Three Racehorses Were Given A Woman.

I used to joke that my life was a straight line from “aspiring California actress” to “woman who knows her way around a craft service table.” I thought drama meant bad auditions, too much eyeliner, and the occasional existential crisis in a parking lot. And then I got a Traumatic Brain Injury. The kind of injury that ends with the word "craniotomy". Which is a nice, clinical term for “we opened your head like a toolbox and hoped for the best.” California started to feel like the wrong planet, and my life collapsed in on itself. So, as one does when the universe hits you with a cosmic reset button, I moved to a place I had never planned on:

Ocala, Florida. The Horse Capital of the World. Apparently, when the Gods close a door, they open… a barn.

When I got here, I was fresh out of brain surgery, trying to get sober, and I did what a lot of people do in that situation: I went looking for a church basement full of folding chairs and bad coffee. I found an AA meeting down the street from a pasture where champions once trained. That is where I met Jeff Stanton.

Jeff was in his seventies. Vietnam vet. Decades sober. The kind of man who looked like he’d been carved out of old barn wood and Marlboros. He’d worked horses his whole life and now lived on a farm called Winding Oaks, which, depending on which decade you were asking about, had also been part of the Heath Farm that became Tartan Farm, and Mockingbird Farm. Racehorses had been bred there for generations. Big names. Real stakes. By the time I arrived, a lot of that glory was gone, but Jeff still walked the property like the land remembered him, even if the people didn’t.

I remember sitting in that AA meeting, worrying about all the wrong things: “Will anyone here like me? Is my sharing deep enough? Do I look sober?” And Jeff just looked over at me like, “Girl, you have no idea where you’ve landed.”

He used to wait after the meeting to make sure my car started. And as horse people will do…we started talking about horses. I must have said something he recognized. Over time, I started visiting him at the farm. It felt like trespassing into somebody else’s history. Jeff would talk about horses the way some men talk about war buddies or old lovers. He’d point at a paddock and say, “Right there, that’s where…” and then he’d tell me a story about a horse that ran like it had something to prove. I got the tour of the holy of holies the "Breeding Shed" and a run down of procedure.

I’d been on a horse since I was 2 but was never a “professional”. He talked to me like an apprentice. And I guess in a way I was. I didn’t understand then how famous some of those horses were. In my past I’d hung out and drank at Santa Anita and Del Mar and bet a few races but that’s about it. I didn’t understand what a graded stakes race or a black type race or a named stakes or a $5000 claimer was or what it meant to be a "Graded Stakes Winner". Honestly, in the beginning, I thought “black type race” maybe meant a race run by goth horses. I was not prepared. But it wasn't too long before Jeff and I were talking fractions and speed figures and had fallen down the Equibase.com rabbit hole to talk sires and dam sires.

By the time I came along, the owner of Winding Oaks were getting out of the racing business. They were selling off horses, equipment, pieces of history. Everything must go. Even the ghosts. Except… there were three horses they didn’t sell. Three geldings. Their names were:

Bishop Court Hill.

Moonshine Hall.

Karibu Gardens.

Let’s start with Moonshine Hall. Now, I am an alcoholic, and I know my Moonshines…but that is not where his name came from. The man who raced him loved Barbados. All his best horses were named after places on the island. Moonshine Hall just happened to sound like a liquor store with legal issues. Whatever the origin, I found him intoxicating anyway. My husband Jay called him “the Fabio of racehorses.” He was right. Moonshine was a bright golden chestnut with a long, flowing mane. If those three had been a boy band, Moonshine would have absolutely been the heartthrob.

Karibu Gardens, “Boo,” was the big dark bay, just shy of seventeen hands. The baby of the three. He would’ve been the strong, silent, athletic one in the band. The one the girls loved because he was secretly goofy.

And Bishop Court Hill, a liver chestnut with a white sock up front, would’ve been the smart one. The guy with all the complicated dance moves who wore glasses in interviews. And Bishop never forgot to remind me in his horsey way that HE was the only Grade 1 winner. This sometimes included a dash to the end of the paddock and back before accepting his peppermint.

You could practically hear them crooning: “Girl, you know it’s true…oooh oooh oooh ah ooh ooh." But these three were no Milli Vanilli. They were the real deal. Graded. Stakes. Winners. I learned that in horse racing, that’s the elite club. Out of the thousands of thoroughbreds who make it to the track, only a tiny fraction ever become graded stakes winners. It’s like the difference between doing a monologue in acting class and actually ending up on Broadway. Bishop, Boo, and Moonshine had won almost two million dollars between them.

Not for me.

Long before I arrived.

By the time I showed up, they were retired, turned out in big fields, wandering around like aging rock stars who’d moved to the country to “get some peace.” People hear this next part and they tilt their head the same way every time, like a dog hearing a strange noise. They say, “Wait. Someone just… gave you three retired racehorses?” And I always have to correct them. I say, “Don’t get confused. Three racehorses were given a woman.”

Because if you’ve ever stood next to a Thoroughbred, you know: You do not really own that horse. At best sometimes you are the current human they’re tolerating. These three didn’t come to me like some fairy tale gift. They came to me like… an assignment from the universe. Some people get a calling. I got three ex-athletes with opinions.

Jeff thought the whole arrangement was hilarious...and delightful. I think he was secretly proud of how proud I was of them and how I'd run down their careers at a drop of a hat. He was known to say that as much as I bragged I was on track to become the best known thoroughbred owner in Marion County. He definetly had thoughts about Boo. He was the youngest of the three. Boo was wary, a part of him still waiting for the van ride to the track. Not dangerous, exactly, but… let’s call it “selective with his trust.” Jeff used to say, “I wouldn’t turn my back on that horse for sixty seconds. I keep waiting for him to yank you over the fence rail by your ponytail.” And to be fair: Boo did look like the kind of horse who could file a complaint with HR——and win.

But somehow, I won his trust. Or he won mine. Hard to say with horses. The line between “training” and “negotiation” gets very blurry. In all of this, sobriety was just… running quietly underneath. I didn’t have a big dramatic “and then I got sober on the back of a noble steed” moment. It was more like:

Go to AA.

Listen.

Don’t drink.

Go to the farm.

Listen.

Don’t die.

The same skills that were keeping me sober – showing up, shutting up, listening – turned out to be very useful with horses and old horsemen. I would stand with Jeff at the fence, and he would talk about horses he’d known, trainers he’d worked for, races he’d watched from the backside. He talked about them the way people talk about friends from the old neighborhood. Meanwhile, my own brain was still recovering from surgery. My balance was off. My memory messed with me. I was trying to build a new self out of leftover parts. And there I was, in the middle of a historic horse farm, somehow responsible for three former champions. Four if you count Jeff since at the end I was the only family he had close by and the only friend he could tolerate.

Time passed, as it does. Slow and brutal and swift, all at once. Moonshine died first. Then 2 years later Bishop followed him. Losing them felt like losing chapters from a book I was just learning to read. I had all these stories about their races, their winnings, their big days under the track lights… but I had never seen them run like that. To me, they were just these old boy-band members in a pasture, nickering at me for more peppermints. But the more I learned, the more I realized what they represented. They were the last living bridge between the golden days of those farms and the present. And then two of them were gone.

And then Jeff died. Lung cancer. COPD. Vietnam in his lungs. Decades of cigarettes. Time. They always say, “When an old person dies, a library burns down.” When Jeff died, an entire racetrack went with him. I remember standing and thinking, “He’s gone. The barns are going. The horses are going. What’s left?”

And some unhelpful little voice in my head whispered: “You.”

It should have been simple: Old horses die. Old horsemen die. Land gets sold. History gets… repurposed. Instead, it all turned surreal.

Developers moved in. Pastures shrank. Barns that once held Derby hopefuls became “tear-down opportunities.” The signs have changed. Mockingbird Farm became something like “Mockingbird Estates.” Heath Farm: “Convenient to Shopping!” Winding Oaks Elementary. Estates at Tartan. I would drive past places where Jeff had told me wild stories of horses so fast they scared him…and now there was a banner going up advertising a new community pool. The ghosts of racehorses were going to have HOA fees.

At some point, I realized something strange: It seems I am one of the only people left in town at least who really knew what had been there before. Not from books or Google. From standing there. From listening to a man who had mucked those stalls and saddled those horses. I started to feel less like a horse owner and more like… an accidental archivist. Which is ridiculous. Because I am not exactly a reliable narrator. I am a woman who started as a California actress, had her brain opened, stumbled into AA in a town built on horses, and somehow ended up with three graded stakes winners in her backyard. If you pitched that as a script in LA, they would tell you to make it more realistic. But here I am.

Today, only Boo remains. It took years, but I finally ride him now. He is still big, still beautiful, still a little suspicious of the world… but we have an arrangement. When I swing my leg over his back, I can feel all the things he’s done that I’ll never fully know. The tracks he ran. The crowds that screamed. The money that changed hands when he crossed a finish line. I feel how small I am compared to all of that. How ridiculous. How honored. And he behaves like having up there is a joy and doesn't try to scare me too much.

Sometimes, when we’re out there together, I think about Jeff watching us. I had promised him that I wasn’t gonna push Boo. And that if Boo gave me a hard no about being my riding horse that I was gonna listen. But I had to try. Sometimes I can hear him grumble from the other side something like “Well, I’ll be damned. She did it.”

And somewhere in the distance, I imagine Bishop tossing his head, Moonshine showing off his Fabio hair, all of them still running in a place that doesn’t get bulldozed. I’m half convinced that in horse heaven it’s the people who run and the Racehorses who watch and bet. If that's true Jeff has one hell of a racing team.

People still say to me, “Isn’t it wild that someone just gave you three retired racehorses?” And I still answer, “Don’t get confused. Three racehorses were given a woman.” Because that’s the real absurdity of it. I didn’t just end up with horses. I ended up with a history. A land that’s disappearing. A man who’s gone. And a job that nobody assigned me but here we are. My job is to remember as much as I can for as long as I can.

I came here broken. I came here trying not to drink. I came here believing my life was something that had already happened somewhere else. And instead, I became the slightly concussed, recovering alcoholic, ex-California actress who is now: The unofficial historian of three retired racehorses, a handful of dead barns, one stubborn farm, and a man named Jeffrey George Stanton.

People think I inherited three horses. But really? Three horses, one horseman, and a disappearing piece of ground inherited a storyteller.

And somehow…against every odd I can think of…I’m still here to tell it.