A tiny horse brings big joy to elderly

The Teeny Tiny farm has a great big variety of animals - chickens, bunnies, sheep, goats, alpacas, a miniature cow, crested ducks and a teeny little horse named Tinkerbell.

Tinkerbell is pregnant, and when she foals she will have a teeny little baby about 12 inches tall, possibly with polka dots because the daddy is a leopard Appaloosa.

That will not be Tinkerbell's biggest accomplishment.

Tinkerbell has a job.

Tinkerbell takes the Jamestown-Scotland ferry at 9 in the morning on the days she works. She doesn't feed the gulls but sometimes she whinnies as she did in early December. The ferry workers, who wave the vehicles on and off every half-hour without really noticing them, all turned to watch the horse trailer with "Traveling Pony Rides and Petting Zoos" written on the side. It was driven by Deborah Robinson, owner of the Teeny Tiny Farm in Surry County.

Robinson wore a hot pink T-shirt, and Tinkerbell wore a pink and purple halter with a bright purple lead line but no pink or purple polish on her hooves because that morning the farmyard was wet and, thus, so were Tinkerbell's toes. She was woolly in her dark-brown winter coat, and when thumped a little on the hindquarters she gave off generous clouds of what Robinson calls fairy dust, because Tinkerbell cannot be bathed in the winter.

But she had the dust brushed off and her hair brushed out and her hooves picked clean and the strand of hay removed from her lip before the purple lead led her into the lobby of Dominion Village in Williamsburg, an assisted living-memory care home where Tinkerbell works.

Tinkerbell is 6 years old. She is 27 inches tall at the withers, which is the base of the mane. She is too small for the show ring, so her previous owner sold her to Robinson, who wanted to do therapy work with her teeny tiny menagerie. A Norfolk hospital said Nay to a miniature horse, but then Dominion Village found the Teeny Tiny Farm on the Internet and said Please.

So Tinkerbell went to work.

When she entered the sitting room, where a TV played aerobics and a Christmas tree reminded residents of the season, Robinson said, "Good morning! You've met Tinkerbell before," and the instructor on TV said, "Looking great!"

"I've never seen one like that before," said a resident, and the activities director, Shirley Steck, said, "I told you it was real!"

Tinkerbell sniffed the green and gold rug, then nosed a walker belonging to Macy Riden.

"It's a horse, Macy!" Steck said.

"A what?"

"A horse!"

And another resident said, "I've never seen a dog that pretty."

Tinkerbell lipped O magazine on the coffee table.

"That dog's so clean!"

"You want to pet her?" Some residents said no, but others said yes and they fed Tinkerbell peppermint candies off outstretched palms.

"Do you remember Tinkerbell?" Steck said to Tad Myers as his wheelchair came into the room, and Myers said he did.

"Hello, Tinkerbell! You're such a pretty baby!" he cooed.

Tinkerbell's first baby died shortly after birth, and if she does not remember, Robinson does. Her eyes were misty as she led Tinkerbell into the Alzheimer's unit where the residents can remember things from many years ago more easily than things that happened yesterday.

"What a pretty dog," said Myers, who had come along.

"Tad, that's a horse," Steck told him.

"Oh, that's right."

The residents fed Tinkerbell red grapes one at a time, and they laughed at the touch of her soft lips. One woman straightened Tinkerbell's tousled forelock, and another cradled Tinkerbell's head in the crook of her arm and sang, "The First Noel."

After an hour or so, Robinson led Tinkerbell back down the hall and out the lobby doors and into the trailer, where Tinkerbell stuck her little nose into a little bag of hay for the ride home to the Teeny Tiny Farm.

Several of the memory unit residents had lived on farms, once upon a time, before coming to Dominion Village. If teeny tiny Tinkerbell stirs even a teeny tiny recollection for them, why, she's a huge success.

Diane Tennant, (757) 446-2478, diane.tennant@pilotonline.com