Here is a story for you: Chapter One

Sophie, first day of being in the jail—and suddenly attacked by a goose.

Then

Saturday Morning, before we went to Burgers, I spent three hours working this brave little tractor for the first time in the arena. (Sorry that there are no pictures of this—hard to take pictures of yourself while you’re actually operating largish equipment. But I looked GOOOOOD. Really, I did.) And the reason why I did all that work was because I saw these—>

(Our twenty five year old snowdrops)

And knew that this—>

(The first spring rain. Pretend you see it)

was going to start to start falling pretty soon, and I didn’t want this—>

(ewwwww)

to happen in here—>

which, as you see, regardless of the rain, very happily

did not happen. Mostly. So you see, my work was not only fun, it was not in vain. Which is a satisfying thing when it happens.

Here is incontrovertible proof that I am telling the truth about running the tractor ALL BY MYSELF (after G showed me how).

And then I cleaned out this (hint: not Dustin, which I am not qualified to do)—>

But did not clean this—>

the evil, horse attacking goose. Here is how this goose came to live with us: that rascal of a Dick Beeson brought this thing (you are not going to believe he could be so vile) to the CHRISTMAS PARTY as an ORNAMENT. He often does this, thinking he is very funny. Once it was a bowling ball with a cut off cork glued to the top with a hook sticking out of it. Like anybody has a tree big enough for that. And the problem with this is that the person who wins these things inevitably decides (in gratitude, I am sure, for my not throwing them off the list every year) to leave their prize hidden somewhere in my house. Once, it was under my pillow. I don’t remember where or how this winged thing was stuffed away, but he hung in the garage for years, and has protected our barn against . . . something . . . now for many, many years. At least four. Anyway, since we put the barn up and realized we could uninstall the goose from the garage and stick it out here where it will get the horses de-sensitized to swinging, senseless things and Dick’s sense of humor.

I also put up this—>

This is the outside of the jail. We call it the jail because Guy’s mother called the place where recalcitrant dogs were sent to cool their heels the “dog jail.” This is actually not for bad horses. It’s taking them into custody for their own protection. We put these panels up when we have to shut the horses off the pasture (hooves and soft ground and growing grass=not a productive combination), which means that Sophie and Jetta have to be in the same tiny space 24-7. Which means that Jetta will eventually lose hide, blood, dignity and all semblance of confidence. And ultimately, legs, tail and nose. So the girls have to take turns in here, every other day. Pffff. Women.

I carried every one of those panels and even that gate (and that’s no chopped liver, let me tell you) ALL BY MYSELF. Including all these—>

Which are on the other side of the barn, and with which I am mounting yet another experiment in small pasture maintenance. Geneva is rolling her eyes at this point. Woo-hoo, carrying ALL THOSE GREAT BIG TWELVE FOOTERS BY YOURSELF. Because SHE hefts these—>

which are eighteen feet, and she does THAT all alone. These are steel panels, by the way, built to withstand the onslaughts of 1100 pound ravening stud animals who really, really want to get to the other side. And how do we girls carry them? You back up to the things, hook your arms through and carry them on your back. You remember those Buster Keaton movies where the guy’d be carrying a huge long board, and suddenly turn around to look at something, and accidentally knock some poor dude off the building with the tail end of the swinging board? Yeah. It’s like that. And the gates are HECK to carry.

But we gladly do it for these—>

Horse Muzzles. Horse Noses. Softest things in the world. And I LOVE ‘em. And I kiss them EVERY DAY, and I have since mid 2001. Get close enough to smell a horse’s breath, and you smell every green and growing thing. It’s wonderful.

Here seen in passive mode.

Here in active mode.

Yep. It’s the life. Just don’t ever invite me in (especially in early spring) unless I take my boots off first.

This is what it’s like to have horses:

You get up in the morning. (Some people do this earlier than I do. Let me just explain that I get up WAY earlier than I would if I didn’t know people (horses) were out there in the frost starving. And though I may lie abed until it’s no longer dark outside, I am up and stumbling around way before it’s warm, which doesn’t happen till about May around here).

You pull on your running pants and a ratty navy blue shaker sweater (which you still love), then pour yourself down the stairs where you pull on your new, toasty lined coveralls and warm boots. No. Wait. First you have to go back upstairs and get the cell phone which is supposed to be plugged into the charger—where, of course, it never is. Then you clatter back downstairs to tear the house apart looking for the dang phone. (Repeat these steps until the cell phone is found. By this time, you will be very, very warm.)

With phone in hand, put on your heavy duty, rootin’ tootin’, LLBean, Thinsulate and plaid flannel lined denim field coat with the corduroy cuffs (that are pretty much worn through. I love this coat) and your neck warmer and your ear warmers and your hat and your gloves. Then you pull your keys off the hook, and you can go on outside to the car.

Self Portrait #1: In the window of the Sienna

Everybody scrapes windshields in the morning. You already know that part.

Then you drive down Center, hoping the heater will start working before you get to the barn.

It doesn’t.

You carefully seek the least icy place to park—something within jogging distance of your gate. You finally climb the gate and trudge through the snow (wishing you’d brought your camera) down the long, long snow drifted driveway.

Self portrait #2: on the driveway (note the tire tracks)

It is at this point that you find the Sick Horse.

You know that he is sick because when he sees you coming, instead of heading for the barn where he will beg for breakfast, he lies down in the snow.

This is not good.

You continue on your way, hoping he’ll get the “I’m going to the barn” part and follow you. But with every step you take, you are trying to ignore a growing sense that what might have turned out to be a really nice day isn’t going to.

You get into the barn and ring the cow bell, which is to say: “I’m serious about dispensing hay, here.” And you peek out to see what the Sick Horse is now doing. Well, he’s galloping. He hardly ever gallops. But here he comes, thundering down the pasture. So you breathe a sigh of relief, while somewhere down deep inside, part of you knows you’re kidding yourself.

Everyone is eager to eat. This is good. Four little equine piggies. You measure out the hay and sling it expertly into the feeders. But the Sick Horse, now standing in his stall, looks down at his hay and decides he doesn’t want it after all.

In fact, he is now looking for a nice place inside the tiny twelve by twelve stall to lie down. Lie DOWN? It’s then that you get really scared, and you touch him all over and find that his chest is wet with sweat (could it just be snow?), and you listen with your ear to his sides, and you hear no grumbling in the gut, which is really, really not good, and when, the moment you let him go, he starts looking for another place to lie down, you go for your medical box.

As if that’s going to help. You take his temperature. You check his gum color and his capillary refill time. You want to count his breathing, but you don’t have a second hand or a stop watch or even an alarm on the cell phone. Stupid cell phone.

By this time, you suspect that you are walking in circles and breathing too fast, so you call one of your best buddies, the horse guru/vet nurse, who is attending a really fun horse event hours away (which you were supposed to go to, but did not because there was already too on the family’s plate, and besides, you are leaving for Texas on Wednesday). She reminds you about all the things you need to check – including heart rate. And since you have a stethoscope (not a great one), you try to find the heart beat with it, even if you have no stop watch, no cell phone with a timer, nothing with a second hand.

After twenty minutes of testing every known heart-beat revealing site known to man, you still cannot find anything.

Then you call your Home Hero, who immediately goes out to get the Suburban started and shows up WITH HIS COMPUTER so you can time the respiration and the heart rate, assuming you ever find it (you really, really need a stop watch). He then starts to dig the horse trailer out of the snow, while you yell to the neighbor next door, a true equestrian, who shows up and looks over the Sick Horse (because now we know he really is one) and speaks the words you have been trying not to hear in your head. Colic. Vet. Go. Then he stays to help dig and hitch up – both the trailer and your flagging spirits.

This is a neighbor, but not the neighbor of this story. This is the snow moving neighbor with the primeval snow moving machine. GO BOB. I do not have a picture of Stan digging us out.

Meanwhile, the Sick Horse drops a load of green horse muffins, which is very, very good news. It means his bowel isn’t twisted, not entirely at least. And he does it twice. Even so, while he has only actually lain down on the ground once, that horse has been shifting weight from side to side, trying to relieve the pain in his gut, which you are praying is only gas or something.

You insert the horse into the trailer (lucky for you, all your horses are good at doing this). You drive east on Center. Stop to put air in one of your eight tires (lucky for you the air is working at the gas station) and you get on the freeway, headed for the vet (lucky for you the fog’s burned off and all the heavy traffic is heading in the other direction).

The vet is a great guy. He can be sharp and impatient, but that’s because he’s got a job to do, and Stupid people tend to get in the way. This morning, vet staff are ready for you—the exam room door has been retracted, the nurse is there, everything ready. And the Sick Horse, even though this is his first time at this vet’s and he is feeling lousy along with being a great big coward, is good as gold and walks right in.

You help the vet put the Sick Horse in a sort of structural straight jacket (“the stocks”), a short, narrow, free standing stall made of heavy pipe, designed to make a horse stay put, which is not typical horse behavior.

As I do not have pictures of the vet doing the things I describe here, having left my camera in the barn in the hurry to get out, you are getting more fog pictures.

The vet will re-check everything you already checked (no, he does not trust you).

In the end, the vet gives your horse a shot of something very, very nice. Then he puts on a really, really, REALLY long plastic glove—finger tip to shoulder long—and then he sticks his hand INSIDE the horse. From behind.

You’ve seen how an accordion works. Horses work basically the same way. When you stick your arm up the wazoo from behind, they gather themselves all together, back humped WAY up. The look on the Sick Horse’s face at this point says only one thing: “woo-hoo-Hoo-HOO.”

The vet pulls out a huge, line-backer’s fist-sized green and solid piece of fecal impaction and shows it to you. This is the plug. The first in a line of many. In other words, your horse has been trying to pass a small bowling ball. The good news: the bowel has officially not twisted. The horse will probably live another day.

The bad news: they have to sedate the horse slightly, then stick a very large, very long piece of tubing into one of his roomy nostrils. They feed it up and inside. And they keep feeding it in and feeding it in. (Whoops, got caught on the wind pipe there for a second). Three or four feet of tubing, at least, up the nose and down all the way into the stomach.

The vet blows into the tube every so often as it goes in, and then sniffs his end of it—“He doesn’t smell too bad,” he happily informs you. And you are amazed once more that medicine is half voo-doo and half technology.

The tube is finally connected to a pump. One gallon of mineral oil, two gallons of water pumped straight into the stomach of the Sick Horse, who is evidently, at this point, feeling no pain.

After that it’s easy. Reload the horse in the trailer, pay the vet (wallowing on the ground in profoundly real and teary thanks, which you did NOT do at the mechanic’s day before yesterday when he replaced your Sienna’s rack and pinion assembly) and go home. To wait and see and hope it’s all over.

You pull up at your pasture, unload the Sick Horse, who steps coolly out of the trailer, straightening his polo shirt and asking, “Say there, chaps: what’s for breakfast?”

But you have to pick up every sliver of hay in the horses’ yard. You have to because the Sick Horse is not allowed to eat ANYTHING until you are quite sure he will not, in fact, die. You tie him up as you do this because he is determined to vacuum up said slivers before you can get to them. He becomes more and more disgruntled.

But you finish, letting in the other little equine vacuums to finish the job. Then you kiss the now Rambunctious Horse on the nose, set him free, and go home to clean the bathrooms.

(The bathrooms? That would be the faithful G. I’m writing this instead.)

This is neither the sick horse, nor the rambunctious horse. It is the snotty horse, who was supposed to be a pony but turned into this instead. This is later. When we are not so worried and have time to be disrespected.

And that is what it is like to own horses.

Post script: the Sick Horse is now the Lively Horse. All you need is a couple of hundred dollars, a great neighbor and a gallon of mineral oil. Call me next time you’re constipated.

I can’t decide which of these three I like. This is #1

This is #2

This is #3, which really is not just like #2. So whaddya think? None of them are right yet. One is too blue. One too dark. Tell me, tell me which one you like????

While Scooter is in hospital with pneumonia, I do not need a sick Tiger.  But he kept lying down yesterday, as we spent all day long putting a floor in the tackroom, and extending the walls up to the ceiling in a bid to keep the arena/hay dust out of everything we own.

 Char worked, cleaning a year’s worth of thick, fine dust off of everything I’d hauled out onto the drive, until Guy brought her a disinfectant (having gone with M to Home Depot for supplies).  She used the stuff, and it burned the first two layers of skin off her hands.  Fun.

So she spent some time riding Dustin – first bareback in halter, then with the saddle, since he wanted to trot.  And you don’t trot on Dustin without a nice think pad and a saddle between you and his spine.  That was when we noticed that Tiger was dull, and kept lying down. 

 At first, I thought it was just the nice afternoon.  So I sat on him, later to be overcome with guilt, thinking he hadn’t been feeling well.  I rode him up, and it was cool – Murphy applauded me,  sitting on an “unbroke” pony as he went from supine to upright.  And it was actually really fun.  Once he was upright with me still sitting him, he got confused.  Started to take a step forward.  Stopped.  Just like – “What am I supposed to do now?”  Then I slid off.

 Later, I could see that his flank was all tucked up, and kind of rippling from time to time – to the tune of interesting gastro intestinal noises.  Temp: 99.9  Respiration: 32/min  Heart rate: 36/min  Capillary refill: 4 secs

So I put him in the jail with water, and we all went home, cleaned up and went to Cocolitos for birthday dinner.  Took some to the kids in the hospital.  Went back to look for poop, which I was prayerfully grateful to find.  No horses dying of a torqued bowel tonight.

Today, I checked Sophie’s feet after their 40 minutes on the grass.  There is definitely a pulse in all four now.   Quick but not pounding.  I’m not sure how to go.  Tomorrow, I may keep her off most of the time.  I also need to check the others.  The wild bunch.

G read that a woman was killed, run over by her spooked horses when she went out to water them.  It could happen any day to anyone.  The other day, I was brushing Tiger, and followed him into his stall on the end of the barn.  Jetta was in there, too.  I had my back to the inside of the barn, one eye on Jetta, who suddenly ducked her head and turned away.  And I was being hit from behind, shoved, the way a wave shoves you, that great uniform strength just moving you forward.

 I yelled, shocked to find that somehow, Zion had gotten into that space with us, behind me.  xLike, why hadn’t I noticed?  And when Dustin took three steps out of his stall, all hell broke loose with these three, crowded into the 12 x 12 with me.  Zion pushed me about three steps before I was able to slip to the side.  When he squeezed out past me, I slapped him hard with the shedding blade, yelling.  

And then I went after the surprised and now dismayed Dustin.  ”Don’t you MOVE when I’m in the middle of the rest of them,” I shouted, admittedly unfairly, shaking my finger in his face.When I turned around, there was Sophie, standing over at the far side of the jail, watching it all.  And behind her, only eyes and ears showing over her back, was Zion, evidently hiding from me.  The dork.

Not dead then, me, today.  And it was just luck. 

By the way, I thought it was Tiger who was taking the rope off the gate to the jail.  

I tie it in a square knot every day making sure that jail doesn’t come open and trap one mare in there where the others can get in and kick her into a corner.

But it hasn’t been Tiger.  It’s Zion.

 I saw him yesterday.

Scalliwag. 

 

I have been dying to put the horses out on the grass.  But frankly, there hasn’t been any.  Usually, I start the season’s feeding in the third week of April.  But not this year.  Our winter left prodigious amounts of snow on the mountain, but the spring brought no rain.  Not for over a month.  

The grass is deep green, which is right, seeing as I dragged that spreader all over it in late March, but where the blades would be a foot high by now, I barely have a lawn’s height anywhere on the entire acre.  Last week, I lugged that sprayer all over for the second time, looking for thistles and mare’s tail, and got quite a bit.  But as I put the fence posts in this week, I found tons more.  I am not pleased with Adam for having us thrown out here where the weeds never seem to lose.

I had enough hay to tide me until the second cutting of alfalfa.  Much confidence.  Wondering where I’d put the left over when then new harvest came in.  Not now.  I’m lucky if I can make it till then.  So last week, I started putting up the electric fence, in hopes that irrigation would kick things in to gear – assuming the water ever started coming down the ditch.I was late getting ready anyway – what with M leaving for South America and the trip to Disneyland, and G leaving Kansas City for the East and my Aunt being 88 and delicate.  But now, after doing a little every day, I have got most of the fences up, and I have only two more days on the charge for the solar energizer.

I let the five of them out on the grass Tuesday, May 6th, for fifteen minutes, which was really more like twenty to twenty five.  I had checked Sophie’s feet for a pulse before that and had felt absolutely nothing.  When I brought them back in – and they were surprisingly obedient, which is to say, I only had to yell for five minutes and swing ropes and chase back and forth – they ran back down the drive to the arena quite handily.  But I didn’t get down there myself, what with having to chase Sophie along, so they hit the arena bucking and throwing their heads, circled the thing and came pounding right back out again.  I wasn’t stupid enough to think they wouldn’t run through me, so I was philosophical about it; I’d closed the gate to the grass, so all they could do was get down there and moon around, staring over the fence, before things heated up again.  And sure enough, here they came back again.Zion actually seemed to be listening to me.  He was the first to give in, and led the charge back up the drive and into the arena.  Sophie lingered, eating the grass on the verges till I fetched her with a personal invitation.  I put her into the jail – well, she chose it – and once I had her eating a little hay, took her pulse again.The pulse in the white foot is a little easier to feel every day.  

Today was their third day on the grass.  I’ve fed them each a flake of hay in the morning to fill them up.  Then let them out as time allowed – an hour after the hay the first day, but several hours later the next day – it was the first day of irrigation, which means I was in the middle of a day-long anxiety attack, and the first thunder storm since last year.

 I was at the hospital with Scooter – four days old and with pneumonia already.  I asked Stan if he’d open Hinckley’s gate and bring the water down for us, which he was glad to do.  But as it turned out, John had shut the water off way up at the river not an hour before we needed it (WHY?????).  So Stan went to the river and turned it down.An hour later – still no water in our ditch.  Poor Stan went up and down the main ditch, looking for the danged water, which seemed hung up between Goodmans and our place – while the thunderstorm raged around him, pounding him with rain and hail.  He gave up after an hour.  Fifteen minutes later, the water, with all the power of the river behind it, came roaring out of the gate, pushing a massive plug of dead leaves and trash in front of it.  All of which is now strewn all over my pasture.But we did get the water.  We got two inches of rain in two hours, and two cubic feet of water on top of that.  If the grass can’t deliver after that, I’m quitting the business and buying rabbits.

 No.  Not rabbits.

Anyway, Sophie is already reacting to the grass, so I’m going to have to go very carefully with her.  The pulse is still slow and still faint.  But it’s there.  Dratted girl.  But everybody looks in good weight at this point – including old Jetta.  I’m not seeing ribs.  The Baby, Tiger/Hickory – he’s gotten so tall so fast, I’m not surprised that he’s the thinnest of all of them.  We’ll see how it goes.

 I have about eight bales left. If the grass is strong, it may be enough to carry me through.

Why do I do this to myself?  Maybe because of Zion, who ran up the drive today, and then stood there behind the open arena gate, watching me as I came up the drive, his white blaze all attention.  He waited patiently there, as though it were a fence, making no move to escape, which he easily could have done.  And so I gave him an extra handful of alfalfa leaves.  

 

Went to feed this morning and found that Tiger/Hickory/Baby had slashed his face on something.  A couple of months ago, I got there in the morning to find the jail gate off its hinges – didn’t take a forensics team to figure that one out: somebody had his face under the gate, reaching out those lips to get every single molecule of hay that had been flipped outside of the stall.  In came Dustin.  Up came the startled head – bang into the bottom of the gate – over to the hinge, which sheered off about three inches of hide up the nose.That little patch on his golden face is now blackish.  And I’m sure this new slash – another strip of hide gone, too, too close to that eye – will grow in dark.  He’s going to look like an etcha-sketch.  This time, I can’t figure out how he did it this time.Ah well –  

So last night, Geneva and G and I went to a two hour lecture about laminitis, presented by a vet prof from Colorado State.  We kind of hadn’t expected that many people to show up, but there had to have been two hundred people or more in that room – everybody from chicks in mullets and chewing tobacco jackets, guys with full beards, pearl buttons and cowboy hats to older women in crocs and guys who looked like doctors.
It was an interesting lecture.  He had a power point (yawn), and he went over the same four points about five different times.  And in the end, what he had actually said for two hours was: we don’t really know anything.  The treatment is even swinging back to age-old treatments  (stand the horse in a cold stream to take down the inflammation) once looked down on as just silly. 

But the point was that there is hope, and there are ways to treat horses.  You don’t have to lose a horse once he’s actually gone chronic – which is what they call it when the bone has separated from the hoof wall.What fascinates me about this is the intricate and unlikely construction of the hoof, and its even less likely attachment to the coffin bone.  They are actually more or less zipped together, interfacing ripples lined with little  - I don’t even have the vocab for this.  How a thousand pounds of dynamic horseflesh can be supported by those fragile, complex laminae, I don’t understand – unless you can divide the weight of the horse by the number of ripples in the laminae, each ripple taking part of the pressure of the load. 

By the way, a long toe is a dangerous thing, putting far more pressure on that delicate connection than a normal toe will do.  I went home to look at Sophie’s feet.  I thought that I saw founder rings on her hooves this morning – very tiny ones, four of them.  But when I looked this afternoon, I didn’t see them.  She’s cool and there’s no digital pulse at all in the fetlock, so for now, that girl is sound. I’m going to have to check her every day from the moment it starts to warm up for certain.

 Hickory kicked me today.  Not because he meant to.  He was trying to scratch an itch on the fetlock of his right hind – you know that awkward way they hold the leg up, then reach around hard with the head, till they can scratch with their teeth?  I always try to help.  And I got in there and started scratching.  At first, he was puzzled – still trying to get to it with his teeth.  Then he just stopped and watched me scratching, that leg suspended up under his stomach.  I gave it a good going over – then suddenly, the foot just popped over and caught me sharply on the outside of the knee – like the scratching had just felt so darned good, his leg just jerked.

First time I’ve ever been kicked, and it was purely my own fault. 

 Mark Twain said, “I’ve done eleven good deeds in my life and lived to regret every one of them.”I think the pony was embarrassed.  But we made it up together later. 

We took the guys off the pasture today. We had to. The horses were beginning to look like professional mud-wrestlers, and the pasture more like ground beef than a grass bed. Taking them off sounds easy. It’s not. We had to go buy a new panel for the expanded and wonderful new Jetta Jail, and another gate, then we had to switch one of the big gates with the panel to the south of it (because of the newly expanded and wonderful Jetta Jail) – which means we (and I mean G) had to dig the panel and gate out of six inches of something like permafrost.

When we got that finished, we unloaded the new panel and gate. Then we had to take an ice pick to the last panel, which had wintered on the north side of the barn, and was three feet in ice. At that point, we opened the driveway gate. We have a gate way down at the end, where the drive meets the road, and the driveway is lined with fences. But it’s always thrilling territory to our five guys, who discovered the open arena gate and filed through, eyes huge – as if they’d never escaped before in their lives.

They headed happily down the drive, sure that there must be grass to find, and spent a while sadly standing with their heads over the closed gate at the end of the drive, gazing longingly at the drippy, muddy pasture they’d just left. Then they gave it up, and the rodeo began. Suddenly, here they came, one after the other in a perfect line, pounding back up the drive like lions were after them – heads up, tails up, blood up. They galloped by (no cantering here), back through the arena gate, hooves throwing mud everywhere, and began a mad spring dance. They kicked. They reared. Sophie, who is our most heavy and awkward horse jumped all four feet off the ground at once. They thundered out onto the poor pasture, gouging and slipping and whirling and chasing, then back into the arena, down the driveway, back up the driveway and through the arena into the pasture again.

My Zion stopped his floating trot (tail so high, it was curving over his back like a Malamute’s) and stood tall, alert and lovely, staring at me and doing a series of short, explosive snorts. Blood up indeed. His legs were set to run, his ears were pricked, he was ready for anything, and so was Dustin.

Then we started assembling the jail. And everyone had to come in and examine the tools, and smell the new gate, and gaze in a puzzled manner at the panel which was now where the old gate had been – and check out the old gate in the new place, smelling it, and maybe bravely stepping through it onto the pasture. Tiger could not leave us alone. He wanted to know everything. He wanted to know why. He wanted to know how. He wanted to be inside the new space, and outside the new space, and he wanted to open the new gate with his nose.

It was a very exciting morning. At the end of it, Jetta had a new house, better than a jail, and was safe, eating her dinner, from all gelding or mare depredations. Only one thing I’d forgotten. And since I didn’t go to the pasture to feed the next day – sending the boys out into the drizzle and rain, I didn’t remember for a full day. Last night, more than half asleep, this flash of knowledge came into my head – like a sudden instant messenger thing: Jetta had no water.

I sat up, grabbed Guy, and at one in the morning, went out to rescue the poor girl. I felt like trash. It hadn’t been hot. In fact it had been cool and wet – but my gosh. What an idiot. We walked down the long drive in the cloud diffused light of a hidden moon, answered softly all the questioning nickers, and let the girl out. There was some shuffling around, but soon enough, Sophie took her turn in the jail, and Jetta drank for three minutes straight.

All is fine now. There is water in the mare house. There is safety there, too. And spring is coming. With all its mud and mess and promise, it is finally coming.

Had to haul in another almost $300 worth of squeegee to clean up the stalls – one mucky, wet winter. But everybody’s doing fine. Geneva says not to worry about thrush till it gets warmer – as it will soon enough now. So this year, I’m going to get better at cleaning out hooves. My hay has been super this year, bless my farmer, and it looks like we’re going to have some thirty or so bales left over after the pasture opens up. Bought 162 then 12 more, and it was almost absolutely perfect, which is saying a lot, if you know anything about hay.

The baby is HUGE. Taller than Zi or Jetta – maybe bigger than Dustin, which will not please him at all. The other day, when I was mucking out the open stalls while the great fur-balls were eating, I once again faced the two butt ends of Zion and Tiger (the baby) who share a stall when they eat. They make this V with their heads apart and their back ends together. When I need to get between them, I either have to take my life in my hands, or go around to the barn door and come at them from the front. Neither is acceptable. So I have started going in on Zi’s off side, between the barn wall and his body, then leaning on him with my arm over his back, and pressing on his far side to get him to move into me.

I know that’s chancy – being pinned between the wall and a thousand pound body is not a great experience. But at first, he didn’t get what I wanted him to do at all. So I’d squeeze in further, duck under his neck, come up on his other side, between him and the baby, press on his ribs and get him to move away from me.

A week or so ago, I tried the move-into-me trick again, and lo and behold, he moved right over as I asked. I scooted up to his head so as to be out of the way, and he had the most irritated look to his ears. But he did it. And the next day, he did it again. He doesn’t welcome the intrusion – he IS eating, after all. But he got it.

Yesterday, when I was cleaning once again, I looked at those two great behinds, and at the muddy ground, and didn’t want to do either thing. So I just said, “Zi. I need you to get over. Can you get over?” And he did it. No ears this time, just crossly shifted his weight and moved completely aside for me – no touch, no push on my part. Just language. It was the coolest thing ever.

Sarah Christopherson rode by again today, her horse fetlock deep in the gritty snow on the roadside. That arab mare was on one, tossing her head and dancing. “I think they smell spring,” Sarah laughed. And truly, when I jumped the fence this morning to walk next to Tiger, one hand on the crest of his neck, he turned as if to nip at me. Cheeky indeed. “No,” I said. He turned away, as if he were thinking that over, then did it again. “NO,” I said, and he seemed to settle down. Sometimes, when I try to walk next to him, in his rhythm, it makes him nervous, and he will suddenly speed up – hopefully without kicking as he does. But after I spoke so firmly, he seemed to lose his cheek, and walked with me easily.

Still, even Jetta was bucking and kicking a little the other day in the crisp pre-snow afternoon.

I looked up at Sarah, riding in just a hoodie in sub-thirty degree weather. “Get home before you freeze,” I told her. But I’ve ridden horses in the ice and snow and I know the truth – especially on a fractious mare whose fretted herself sweaty – a person sitting on a horse is almost always going to be warm as toast.