Whenever I cycled past her pasture, she responded to my calls; with a sonorous murmur she welcomed me and then walked up to me. In the spring, when I plucked dandelions from the roadside in front of her, she rewarded my servitude with incessant gushing horse talk. Her affection towards me always embarrassed me because she didn't do it for the present, because at that time her meadow was one big, yellow sea of dandelions. She was also the one waiting for me on the side of the ditch when I went to pick an apple for her in an adjacent orchard.
Lotte was the last farm horse in East Groningen; to me she was more than a model.