The mimosa ponies

During this time I remember songs that were playing on the radio. One was, “That Doggy in the Window”. That is Hodges in the picture.
Well Hodges and me became friends and played together all the time. We rode our horses all over the neighbor hood. We would take a knife and cut a limb off of a tree, not just any tree but a Mimosa tree. Uncle Jake had one in his front yard. We would cut it about four foot long and we would put a string on the big end for our reigns and we would carve the bark off some of it so it would be spotted. We named them every time we cut a new one. Mine was mostly named whitey. When the small end started wearing off some, we would take them down to the tar patch. As I said before the county yard was right behind our house and they had a tar tank, use for making roads. Well it must have had a leak in it because there was a ditch and it ran down beside the railroad track. That’s where we tarred up our horses tails to make them last longer. Today I bet if EPA found out about that somebody would be in big trouble. We would ride those ponies all day long all over the neighbor hood. We had hitching post all over and would tie them up when we got off. I can look back and see how 2 little boys must have been very tired at the end of the day, running all day long with a limb between their legs. At night I would have cramps in my legs and Mama would get up and put salt in a sock put it in the oven to heat it and put it on my legs. That was her remedy to making better anything that hurt. Especially an ear ache.