Christina telecommutes between Philadelphia and Massachusetts. (In this photo, she's actually on the phone with her boss at 76 Carriage Company while Teddy the carriage horse models for a bridal show.)

I work full-time as a carriage driver in Philadelphia. What that means is that I spend pretty much the entirety of my working life with draft horses.

When I’m working giving carriage rides to people in historic Philadelphia, I also give history tours. I have lived in Paris and visited many other of the world’s great cities, and I can honestly say that Philadelphia ranks right up there with them. I love it. In the course of my giving a tour to people, they often ask me what I’m doing driving a carriage. I tell them I love history and have got a couple of degrees in history. They frequently respond in surprise with something along the lines of, “Well, that’s an interesting way to go about becoming a carriage driver.”

No. It’s a perfectly logical way to become a carriage driver. It’s where my life has been pointing for a long, long time, though I often didn’t follow its ever-insistent nudging.

I was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and lived for a time in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, before we moved to Lexington, Kentucky (“Horse Capital of the World”) when I was six years old. So I’m a Southerner. I grew up absolutely obsessed with horses, although I only took one horseback riding class as a kid. Just because you live in Kentucky doesn’t automatically mean you have horses. I didn’t even really learn how to ride until I was in graduate school… …in North Carolina.

I attended a math and science magnet program in high school and then decided that my real passion was history. So I attended Emory University in Atlanta, GA and majored in History and Anthropology & Human Biology. Going to Emory turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, as it was during my senior year there that I met my husband, Peter Clericuzio. After graduating with honors from Emory, I began graduate study at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, where I received a Master’s Degree in History in 2004.

I’m a bit of a global traveler. I first went abroad when I was 16 and spent a month in Russia with the Citizen’s Exchange Council, which established a U.S.-Russia exchange based on watersheds and conservation. They matched up people living in the Don River valley with the Tennessee River valley, so the gifted summer camp I went to offered people the opportunity to travel to Russia. We spent two weeks in Rostov-on-Don and two weeks traveling some 1200 miles up the Volga River by boat to Moscow. I’ve since then also traveled to Spain, Italy, Morocco, Belgium, England and Scotland and have twice walked to Germany from France (hooray for the EU!). I’ve lived in France for about a year all together.

Peter and I got married in June 2005. Three months later, Peter went to Nancy, France for eight months to do research for his architectural history dissertation on a Fulbright grant. I stayed home in Chapel Hill and was finishing up coursework for my Ph.D. I originally was going to write a dissertation that I thought would be very “marketable,” so to speak, on how the French loss of Haiti in the early 19 th century had been a traumatic experience that had formed French national identity. In the process of doing preliminary research, I discovered that there was almost no evidence for my project, but as I was reading through the minutes of the French National Assembly, wherein the deputies were spending vast amounts of time discussing budgets, I discovered that my French historical subjects were spending an awful lot of time talking about horses, specifically French horses and how those horses were vital to French national identity. (Most historical studies of national identity are based on inference and not on explicit declamations by the historical actors on how they’re defining themselves, so this was VERY exciting.) I decided to change my topic and drew up a dissertation proposal entitled Les Plus Beaux Chevaux: The Horse in French Society, Politics and Culture, 1789-1830. My advisor’s reaction to my new project, however, was something along the lines of “Do you really think that horses were that important?” I eventually persuaded him that you couldn’t really understand the past without understanding people’s relationship with horses, but I came to realize that it would always be an uphill battle to convince historians within the profession.

While Peter was on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean, I began to question whether or not I wanted to be an academic historian. Increasingly, I had less desire to stay in libraries doing research and talking only with other historians, and more desire to interact with the general public, sharing history with everyone. In December 2005, I decided to leave graduate school. I moved to France with Peter for a few months in 2006.

Peter began graduate school in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 2006. I moved with him to Philadelphia, unsure of exactly what kind of career I wanted to pursue. I knew that Philadelphia was extremely historic, and that surely there would be some sort of job opportunity as a tour guide. I did some research and came across an ad from 76 Carriage Company and the Philadelphia Trolley Works that essentially read, “Do you love history? Do you love horses? Have we got the job for you!”

I became a full-time carriage driver and have finally found my passion. I love being outside, working in partnership with a wonderful draft horse, interacting with visitors from all over the world.

As I became immersed in doing my job as a carriage driver and became a real “horseman,” I felt much more at peace with my life and more connected to the world. I think I experienced a seismic shift in my thinking the day about three weeks after I started working when my co-worker Carol looked up at the blue August sky and said, “Fall’s on the way. You can tell by the color of the sky.” I looked up, and for the first time in 26 years really noticed the subtle changing of the seasons.

I also came to discover the traces of our equine friends all over the magnificent city of Philadelphia, and grew tired of those who would come up to the carriage stand and argue that horses had no business being in the city. Well, the horses built the city.

“How do you keep horses in the city?” one gentleman challenged me.

“The same way they’ve been living here since 1682,” I answered.

I believe I know more about how people lived in the past – and can live with horses in the future – having worked with these wonderful carriage horses than I could ever have learned in a library.

Recently, I have turned some of my attention to networking with other tour guides in Philadelphia, by helping form the Association of Philadelphia Tourguides in response to recent city legislation regarding mandatory certification of tour guides. I am currently serving as Secretary. It is our belief that no one person can know everything, but together we contain a wealth of knowledge. By sharing that knowledge with each other, we improve the quality of tour guiding in the city.

I hope to apply the same sort of principles to this project. Pam has assembled around her an amazing network of people (and horses like Huey and Bud) who have incredible things to share with the world. I hope to contribute by adding my knowledge of history and horses, as we try to educate the world about our vital relationship with the horse and with the Earth.

Click here to see Christina's full resumé.