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Sean Clancy If the wind shifts the right way and the announcer senses a photo finish, we can hear the call from our front porch. The Middleburg Spring Races and its fall counterpart, the Virginia Fall Races, at Glenwood Park serve as our local venue, our corner pub. A couple of miles by car and shorter by … Read more
Dust off those rusty strings just one more time…
“Gonna make ‘em shine,” Arch Kingsley, Jr. said in a text, referencing a Grateful Dead ballad, before mounting his first ride in eight years.
Fighting a development down the street. Middleburg Preserve. Isn’t it ironic. A housing development named for exactly what it’s destroying. Here’s an excerpt from my 2 1/2-minute speech, er, plea, to the Board of Supervisors last week. We want an emergency zoning change in St. Louis, this is simply to right a wrong, to follow the 2019 … Read more
An editor once told me, stop apologizing for not writing and write. Well, here’s a quick apology, sorry, I’ve been absent lately and I’ll get writing. Brutal weekend. We made the agonizing decision to put down Teddy Sunday night. An old soul, part of our family, a stoic, singular character who lived his best life … Read more
Life on a horse farm. Life and death on a horse farm. That’s the way it feels every day, just trying to keep horses, goat and cats alive. Annie takes the brunt of it, making the decisions, all the decisions. The feed chart, the blanket plan, the turn-out routine…so many decisions. Most work. Some matter. … Read more
Monday morning brought the brutal news that amateur jockey Lorna Brooke had died from a fall at Taunton. But for the grace of God go I… A 36-year-old mainstay in the amateur ranks, Brooke drove the box, groomed the horse, rode the horse, cooled the horse out, drove the horse home and poulticed the horse, … Read more
Chris Gracie pulled his tack off Include It after finishing second in the maiden timber at Piedmont in April. “You know, Sean, he’s got gears,” Gracie said after riding the 6-year-old Maryland-bred for trainer Todd Wyatt and Riverdee. A maiden on the flat track for Fitzhugh and Mike Trombetta, a maiden in training flat races … Read more
Racing Weekend. Feels good to print out the form, find the NSA hang tag, the horseman buttons, the binoculars, polish the boots, check the weather forecast, gas up the car and fire up Waze. Limited attendance and definitely a different vibe, but it’s a start, a restart of our lives. Our racing lives. Grand National … Read more
A seismic clash of champions at Oaklawn Park ushers in the second half of April and the final serious countdown to one of the country’s most anticipated weekends of the year.
Hammers hammer. Diggers dig. Truckers truck. House renovation. The ultimate personality shaker, relationship tester, is underway. Today we talked about amps to and from the generator, brush strokes in the fireplace mortar, plastic-sheet walls, gas-line ditches, code and against code, junction box to the switch box to the fuse box. To name a few topics…issues, … Read more
