come to life! I always loved those little plastic ponies, the kind you could braid and glitter and keep clean on a shelf. So when my dad showed me Frosty, a real horse with an actual tail, I figured the universe had finally delivered. No more pretending, I just got the real deal! I grabbed a comb and went to work like I’d been training for this moment since Christmas morning.

Frosty disagreed. One flick, one buck, and I was airborne!

“My dad’s voice cut through the chaos-“I’ll get the shotgun!” and I hit the dirt laughing before the dust even settled. He could make timing feel like grit.

(Yes, I got the wind knocked out of me. Clearly, I survived.)

The sky that day was blinding - the kind of blue that doesn’t blink. For a second I just laid there, staring up through dust, realizing I wasn’t broken, just breathless.

That’s how it’s always been with me: the fall teaches rhythm, the laughter resets the light.

That’s when I realized where my humor came from. My dad-quiet but wickedly funny. He could make timing feel like a gift. Him quiet but hilarious, me bruised but giggling. Humor as reflex. It’s where I learned that if you can laugh while you’re wiping the dirt and horse shit off your jeans, you’ll probably survive most things.

Years later, with most of my family gone and the noise of that life quieted, I started thinking about equine therapy-about horses as healers. And I thought of my cousin, my uncle’s daughter from those same farm days. I reached out, asked if she still had horses. She said she’d traded them in for a donkey; getting older, she laughed. We decided to meet for lunch, let our kids meet their cousins.

And there it was again-the smell, the memory, the light. The kind of laughter that only comes from falling off a dream and getting back on anyway.

Funny thing about that first buck-it didn’t just knock the wind out of me. It lit something in me.
Maybe that’s how every lighthouse begins - flat on the ground, laughing, learning how to shine.