SSSSSSS

It is late March. Typical to this month of the year it has been one of extremes in weather, at times cold and blustery, and others balmy and bathed in healing sunshine. In between these have been violent rain storms with hail, lightening, and tornado watches, all brought on by the colliding frontal systems that almost weekly push their way thru the state.

The rain and increasing warmth of the daily temps has also brought the world back to life and green again after the winter gray. Trees are beginning to be covered with a bright chartreuse flocking of tiny leaves and flowers and every surface, outside and in, is covered with a sickly pale green powder of the thick sticky pollen from the hordes of the trees around the house. Flowering shrubs are also reawakened and are beginning their spectacular show that southern gardens are famous for. The exploding reemergence of the continuing cycle of life in the world can be felt, heard, and experienced with all the senses.

March brings many things to life and mind and surprisingly there is much alliteration to them; spring (the official start there of), showers, spring break, shedding, sneezes, and snakes. So many folks I know complain about their horribly incapacitating allergies to this plethora of pollen, and walk around with Kleenex, swollen noses, and puffy, runny eyes. The horses are now dropping massive amounts of long fuzz as I groom them daily and I find piles on the ground where they roll trying to scratch the winter coat off. I am fortunate to not be allergic to either, the pollen, nor to the endless amounts of horse hair that finds its way into my nose, eyes, mouth, and which covers my clothes inside and out. As to the snakes, this time of year as their reawakening time, is not my favorite aspect of the season. You can feel when its snake weather. There is just a certain temperature and humidity that feels snaky. That is when they begin to show up in all sorts of places.

Last weekend, Sunday afternoon was spent in the ritual “clean the boat up” session. This traditionally is a group effort, which involves pulling the fishing boat up onto the trailer and up to the house to take all of the rusting fishing lures, empty beer bottles, piles of leaves and acorns, and anything left over from last summer and fall’s excursions out. The boat then gets a good scrubbing and rearranging of all the stuff and everyone feels good and ready for the next adventure. This process was finally finished and as my daughter and I walked to the back door to put away the cleaning stuff, I stepped on the first step and heard her behind me say “SNAKE”. This is a five letter word which always does get my attention and I turned to see what she was referring to. There on the carport, less than two feet away from where I had just stepped, was a fat, coiled up, young copperhead snake, its tongue flickering and tasting.

There is always the “holy shit” moment after finding one of these slithering serpents so close to one’s feet. My heart goes into overdrive in an instant and my mouth starts spitting obscenities that I never knew I knew, and for some strange reason I feel like standing higher on my toes, as if that would save me from a bite from the snake. Copperheads scare the stuffings out of me because their tendencies to be waiting in places like at our back door steps, or under the lawnmower just before I was going to hop on to cut the grass, or even the big sucker that I sat next too on a big granite rock by a quiet trout stream one day. The little ones also have the tendency to look incredibly like a pile of poop made by a small dog, which we have a few of and so have their monuments scattered here and there, and while I do keep eyes sharp to avoid them I don’t always look at them carefully enough to rule out a snake instead of mere poop.

This particular snake met with his demise before he could sink his tiny fangs into any of our feet or into any of the very curious dogs that were milling about, and we all cooled our nerves with a chilly brew. Our daughter and our son in law then needed to head to town for the evening and weren’t thirty seconds down the drive before I heard gun shots. Pow, Pow, Pow,….Pow! My cell phone showed a text “ANOTHER SNAKE” and Mark and I headed out to investigate this second serpent on this sunny Sunday.

This one turned out to be a much larger cotton mouth or moccasin, who had happened to be considering crossing the drive right when they were driving out. This one also met with its demise, but we were all left a bit jumpy about if there were more to be seen for the day. Fortunately we did not. It is a normal and expected part of spring that snakes move around after their dormancy of winter and we understood going into this farm that we would encounter them. They were here long before we built this house and I suspect that they will be here after we are gone. I would just rather understand their being here fills an ecological nitch, but would also rather to not have to come face to fang with them.

I have seen two more since that Sunday, one, an incredibly long black racer that I nearly tripped over in my barn aisle way. Not being a poisonous one I didn’t freak but told the thing to get out of my barn with a “shoo”. This snake was not very impressed with my threat but finally slowly retreated to the door to the barn and went his on way. Then yesterday, when I opened the doors to the trailer I store my hay in, there on the bale in front of me was a kind of interesting colored one, who dropped out of the trailer and slid silently under the trailer. I had to look him up in the field guide to find he was a Speckled King Snake, and while I am not a fan of any serpent I was happy to see this one because the mice who also live in that trailer kill time by chewing on hay ropes and breaking bales open. So I hope this fellow stays and enjoys many of the evil rodents, but just not when I around, a symbiotic relationship of sorts with a slithering serpent.

And so March comes to a close in a few days. Spring in entrenched. Our Purple Martin colony is full and noisily vibrant. The horses are beginning to look like polished marble with their newly emerging coats, and the infamous Jack has eaten nothing to report and stays thankfully away from the vet’s clinic. I have waged war on the overgrown garden, again, and will be planting the summer vegetables soon with wishful hopes for a bountiful crop. I did find a clue yesterday about the mystery of the missing peach crop from last summer…we had stacked a bunch of landscape fabric on the ground in the corner of the garden last year and it had not been moved since we put it there. Well, I did move it yesterday and lo, I found hundreds of peach pits underneath it there. It looked as if a critter had made it a mission to stash the ripe peaches under this cloth, maybe to save for a rainy day? Who knows? I mean, what kind of animal steals peaches and hides them? I will definitely be watching the peach tree more carefully this year and make sure the hot wire keeps the browsing deer out of the garden, if possible. Ah, the simple life on the farm. Not. Still, it is good.

Atlas

Many years ago my father introduced me to a writer named Ayn Rand and to her books on her philosophy of what she called “Objectivism”. Her stories were of heroes and heroines of strong character, intelligence, and who were the creators and do-ers in societies of those who would be carried along on the backs of these heroes’ actions. Perhaps her most famous book, “Atlas Shrugged”, involved a group of such characters in a time of an industrial boom in the world and these people were the ones making progress happen. When they felt that they were taxed to the point of suffocation and felt that the weight of a world they were making spin was taking too much of a toll on them, they left it all behind and formed a commune of sorts, leaving the ungrateful behind to figure out how to keep it going without them. Hence the name of “Atlas Shrugged” in reference to the mythical strong man who held up the sky and kept it from dropping to the earth below. I did a senior English project on her books and her philosophy and I took much of her thoughts to heart. I knew personally, characters like hers of such extreme strength of will and who acted with deliberation and an honesty of unparalleled proportion. My father is one such person, and he has been my “Atlas” my entire life, and for so many others whose lives he has touched in his long career and life.

My father is now old. He is ready to move on from this life. I know how much he hates that he is no longer super man, the sole hero to us all. He is tired, he hurts, and he is no longer able to carry our hopes and our faith that all is good in the future. It isn’t necessarily. And for the first time in my life, I can totally empathize with his feelings. No I do not wish a soon end of my father’s life, but the inevitable will happen at some point and in his mind that time is soon, or so I think he hopes . He never wanted to be old and decrepit and dependent on helpers to tend to his meds, and check on his pace maker. His has been a life of total independence on anyone’s actions, or anyone’s opinions of his actions. He can no longer be this thing that he was for so long. He can no long be Atlas, and he would rather die than be ineffective. I understand it now. The hero and warrior that he was, is now simply tired of fighting and wants to put the weight of the world down.

My earliest memories and my first awareness of my dad, was of me riding on his shoulders when he would take us on hikes at various parks and such. I would hold his ears for balance and I would pretend to steer him by pulling one way or another on them. I of course out grew this activity pretty quickly but my father continued to be the pillar of strength and the force that carried so much of my formation and personality. He pushed us, my brothers and me, to be the best we could be at whatever the endeavor, to be self reliant, and to expect excellence out of ourselves. I certainly did not make the aim in many of my attempts but I gave it a whole effort when I did, and was always seeking the nod of his approval.

As a young man called to the military he proved himself to be the leader and hero and was decorated with many of the highest medals awarded. After a very successful career of being a commercial contractor building shopping centers, my dad sold his business and was in a bit of limbo at what to do next when fate called him to a much different line of work. My brother David, who I think was Dad’s favorite child and who was so much like him, was killed in a car crash just before his 21st birthday, during this limbo time for my dad. David had been encouraging Dad to get into politics for years, because David felt that if the brightest and best don’t take on the responsibility of such, that the society will be governed by the leftovers, morons. With David’s death as his motivation, Dad stepped into the city government, and ultimately became the chief manager and tsar of this town and held the mayor’s office for 22 years, and did so without ever taking a penny of the salary.

There were many who did not like the iron hand that he held. There was the Christmas Eve that the windows to his car, parked just outside the living room where we sat, were blown out by gunfire. Those who were used to the good ol boy method of getting things taken care of were surprised to find him unwilling to take their bribes and under the table offers. The city was a wreck in disgrace when he took it on his shoulders to carry and he left it in a perfect financial state and a safe place to live, when the fickleness of the voters forgot what it had been like before him and un-elected him.

The un-election was a deeply wounding thing for him, feeling the pain of putting so much of his life and spirit into being Atlas for this town and its people, and having his efforts become so unappreciated, and largely forgotten. He rebound, however, with another career, and then yet another, each one was left in the best business shape possible.

My dad was a always a fierce competitor, and played sports with brawn and a mental toughness that would leave you gasping. The first time I played racquet ball with him, my shoelaces were soaked and I was totally winded, while he bounced around like a puppy slamming the ball across the room with arms of steel. He loved to take the family of ski trips to Colorado and dragged us down countless idiotic black diamond runs, where we fell for distance, and he characteristically fought the moguls with a definite lack of grace clamping onto his ever present cigar.

He continued playing with this focus, and worked out with weights daily, even through his first couple of rounds of chemo therapy with a bout of throat cancer a few years back. Finally the poison that was being used to try to save his life, knocked him down and he never fully recovered that same fire. His mighty strength has waned, and the once fierce sparkle to his eyes has dimmed. So now he waits, for that which awaits us all.

Today marks the one year time passing of the loss of my other Atlas, my beautiful gelding who died from colic last March 15th. I can not help but feel the pain of this memory, still a very raw nerve, but mostly compartmentalized now so I can function. Reading my last year’s blog entry can open it right up, and tears are not far away when I do. Seasons have come and gone but the grief remains.

It is such a sad part of this wonderful life that it has to end, however the age and whatever the form and it is only the ephemeral memories that keep their spirits here, and close. I have been so fortunate to have been a part of my father’s life and there is no way I can ever repay what he gave me and the things he taught me. I now sadly wish him a gentle crossing when his time does finally come, a truely great Atlas that will be so sorely missed. The world will never be the same without him.

Singing in the Rain... or Not

There are few things more soothing than waking to the first spring thunder storm that is slowly making its way across the landscape. Low, continual and deep rumbles are interspersed with resounding cabooms and sharp cracks. There are the brief flashes of light with the following ripping of the sound barrier, a crack that shakes the windows and leaves one wondering what got hit so close by. The rain is a constant, socked in and soaking the earth. The sounds are very hard to inspire one to get out of bed. The safety of the flannels and pillow lured me into repeated snoozes until finally I could stay there no more and I got up to see what the rainy day would bring. After coffee I figured the horses might like their breakfast, albeit later than usual, so I donned my long rain coat, my snowy river felt hat and pulled on my water proof tall boots and headed to the barn.


I fed the first group, letting them into their stalls to get out of the rain for at least part of the day. The last to be dealt with was Cistine, whose paddock has no shed roof for shelter and so she was anxiously waiting for me to come rescue her. I grabbed her halter and set out into the rain to bring her in. I stepped forward through the fence line to put on her halter and she stepped quickly away from me. This repeated several times. The problem was, she apparently just didn’t like my hat and coat, and she decided that she just absolutely could not be caught and haltered. I could get face to face with her and she would reach up and bite my hat and then reach down and bite at my coat, but I could get not closer to her. After a few unsuccessful attempts to reach over her neck to get the halter strap around her, that were met with her head going straight up and her walking backwards, I knew the game was on. This issue of not being caught, was what the new focus of my day was going to be about. It was the principle of the issue, she didn’t like my garb and wasn’t going to play put on halter and go in to the barn, like she has done every day of her entire life. The choice was to leave her in the rain with no food or use the moment as a lesson of sorts. I chose the later.

Years ago a fellow named Monty Roberts brought a really old school method of breaking horses to the mainstream with a book and videos and such, and he called himself the “Horse Whisperer”. The techniques of his method went way back to very early horsemanship and were based on principles of the psychology of prey animals and how they react to being pursued. The idea of it was that one would chase the horse, and direct its movement until the horse finally gave up its fear and began being curious about the pursuer to the point where the horse turned to the pursuer and gave in and “joined up” with the pursuer. This point of acceptance in a horse is a huge break through when the training process is going on. It goes to the core of the relationship that is forming at the beginning of the training and sets the tone from then on. Breaking a horse can certainly be done by other methods than going to this end but it is a very fast and definitive moment that some horses really need to become solid partners with their riders, especially ones with strong opinions, like whether they like your rain coat and hat or not. So standing in the pouring rain with an empty halter, I realized that this was to be my expenditure of time and effort for the next minutes, or however long it took to win the game. “Oh boy”, I thought, but somewhere I had known this moment had been coming and I resolved to see it through.

I began with approaching her with the halter and if I reached to put it on her head and she even flinched away, I would make her move away from me. I kept her moving across the pasture, back and forth, cutting her desired paths off and sending her where I wanted her to go. She did not want me on her left so that was where I concentrated my body language, pushing but watching for signs of submission on her part. There was no room for almost here. This was a clear line drawn, that only a willingness to be haltered was the answer, and patiently I walked behind her, back and forth, back and forth.

Over head the skies were still rumbling and the rain was steady. An occasional flash of lightening would elicit a,”SHIT!” from my mouth and a involuntary cringe in an expectation of becoming flash fired by a direct strike of these bolts. Fortunately none struck so close that I did not mange to survive to write these words but at one point I seriously questioned my sanity for the sake of an issue with a stubborn mare, and on ward I trod relentlessly pushing this silly beast. The dogs watched this parade from the safety and dryness of the barn and did not give their opinions of the scene nor of my apparent total lack of sanity.

She kept an ear on me at all times and would periodically act like she had tired of the game and was ready to stop. As soon as I raised my hand off she went shaking her head and narrowing her eyes in a peevish way. I wondered at just how long this was going to take, but the choice to stop and pick it up another day was not an option.

At long last she began chewing and making mouthing type movements which I took for a good sign as all good herbivores do this to indicate their lack of interest in eating another critter and to hopefully avoid being eaten as well. She began stopping more frequently and would put her nose to the ground, also a good sign, but still held out when I went to halter her and moved away. Two full hours of walking in the pouring rain in a spring thunder storm following an opinionated horse, finally came to a close and she dropped her head and stuck her nose in the halter. She then reached over and took another half hearted nip at my hat to let me know she had relented, she was hungry and wet after all, but she still just did not like that hat and didn’t want me to forget it. She quietly walked with me to the barn and I fed her her long awaited breakfast after she had rolled in the dry shavings to get the ichiness off. I left her to her meal and went back to the house for dry clothes and more hot tea.

I returned after a few hours to turn her back out, the rain having mostly moved on and thunder quieted. I did wear the hat for curiosity and when I walked into the stall she immediately reached up and grabbed my hat with her teeth. She did not move away tho this time when I reached up to the side of her neck, as she had done for the previous several hours. I took the hat off, let her smell it, and then placed it on her head and she was fine with it. I guess as well as the new shape, the wet smell of felt must have been strange enough to cause the holdout.

Who knows with horses, what they will be freaked out by and behave so adamantly about. How can you possibly know what to school them about until you really need to school them on it? How do know which buttons will do what until you push just the right one? You can’t, and that is why horse training is never in a straight line. It requires a whole bunch of patience and a willingness to do stuff like walking for two hours in the rain dodging lightning bolts to make a point. But my still damp hair will straighten back out eventually, my clothes are in the dryer, I have a new cup of tea brewing, and tomorrow is just another challenge waiting to happen in horse world. Silly critters, they are.

The Pre-Spring Not-So Blues

It isn’t officially Spring yet but don’t tell the flowers and bees, and amorous birds on wing. After a nasty start to February, the recent weeks have been so balmy and deliciously gentle. The sky has remained a powder blue with a few fluffy clouds drifting along pushed by a soft breeze from the south. The low angle of the sun keeps the shadows long and makes for dramatic scenery when it hits the still bare trees and brightly lights one side and keeps the back in a cold, dark contrast giving the horizon strong vertical lines of silvers and blacks
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These easy weather days have made for good opportunity to get horses worked, though the ones still wearing their long furry coats are sweating a bit more than they want. I will probably clip the woolliest of them soon, and that will probably get the weather riled up again and cold, but I hope not.

I have been spending a lot of time ground working my soon to be four year old filly, Cistine and she is doing so well now, after surviving her bout with the circingle that slipped on her back and startled her a few weeks ago. She is now pretty confident on the lunge line and has just started working with my training trash. I noticed today that on one side she was wearing a plastic vodka bottle with a pebble inside, and on the other side I had hung a V8 juice. I just need to add a few more things to her wardrobe like a bottle of Worchestershire sauce, a pepper grinder, and some Tabasco and I will have the makings for a nice Bloody Mary. Or wait, if they are all empty, that means I already drank them.

After our work today I walked her down to the pond dam where the grass is bright green and enjoyed standing in the sunshine while she devoured the shoots of green. Her eyes blinked in a slow motion repeatedly, deeply calm and relaxed as she ripped the grasses and munched them away. I could fully empathize with her state of mind.

Yesterday as I headed to the barn I noticed my neighbor’s truck parked up at the top of the hill where our driveway cuts next to an old graveyard. Margerie had called earlier to ask permission to come look at the stones because the local historical group is trying to get all of the little abandoned cemeteries catalogued and noted. I changed my course and drove up the road to visit with them, giving the horses a few more moments to eat before working them.

We had first learned that there was a graveyard on our property when we were building the driveway and a gravel truck found one of the unmarked graves, sinking a front tire to its axel. After looking around we noticed many more indented places all running east and west on the crest of this hill. Few had stones to mark their names or the few facts of their lives gone by. The ones that remain are crudely hand scratched reminders of the names of the buried, lives over a century ago, that once shared a story of this land that we now are caretakers of. These are obviously not the graves of aristocrats.

Margerie, and her husband Davis, live down the road from us and own most of the many acres surrounding our farm. They both grew up in this area, she was the daughter of a dairy farming family, and he the son of a general all round farmer, who raised cattle, chickens, oats, corn, and whatever was needed to live on.

They know the history of this area well, but they also know the tales, the stories, the names, and the things that happened that won’t make it into a history book and which will soon be faded memories that will most likely die with them or perhaps linger a bit more by their sons hearing and remembering. We stood together over these graves and she jotted down the few inscriptions left and we talked and looked around, and I took in several stories about things that had happened on our property and of the lives of those that had been previous stewards of it. We talked about the spring that once flowed near our house that once watered the crops, and the people and livestock that lived here to work this land, in a very different time and way of life.

Early sign of spring are definitely happening now. The daffodils that grow around these graves are now in full bloom and I saw the first Trillium coming up there as well. When I walked past the now suddenly in bloom, Flowering Almond tree, yesterday, it was alive with the sound of thousands of busy bees hitting on the first bit of pollen they have seen in a long time, their legs bloated with yellow. There was a continuous drone of their collective buzzing wings that gave the tree a vibration that could be felt as well as heard.

The main harbingers of spring arrived in full force today though. The long awaited sound of a group of Purple Martins’ morning calls filled the air when I opened the front door this morning. There were three pairs flitting around all the houses and gourds, checking them all out. In and out they went, some showing preferences to the older gourds and others liking the new super large gourds we recently added to the colony pole. At one point a male flew to one of the gourds and stuck his feet inside the hole and pulled out another male. They fell towards the ground with the first male still holding onto the second, and finally he released the relocated martin before they hit the ground. I guess the wife of the first really wanted that one house, or else. I absolutely love to hear their lyrical songs and watch them in flight, and the fact that they return each year at this same time is simply magic. Their arrival really marks the beginning of the season for me and for all of the folks who raise a pole up to try to attract these flying nomads. Turn up your computer volume for a treat below.

There are not many things better than a fine day in pre-Spring listening to martins once again singing in the barn yard. Aaahhhh.

Learning Curves and Signs of Spring

One doesn’t have to be crazy to be able to endure the weather in the south in February, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. The repeated assaults by the western blown cold fronts combined with balmy sunshine filled days leaves one wondering every day what to wear. It is amazing more folks don’t have perpetual colds. How the poor animals that do live outside in the changing elements deal with it all, I cannot imagine. I am sure that some don’t.


This past first week of February has been text book to this description, first roaring in with a terrible rainy cold few days which were then followed by a few days of bright blue sky and warm sunshine. Already the tease of spring’s arrival is being made evident. The best part is the ever increasing daylight time in the afternoon. Trees are beginning to bud tiny little future leaves and flowers, and the empty veggie garden is calling me to come get my hands dirty and plant something. We have seen the first scout of the Purple Martins and have gotten all of the nesting boxes ready and we now await the arrival of the entire returning flock.

Yesterday I noticed the first daffodil that has bloomed at the old trailer site where some folks named Blanche and her husband, Eddie, I think, planted row upon row of bulbs many years back. There are the daffodils, and paper white narcissus, and the little white bell shaped blooms with the little green dots around the petals. All of these were planted by some unsophisticated simple folks, who cared whether their yard in front of their very not new house trailer sat, looked pretty. And bulbs being what they are, have survived them and multiplied and each year now they remind me of these people and I appreciate what they did that marks the beginning of spring on this land.

It has been a good week of working the horses after a time off dealing with other stuff, like life. There were a few in the herd that needed a refresher on proper behavior but no real ground was lost and all are back in the working groove and continuing to learn. They are also beginning their spring ritual, shedding, not a lot yet, but my clothes and face bear the evidence that the changing light is triggering their bodies to let go of that long fuzz. A look at the weather report for tonight and another approaching possible snow/rain/cold front says they’d best hang on to being yaks for just a bit more.

Regular work has begun with Cistine, my soon to be four year old daughter of Joline. Cistine is still lanky and quite tall, at 17hh+, and has a long way to fill out and hopefully not any more upward, but is sweet and generally fairly quiet, for a teenager with the attention span of a half a nanosecond. Her days recently have been about learning to focus, primarily on me and my body language, working in hand on the lunge line. She had had time off as well for a few weeks and the other day I got her out to start again on these basic things. All groomed up and tacked with pad, circingle, and Portugeuse cavesson, off we went to the field where I work the young ones.

I could tell right off that there was a buzz in her brain, a bit of a squint to her eye when looking at me, and her focus could not be found, anywhere. It was like a bubble enlarging and getting ready to pop and there was a good breeze blowing and leaves were rustling giving the day a pretty high spook factor for even the solid ones, so I didn’t think it would take much.

I just did not know what the trigger would be, but with young ones I tend to go look for buggers to school at this stage, for me to learn more about what gets their goat and how they might react. The older I get the more of this stuff I do so that upon that fateful day when I tread into a stirrup to get on her back for the first time, I want to know what to expect, and I also want her to know what to expect as much as possible. So I was paying close attention to this time bomb ticking away at the end of my feeble cotton rope.

Things were ok up to a point and then it was time for her to enlarge the circle she was making around me and so I sent her away from me and then asked her to trot. This was the moment she had been waiting for. With enormous drama, she grandly leapt with the theatrics of a movie star, into the air, shaking her head, as all of Joline’s foals learned to do in a gesture of showing anger, impatience, or just enthusiasm. That would have been ok, a bit of over doing it, but the problem was that the loosely buckled on circingle was no longer just behind the withers, but had slid backward to her flanks, the forbidden and most personal, zone of most young mares.

Her eyes widened and the rodeo was on, and with the next moves she made, I know that there is no human alive who could have hung on, or would have wanted to have been there. More like “Beam me up, Scotty, and make it fast.” I was very happy to not be passenger at this point but suddenly got very busy with a very large, very agile, very panicking giant of a horse who was bucking and jumping into the stratosphere in a misshapen circle around me. I felt like I was the tether for a 747 doing the up and down exercises they fly to make potential space men feel weightlessness, and vomit, and all of this exploding energy was being held down with a gossamer thread in relationship, that and that fine new cavesson I recently had bought. Her sire’s genetics for being a jumper were showing in fine form and I couldn’t help but be amazed at her achieved altitude with each trip upward.

This all seemed to go on for several epochs but finally the silly thing stopped these bouncing antics and just stared at me quite perplexed now at her situation. I walked over to her and released the circingle figuring to reintroduce wearing it when I can actually make it fit and have it not slide backwards, and I dropped it to the ground.

The pad and the evil circingle lay there and suddenly became the most horrifying of unknown creatures to her, so that become our new schooling tool. I lead her away from it and then got her into a circle where she would have to pass very close to the villainous pile of leather. When she got close to it again she leapt sideways away from it, into my space, which was what I was waiting for and set her up for. I bellowed something to catch her attention and stepped sharply at her and surprised the heck out of her. Poor thing got her legs tangled up and down she went into the sand. Without panicking this time, she got up and stood staring at me again, this time with head quite low and eyes were softly blinking, this time in submission. She thought I had made her fall, and sometimes accidents like this are the best training thing that can happen. Her face was now one of acceptance and relaxation.

We quit on that and I placed the pad and, now ignored circingle, on top of her back and walked slowly her to the barn, her total focus on me and how she could figure out how to get back in my grace again. I gave her a carrot after I groomed her and put her away to think on it all.

The next sessions have been super but I will continue to pursue the scary things long before I will be ready to get on her, but waiting will be hard. Cistine is so supple and athletic, and has amazing big super gaits with crisp leg action. I got to see a whole lot of her athleticism in her airs above the earth episode, more than I really wanted to, but time will work the silly frolics out. Training is always ongoing and is a process, as is all learning of any type, as well.

On a different note, I spent some time doing some learning a couple of nights ago. I actually took a photography workshop/class with my favorite photographer, my husband Mark. Someone who had to reschedule for one of his classes left an empty spot, so I took it. In the years we have been married I have never sat down to learn anything from him about what all those dials and buttons are for on these new fangled digital cameras, even tho I have been on the sidelines at all of his workshops all over the place. The learning curve was too steep, I had thought.

We actually got together way back when, in art class at college, when I asked him advice on what type of camera to buy. It was back when film and darkrooms were how images were made and he was just out of the army where he had been an instructor of it all. Back then I took some rolls and processed them under his guidance, but when the digital era emerged, I quit trying and resorted to my cell phone as my camera. So it was quite a treat to sit and have him show me what the controls were and I look forward to learning more about it now. My intimidation of the digital realm has lessened and I got a better glimpse of how much this guy knows about not just taking the picture and printing and all, but what a fabulous teacher. Who would have thought it? It was a classic case of the cobblers’ kids having no shoes, but by my own fault.

Off to barn world to feed and batten the hatches for the incoming front. Hopefully it will be kind and gentle and return to the beginnings of spring soon.

Birthdays and the Big Boom Theory

The last weekend of January was a pleasant one, marked by the annual visit of our friend and his wife who come down every year at this time and use the house as base camp while they attend a historical symposium of some sort. This fellow is the one who sent me the link on the mortar for Mark’s Christmas gift, and he came here on this trip with the back of his truck full of boxes of powder, several different cannons and mortars, and lots of golf balls and wine corks. So Friday afternoon upon their arrival we set up on our tail gates out on the pond dam with our toys,  I mean guns, and fired lots and lots of charges. I am sure my neighbors must’ve been thinking that the siege had begun and the horses went to the far end of the field to escape the loud blasts.

The wine corks were for a tiny brass mortar that had a bore the diameter of the cork and this tiny gun would fire the cork out into the pond about fifty yards with an amazingly loud boom, unexpected from such a diminutive thing. The fact that one must drink a bottle of wine to save up ammunition for such a cause was not lost on our friend and he had lots of corks to fire.

Many dozens of golf balls were sent sailing into the sky, our general target being the moored pontoon boat at about a hundred yards out. Getting the powder to fire consistently, tho, was a bit of an issue for Mark’s mortar so a great deal of thought and discussion as to why filled the dinner time conversation with many theories brought forth.

Compression of the exploding air inside the barrel is what sends the golf ball, or cork, into the air, and this was being difficult to control. The fabric patches Mark was using didn’t make a tight fit every time and occasionally the “fire in the hole” signal was followed by a soft “poof” and the ball would slowly roll out of the barrel, which was hilarious to everyone but Mark.

The next day, eureka, our friend John came up with the solution for these embarrassing silly expulsions, in the form of good ol’ southern grits. The brilliant idea was to put grits in front of the powder with the grains sealing the shape of the ball to the barrel perfectly. From then on there were no more soft “poofs”, but resounding “BOOM”s were then the norm as Mark’s golf ball flew far and high.

So Saturday afternoon we set another siege on the pond and we all had such fun making loud booms but disappointingly, when done, we still had not gotten one ball to assail our target, the boat, having given it  a first class effort. Sunday, however, when Mark and I were out in the fishing boat we went over to the pontoon boat and found that, yes indeed, one ball had actually landed on the floor on the soft carpet and hadn’t made a noise, and which had lead us to believe in the failure of our attempts. The question remains as to whose ball it was and both the fellows are claiming it  and the victory.

It was thirty years ago, this week, that our first child was born, a lovely little girl, who we gave a family name of Emily. We had been expecting a boy back then, as we had just felt that having a boy child was our destiny, and with the lack of ultrasound back in the day, it could not reveal the answer. So it was pretty funny when Mark’s first words upon her arrival were, “Honey! He’s a girl!” We were certainly not disappointed at this turn of our imagined fate then, and in the rest of her time since that day, Emily has failed miserably to disappoint us at almost everything. She has grown up into an epitome of grace, beauty, and intelligence and it is my privilege to have known her as she has progressed through her years to this point.

I do have to admit that in thinking about having a kid of mine now be thirty years old is a bit daunting in its milestone marker. My father must have thought the same at my fiftieth birthday when he turned to me and asked me how I had gotten so old, as tho he hadn't. I am questioning this too now myself because I sure don’t feel much different than I did when I had her, way back then, at least mentally. I will refrain from the whining I could do about the physical damages that have come with both age and injury that do make me painfully aware of the passing of the decades.

Emily and her husband came out to dinner to celebrate the blessed event the other night, along with a good friend of ours. I fixed a rich thick stew of boeuf bourguignon, sautéed some fresh green beans and shallots, and mashed up some creamy potatoes. All of this fare was nice pure comfort food, a soothing end of the January night and the month. There was champagne and toasts to begin the evening and copious amounts of red wine for dinner. Not being able to deside between them, dessert was a helping of both a tiramisu that my aunt had sent to Emily, and a pumpkin bread pudding with rum sauce that I had made. There were many “mmmm’s” while we munched merrily away.

When dinner was finished and plates put away, the shaker came out and graciously chilled enough vodka to go around the five empty martini glasses, each with a nice plump olive awaiting emmersion. Then we went outside to fire the mortar into the night sky to further celebrate the birthday of this fine child. With a full load of black powder and a good sparkling fuse, the charge exploded, sending the poor golf ball far into the air, way across the pond to the other side.

No mere ordinary golf ball, this was, but this one was one that upon impact, or explosion, a light comes on inside the ball and flickers. The flickering continues for about five minutes and then turns off until the next impact. So we watched the ball as it rose high above the trees and it traced a perfect arc across the dark sky. Gun powder, loud booms, and martinis were the perfect end to the evening that recounted a very special day for a very special person, our daughter, Miss Emily, or as she has been called by her dad all of her life, Pooh.

So January has come and gone now, a fairly benign couple of weeks, weather wise, but February has begun  with a monster of a storm that has screamed across the map and has blanketed a line from Texas to Maine with deep snow, ice, and treacherous conditions. Where we are here, below that frontal line, it is simply very cold, wet, and gray, this the official Ground Hog Day. I have not read yet what the verdict was on the forecast for the next six weeks, but today, here, it is gross outside and the now nearly bomb proof horses munching hay in the barn will not be worked.

My parents were married on this day fifty nine years ago and I will take them some flowers later today and tell them thank you for starting the chain of events which, by their union, became the amazing gift which led to not only to my birth, but subsequently, to the births and lives of both of our two wonderful daughters.

training trash

Last night as I squeezed the last drop of vodka out of the plastic, recyclable, and soon to be multitasking, bottle into the stainless shaker, I remarked “oh boy, another horse training tool.” That, perhaps, would not have been everyone’s thought as they prepare a martini, but it was for me as I am just beginning the long road with another young horse, towards its getting to be a useful citizen. To that end I use any, and everything, to desensitize the beast before I step into the stirrup for a first ride, and that definitely includes, but is not limited to, plastic vodka bottles.

The approach is to systematically introduce all sorts of potentially scary stuff to the horse and have it react, find no real danger, and then learn to quickly shrug off stimuli without hysterics, i.e., not run away, buck, kick, rear etc. Some folks might regard my tools as trash, but I call them training materials. When I start new youngsters to all of this, my barn is cluttered with plastic vodka bottles, some filled with water and some with pebbles in them, plastic sacks, towels, feed bags, whatever will make noise, flap unexpectedly, and startle the horse when it moves.

These items are hung off of the surcingle with hay ropes, and they hang passively until moved. When the horse moves off, and these things do their job, either by visual or aural stimulation combined with these things physically bumping the horse, it learns, gradually, that if it stops, then these scary things also stop. This is a critical lesson for the fright and flight mentality that horses are inherent to, and this can potentially save a dangerous situation later on when under saddle. So I collect all sorts of trash and use it creatively to this end. The fact that the vodka requires being consumed before the bottle can become a useful item for the barn, demands a diligence to a worthy cause.

With the leaving of two of my herd last week, to new owners’ homes far away, the barn has quieted in its feeding routine, and yesterday I actually enjoyed this new gap in my responsibilities, and found time to work the two older mares and the young filly, Cistine. It was a nice soft day in January, and a skim of clouds kept the light a bit hazy with no shadows, and let in just enough sunshine to warm it to a fairly comfortable temperature. As I rode the horses in the dressage arena, the dog pack all laid motionless in the brown grass in front of the barn, inanimate basking lumps of fur.

Mark had chuckled at my comment the other day that I am now down to, an almost all time low number, in the herd, to only seven horses. In the past years of my breeding, training, and running this farm the herd size has usually ranged from 9 to 12 horses at a time here, keeping me quite busy. This amount of work was fine a few decades and a few injuries ago, but both have left me with a whole lot less enthusiasm for keeping the pace up. Right now I feel the release from a lot of it and it does feel like a lighter load, even at the herd’s number being seven of them still.

Rain moved into the area last night and was falling steadily this morning when I woke. Getting the motivation to get out of bed was a bit hard, but I could smell the coffee in the kitchen and finally I roused to see what the day would bring. I had been waiting on such a rainy day to attack something in the house as I had been feeling the need to purge this overstuffed house, and that included my closet, the pantry, the attic, and the whole place in general. There was just too much stuff, everywhere. Undecided where to begin, I opened the door to the pantry to get something and the entire stash of tea bags and boxes all fell out onto the floor, and so there it was, my first victim, the pantry.

My pantry is a large set of cabinets with many deep shelves, which tend over time, like a decade or two, to hide things in its deep recesses. Things migrate too, from their designated area, leading me to believe that I am actually out of said item, and I buy another to replace it. The things that are hiding tend to stay there for many years without notice, until I finally can’t stand not knowing what is in there past the first few inches of viewable canned goods. I began at the bottom shelf on the left, pulling everything out and I began to take back my pantry.

After it was all said and done, tidy and well organized again, I drew several conclusions. First there is no amount of pantry space that will remain empty for long. There is a phenomenon just like with coat hangers, that sets certain items to replicating. I will not ever, ever, need to buy any more Progressive bread crumbs, Old Bay seasoning, Lipton tea bags, Worcestershire sauce, and no more bags of dried beans. My supply is well loaded there. The second conclusion was that on my next life I will build a walk in pantry with shallower shelves so that I can see what the heck is in there.

It was nice to get an idea of the inventory again tho, and it felt good to see such organization again. The garbage can was full of food items from the last century, and the stuff that I knew I was never going to use or eat, like the starter mix for some weird soup that was in there, that I have no idea where it came from, and the fusion/raspberry sauce that made my nose gag when I smelled it. The better news was a few items actually made it to the training trash status, and no doubt will come in quite handy in barn world.

The rain has gone for a while and the humidity is turning the afternoon into a soft gray fog. Red Shoulder hawks are screaming outside in the swamp area below the house and my dog pack is giving a good impression of being tired and sleepy critters, all laying around my chair here. I know that in a few minutes, however, when I get up and make the slightest move towards my barn shoes, they will instantly, once again, spring to full life and begin the barking and howling that begins our ritual walk to the barn for afternoon feeding.

And, ready, set, here goes…tomorrow the closet gets it.

below is another of my poor bewildered horses going thru training trash 101:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWgXgRkZr0g