EDMONTON – Trick riding sisters Krista and Amber Graham prove miracles do come true.
Before a car accident in December paralyzed four-year-old Hanna Chilson from the waist down, the tiny horse lover dreamed of being a trick rider. Chilson practised her riding stunts hanging off the shopping cart in the grocery store or from anything that moved near her Hardisty, Alta., home.
Chilson and her cousins would point to a poster of the trick riding Graham sisters and imitate a suicide drag or a saddle layover off the living room couch.
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The dream didn’t end with the car accident.
During part of their trick riding act in the Canadian College Finals Rodeo at the Farm and Ranch show, the Graham sisters rode around the arena with Chilson in their lap.
“They’re making her dreams come true today. She’s going to be a trick rider,” said Jodi Chilson, Hanna’s mother.
It was while Hanna was recovering at the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton that Hanna’s aunt, Bobbi Lomheim, asked the Graham sisters for a signed poster to help brighten Hanna’s day.
The Graham sisters didn’t stop at a poster. They brought Hanna and her two cousins embroidered jackets and blankets, visited her at hospital, sent encouraging messages to her hospital bed and invited her to join their trick riding team at the rodeo.
“I didn’t expect all of this when I wrote and asked them to send a poster. They’ve gone above and beyond to make her feel like a normal little girl,” said Lomheim.
Giving a little time to Hanna seemed the least they could do, said Krista.
“For us it seems like it’s so small, but to her it’s so big,” said Krista in her fourth year of nursing at Red Deer College.
The pair knows what it’s like to have a dream. Amber said they were horse crazy girls racing around their Marwayne, Alta., farm and following their parents on the rodeo circuit. They wanted to be barrel racers when they grew up, but then they saw their first trick riding show and knew they wanted to be trick riders.
“We were touched by her story and wanted to do everything we could to brighten her spirits,” said Amber, who is in second year education, also at Red Deer.
Two days before the show, the pair practised riding around the arena with Hanna. At first she was shy, but soon she was asking to go faster.
“She’s a very determined little girl,” said Amber.
