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

A Fond Farewell to Robijn and Cupcake

At some point back in the summer, when I was sweating my guts out doing my daily routine of leading and feeding, riding four horses, and such,  I realized that the amount of work I was doing each day to keep the horses all fed and worked was not in proportion to the amount of enjoyment I was receiving for the effort. Horses had become my albatross instead of my freedom, and that equation was just wrong. It took some doing but finally I got photos and videos together in some ads posted onto a few places in cyber world and started to get hits from folks wanting more info about the ones on the market.

That opened the gate and unleashed the parade of the tire kickers. There were the ones looking at a four or five digit price tag wanting to know if the mare would be good with children, or good on trail rides. There was the one who said he was an agent for a woman in New Zealand who wanted to pay me immediately with his credit card, never asked anything about the horse, and sent me to a shipper to find shipping costs, which were suspiciously very low, and whose English was a bit sketchy. For the past two weeks I have done little but answer emails to folks telling them all more about which particular horse and fielding out the ones who sounded like total and absolute, idiots, and there were many. Finally though, for two to my horses, I managed to find the right buyers, or they found, me.

Robijn was the first to sell. I had bought Robijn as a yearling from a breeder in California eleven years ago, sight unseen because I knew the bloodlines well and I knew the breeder and trusted her to send me a nice horse. She did. Robijn was awarded her First Premium when I presented her to the breed jury, and went on to produce four super foals during the time on my farm. I backed her as a three year old and rode her intermittently between her being a baby hotel or mommy. She was a gentle giant at 17h, a bright red bay with a wide blaze, a generous supply of chrome on the legs, and enormous dark brown eyes. In recent times though, she had begun having trouble holding onto a pregnancy, and this coincided with my becoming a bit unenchanted with the whole breeding business, and so I made the decision to sell her. This was not going to be easy as what I had was a very big sweet and pretty mare, with big super fancy gaits, but who was middle aged, very green broke, and who was questionably breeding sound. Finally the right buyer popped into the scene and suddenly the shipper appeared and off Robijn went to Illinois.

To make a decision to sell a horse is a deliberate one, not unlike the breakup of any relationship, and the follow thru of actions until the mission is accomplished is often complicated by conflicting emotions. This mare had been part of my life and daily routine for eleven years and in that time we have shared many things. I have helped each of her foals into this life, and guided them to her waiting udder, and watched her lick their wet skins as they swayed on their new legs. I have stood in the dark and cried with her after she lost one of her best foals, a bay colt that had more athletic talent than all combined and who just died for unknown reasons one day. The mare and I stood that night, with her eyes locked onto me, questioning me, seeking answers I could not give her. I was the first to sit on her back and then teach her the next steps to being a riding horse. She knew me, and I, her.

There is a blank spot in the herd just now and I miss her sweet face that always welcomed me to the barn. With her sale however, there is a release from just a bit of my responsibility to maintaining this herd. I mentioned a bit of my sadness in a text message to the very excited buyer when the mare was in transit to this lady, and she replied a very saving thing, “She is not gone. She is just not there.” My relationship with Robijn is over and she will begin one with someone else, but in this process I have gained an ounce more freedom and that, I keep reminding myself of, is my goal.

Cupcake, Robijn’s last foal here, a young mare, also a red bay is to be picked up by her new owner on Saturday. Last Friday, Mark and I loaded the mare into the trailer for her first trailer ride ever, to go across town to a veterinarian who was to do a prepurchase exam on her for the potential buyer. The whole idea was terrifying to me. The unknowns of taking a young horse on their first ride for something like this are huge, and the risk of a panic attack on her part were looming in my brain. Off we drove with the sounds of her scrambling hooves blam, blam, blaming the walls of the trailer. Finally she found her sea legs and there was silence for the rest of the ride across town.

Once there, we readied to take her out of the trailer and opened the ramp for her to back down. A misplaced foot that was wet from dropping on the floor, slipped down the ramp and she suddenly found herself with all four legs stretched in very awkward directions. No panic, she managed to regroup and got out unscathed, and we walked over to the clinic to begin the exam. The mare was an angel, standing still when needed for x-rays, and happily trotting along when the flexion tests were done. Her x-rays showed a flawless set of legs, and so she passed with flying colors, impressing the examining vet with both her quality and her character. I was impressed as well. After a bit of apprehension about reloading into the trailer, she stepped back on board and home again we drove.

One really doesn’t know what you have with a young horse until they are tested with sensory overload, and on this day she was tested in many ways, above and beyond, and justified her value. She will soon have a good home with the enthusiastic young lady who came to see her after New Years day. I will miss Cupcake, too, like Robijn, but perhaps not as much as her half sister Cistine, who has been pastured with her since they were both born. Theirs is a tight bond that only siblings know and that will be a sad one to break. Life changes for all, and with these two fillies coming of riding age it is now time for their lazy days to give way to the beginning of their work as the dressage horses they were bred to become.

Cistine will remain on the farm for now, as quite possibly be the last young horse I will start down the path of learning to carry a rider and all the other many things she will have to learn as she grows up. It is by reducing the size of my herd that I will have time to devote to her, and it will give me time to focus more on the two older mares further along. It will more importantly though, give me time, just plain time, for whatever I might want to do that doesn't involve a horse. That is my goal, and to that end I say a fond farewell to the ones I will sell or sold, and look forward to enjoying the lighter load in the barn world and beyond.

Jack and his continuam of culinary misadventures

I was not amused to be awoken the other morning to the sounds of a small dog wandering around my bed, retching in most earnest attempt to unload whatever was in its gut. Sure enough, it was Jack. There are few things that can bring me to full alert faster than the sound of a dog in the process of throwing up, knowing that if they are successful, that the cleanup will not be pretty and will probably invoke more retching, from me. So once my brain registered what was going on and functioned well enough to prompt my body to start moving, I got out of bed and chased the heaving puppy to the back door. It was there the clues began to reveal themselves. I booted the boy out to finish his business and turned to follow the trail.

The first clue was the tattered remains of the bag of dog food that I had placed on the floor after having poured the majority of it into the dog food can, which mysteriously only holds 40 lbs. and this bag holding 50 lbs, had a leftover amount in it. When I had placed the bag there I had even said to my self, “Self, don’t leave that there cause Jack will get in trouble with it.” Distractions being what they were for the evening, of course, I forgot and left it there.

The helpless bag had not just been broken into. Shards of paper lay around it, evidence that the poor bag had obviously been ripped into with a maniacal ferocity. The glossy picture of the Labrador retriever on the cover of the sack had been torn with a demonic energy and the portrait of the once peaceful lab now looked quite sad. The bad part was, that the dog food that had been inside the night before, was now about half of what had been in there before the attack. Jack had consumed, along with the shredded paper he must have taken in, somewhere close to 4 to 5 lbs of dog food. This was the beginning of yet another chaotic tale of my overeating, diabetic, pancreatic (from having eaten a ½ gal or so of cooking oil), and wooden plank eating poor puppy. Here we go again, I thought, back to the vet, again.

When a diabetic gets too much food, like nearly 5 lbs of dog food for instance, or too much sugar, they become thirsty beyond belief and will drink any water, and all water available. Jack had followed this course of relieving his thirst, after eating his fill and then some, and the evidence of his action led to consequences of relieving himself, all, over the house. Puddles lay in various stages of evaporation everywhere. The question loomed as to just how serious this bout was going to become, with the frightening possibility of our making yet another installment on my vet’s addition to his clinic.

I let all of the dogs back into the house for breakfast and I offered Jack a small amount in a bowl to assess his situation. He didn’t even sniff at it which is totally against anything Jack ascribes to. He is a professional eater, and takes that job very seriously. The vet had told me when Jack was first diagnosed with diabetes, that if he refused food, then to not give the insulin shot that would normally follow a meal, but he had not told me what to do instead. I was in a quandary here because this puppy was stuffed full of food and no way to process it without the insulin. So I decided to risk a breach of the vet’s advice and I pulled a syringe out to give him his dosage. It was then that I realized just exactly how really full this dog was.

To give a shot subcutaneously to a pup, one grabs a pinch of skin right behind the shoulders, and injects under the skin but not into a muscle. Jack was so full that there was no skin to pull. His belly had swollen to uncharted diameters and his skin was stretched to the max. I managed to squeeze the tiny needle into a miniscule recess under the skin and waited to see if my action was going to make him better, or kill him. While I anxiously waited for the results, I walked the house with a roll of paper towels and mopped up the gallons of puddles.

Gladly the poor puppy did not die from the dose of insulin, or this new overeating misadventure, and gradually Jack’s belly began to deflate in circumference over the course of the day and by late afternoon he was once again happily chowing down on horse droppings, and whatever horse feed had been dropped by the herd. At dinner time he got his carefully allotted ½ cup of prescription dog food, followed by another dose of insulin, and things were back in the groove for Jack, again.

‘Til next time…

Tick, Tock

As the blank screen stares at me, behind me the clock continually ticks and tocks and the dogs wander around the house searching for the right place to nap after their morning trip to the barn. Horses were fed but there will be no riding today as a light mist is falling and my hair is growing in exponential proportions and would not possibly fit under a hat or under a helmet with chin strap. It is chilly, damp, and just right for doing what I am doing now, writing. A nice cup of tea helps soothe the anxiety of not getting horses worked but I think I will make it.


This year’s now retired Christmas tree sits waiting at the edge of the pond, like many before it, ready to become a fish house once it’s weighted enough to sink into a deep spot. Holidays have come and gone again. This New Year marked the end of a decade, the first of the 21st. It was not my favorite and I can’t say I am sorry to see it go. I remember at the end of 1999 how everyone was freaked about Y2K and how the bottom was going to fall out when the clock struck midnight and it became a new century. All the doom and gloomers were wrong about the day after being the apocalypse. No, it was the entire next decade that had so many dismal things occur in it. So in its passing I say good riddance and have hope that this next one will be more balanced and pleasant for all.

There have been many birthdays recently, of both friends and family, also markers that delineate passing of time. Time is linear and its passing is one direction and the future another. Our marking of birthdays, centuries, and years give us scope to our lives and a way to assess what to make of what we have done and what we want to do, given the uncharted amount of time left.

It came up the other day, the idea, that what would it be like if we all had no idea how old we were. If the passing of the annual celebration of our births were suddenly deleted, and no reference to it existed, how then would it change things? How does the knowledge of our age shape what we think, act, and live? If we had no calendar, no clocks, would we flounder in the lack of these markers that give pattern to our days or, would we live a freer existence in a sublime ignorance of the number of the passing days of our lives?

It is usually only in hindsight that one can see, oh, that was the last time we did that. Unless it is a conscious decision to never do something again, the things we think sometimes will go on forever, and we take for granted, one day stops, and we don’t even think about it until some point down the line and then realize it ceased to be. When was the last time I played tennis, held my young daughters in my lap, or kissed my grandmother on the cheek? These events passed silently, without my awareness, and so I wonder what events will I not recognize as being the last, until they too become the last. Will I know I am taking my last breath? Ah the questions that these markers of time bring forth.

Here on the farm the repetition of the season has its markers, by the repetition of visitors. Ducks that spend summer time in the north now find refuge here and so our pond is temporary home for various types. A Pied Billed Grebe has been hanging around as has been a group of Harlequin ducks. The males of these ducks are spectacular creatures of stunning black and white markings with a distinct silhouette and, regrettably, the females are drab and merely follow the males around the water, dabbling and diving under the surface to find dinner. Together they make for a splendid show and I wish they would visit longer but I enjoy them for the time here.

Canadian geese flocks have also returned and one pair in particular have staked out the feeding places of my two fillies. They float close by in the pond and wait for me to throw feed and hay, and then leave the water and waddle up closer and closer to see what scraps they can pick up. Cistine chases them off with a shake of her head until she is finished with hers and then they are allowed to glean the leftovers.

Many birds, mostly finches, have converged on the feeders hanging off the back porch today, especially since the weather is so yucky. They don’t seem to feel a threat from the two Red Shouldered Hawks that just landed in the dead tree close by, and remain focused on the free sunflower seeds, flitting and chirping as they fight over the kernels. Maybe they know these hawks would rather have bugs or frog than feather covered grub. They won’t last long doing that if a Sharp Shinned Hawk cruises thru and takes a stoop at them.

Years ago, I never jotted down the first time so I have no reference for knowing how long now, a black brindled calico cat started hanging around the barn area. She comes in the winter and then leaves in summer and fall. She too is a horse feed leftover scavenger. It has been at least 6 or 7 years now I know, but always somehow she manages to survive being a victim of all my silly dogs who think chasing fur is good sport. Yesterday as I went about my afternoon feeding I happened to finally notice that she sat, motionless, on the box seat of my parked carriage, only a few feet from the dogs who were right under her, apparently oblivious to her presence, but perhaps they knew and just weren’t in the mood at the time. She sat and glanced at me revealing nothing.

And so begins another year, another decade, another day. Time flows an uncharted course for all and it just keeps ticking. This year I make no resolutions because I don’t want any guilt if I change my mind or can’t comply but I do hope that I get the several projects lurking in my brain done. They are shadows at this point and I am hoping to find a way to find a beginning to their form. I think it will come, in its own sweet time.