Gracie Minor, 9, sleeps with a roomful of horses.

There are horses on her bed, on her desk, on shelves and on the floor. Horses even run around her walls. They are in her books and movies, and in her family’s basement.

They are pink and blue and purple and white.

“I don’t have a real horse,” the Chelsea fourth-grader said. “But I’ve been reading on the Internet how to take care of them so I’ll know how when I get one.”

Gracie’s mother Sharon said she takes her to the library once or twice a week and she always asks the librarian, “Do you have any new horse books?”

And at camp last summer, her art project was a 3-D picture with a horse on it.

“I don’t know why she became so interested in horses,” Sharon said, “But she’s loved them since she was 3 or 4 years old.”

Gracie began taking riding lessons at James Hale Stables when she was around 6 and rode there for about a year and a half, Sharon said.

She said she hopes Gracie will be able to have a real horse someday. But besides being expensive, they need a lot of care.

“And I don’t know a thing about horses,” Sharon said.

Meanwhile, Gracie holds onto her dream of owning a real horse one day, while enjoying horse gifts from friends and relatives who know about her love of horses, reading books about horses, watching and collecting movies about them, and researching them on the Internet.

Shelba Nivens can be reached by e–mail at ssnivens@bellsouth.net.