Heart Attack on Hawthorne

Actually my heart attack was on Kinghorn but that doesn't alliterate so nicely and I was trying to turn onto Hawthorne.  So we'll go with the original title.

Kinghorn is the street my mother lives on, Hawthorne is one of the major streets from Pocatello to Chubbuck on our side of town.  Hawthorne is extremely busy and my kids elementary school, while not facing Hawthorne has part of the playground on this busy road.

Now if the fifth graders wanted to go to a certain park that's fairly close by, they'd walk through the neighborhood to a city easement that connects to Kinghorn, which they could safely walk down and turn to the park, crossing two major roads but not walking on either.

Why am I telling you this?  Well today my mom and I went walking at the park, I drove her home, stepped inside, visited for a while and then left, going to the intersection of Hawthorne and Kinghorn, ready to turn right on Hawthorne.  When I pulled up, I noticed that the fifth graders were about to cross, they were collecting in the easement property. 

So I waited.  The aid working as a crossing guard, stopped traffic to let the stream of ten/eleven year olds across the street.  There was the initial group, which was 3-4 thick crossing the street, in one solid row, then the meandering ones followed and it was a lot with big spaces between the kids.  Thank heavens for that because all those kids going through the easement freaked out the horse in the bordering property.

All of a sudden, this horse bolted into view, almost getting hit by a car, the horse ran straight down the center of the street RIGHT THROUGH THE FIFTH GRADERS.  The crossing guard jumped and shoved kids back as the horse went straight towards them.  Took about two seconds for it all to happen and I sat there, safe in my suburban, my heart pounding in complete disbelief at what just happened.

Welcome to Idaho?  Where within the city limits you can have people owning acreage and horses? 

My daughter, queen of the meandering tweens, missed the whole thing.  She was a good two minutes behind the horse incident. 

This poor animal was terrified in the street and some of the dumber kids tried to go back into the street to snap pictures on their phones.  Yeah, the techno generation.

So, no one was hurt.  Amazingly!  Thankfully the animal didn't bolt a minute sooner when the kids were thicker going across the street, they might not have been so lucky. 

I know I lost a few years during those two seconds.