Archive for October 2023
Longest Disappearance
This morning I am writing while seated near our front door, wondering if Asher will ever return. Moments before Cyndie was to drive off on an errand, Asher bolted into the woods as she was about to bring him inside and feed him.
I had just finished feeding the horses and came up to find Cyndie planning to drive to the neighbor’s place where he had recently made unauthorized visits three different times. She didn’t find him there.
Now she is gone and my walk around in search of any sign of him proved fruitless. This is the longest he has been awol in the six months we have had him.
Watching two squirrels chase each other around the trunk of a tree out the front door informs me that Asher is still not in the vicinity. He has trained them well to seek the highest branches and get out of sight whenever he steps outside.
The sight lines are wide open today, which is a drastic improvement over yesterday morning. While feeding horses yesterday, it looked like we didn’t have any neighbors because of a heavy fog. We could hear cars driving on the road but we couldn’t see them.
At least Asher won’t have any trouble seeing our house if he decides to return. Since his recent forays to the house across the road, we have been making him wear his orange vest to which we attach a leash to restrain him. At least he will be easily identifiable as someone’s pet by that vest.
Cyndie was slowly granting him opportunities close to the house to move off-leash while she lured him with treats to pay close attention to her.
Yesterday, after the fog lifted, we lounged on the back deck with Asher tethered on a long leash. He basked in the warm sun.
I hope that my post tomorrow will be able to describe his return without incident. I may spend today thinking about how big an area we could fence off to contain him if that ends up being a solution.
After failing to achieve control with our previous dog, Delilah, I am hoping we don’t end up in the same situation with Asher…
He’s Back!
Before I finished typing the previous sentence, I spotted Asher slowly walking up the driveway. His orange vest is more dirt colored than orange. He took a big drink from his bowl but didn’t seem the least bit worried that he hadn’t been served his usual breakfast.
I don’t know where he’s been or what he may have found to eat, but he seems rather exhausted and perfectly content to just lie down and rest.
I wish that his return would make me feel just as perfectly content.
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Eleven Years
In October of 2012, Cyndie and I packed everything we owned and moved from Eden Prairie, MN to the property we named “Wintervale” in Beldenville, WI. I am very lucky to have a record of the process and everything that has happened since preserved in the archived posts of Relative Something.
We spent a little time yesterday looking back at pictures we took eleven years ago and marveled over some of the changes. We found one of me sitting on the Ford New Holland 3415 diesel tractor with the manual open to the “Instrument Panel” information.
There is also a photo of the one and only time Cyndie drove that tractor.
The bucket is filled with debris we were clearing out from the space beneath the barn overhang. The previous owners had stored gates, fence posts, and a bunch of firewood under there. It’s been the primary hangout space for horses ever since.
On a walk yesterday, I tried to take some pictures from a vantage point similar to ones from eleven years ago. It wasn’t easy to find the exact same spot.
October 2012
October 2023
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I tried using the top part of the barn visible in the shots above to line up a reasonable comparison. There’s no longer any sign of the shop garage or the house roof from that hill. It’s nice to see how much the evergreen trees have grown. In the 2012 photo on the left, the willow tree that is visible became fenced inside the small paddock and is now nearly dead.
There was an incredibly warm day in 2012 that inspired us to cook dinner outside over an open fire for visitors, Elysa and Ande.
October 2012
October 2023
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It is easy to see that there are more leaves remaining on the trees in 2023.
October 2012
October 2023
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That spruce has gotten a little taller.
I’m curious how much growth might happen in eleven more years. While walking through the area we call the North Loop –which over the years has been cut for hay, fenced in for grazing horses, and now allowed to grow wild– I was surprised to discover several new pine and oak trees that have naturally sprouted on their own. The existing poplar grove is doing a fair job of expanding its reach and many of the existing pines are growing strong.
We look forward to shepherding this acreage toward becoming its own little forested space on the north side of our driveway for years to come. Based on clear evidence revealed on our walk, the deer are already fond of bedding down there.
Happy 11th Anniversary, Wintervale!
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Dramatic Glow
Getting up in the morning to feed horses this time of year provides more opportunities to see the spectacle of dawn’s early light when there are clouds around to be illuminated. Yesterday was a fun one.
During much of the summer, the sun is already above the horizon by the time we pop out of the woods near the back pasture on the way to the barn.
More than once, I neglected to grab my sunglasses on the way out the door and regretted it when finishing horse chores with the sun glaring.
It’s both a treasure and a curse to need to be outside every day regardless of the weather conditions. Builds character I suppose. Whatever “character” means in that context.
Sometimes, I feel more like it’s a caricature of myself that is created by my antics. If Relative Something was a cartoon animation, what would my voice sound like? I can’t say. I don’t know what the self-talk that plays inside my brain sounds like.
If I tried to pick a voice actor to play me, it would become an exercise in deciding what famous voice I’d want to sound like. Samuel L. Jackson. Um, yeah, no.
Okay, I admit recently rewatching the final scene in the diner in the movie, “Pulp Fiction,” when I stumbled upon it while channel surfing. I’ve also been watching the limited documentary series, “Beckham” but I don’t hear his voice fitting for me.
The documentary about me will need to be animated because nobody with a camera has followed me around recording all the poignant scenes of our lives at Wintervale. It’s too bad because the morning routines outside as the sun is coming up would look beautiful.
Especially when Mix reaches her head out toward me in her greeting and we exchange breath.
Can you imagine hearing me lightly calling from a distance to let them know it’s us coming?
“Good morning, horses.”
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Puzzling Thoughts
There are hints in this transition toward the months of spending more time indoors than out, that jigsaw puzzling season is going to start very soon for me. The increased hours of darkness are a significant influence on my thinking, but I have also noticed lately that my photographic eye is trending toward images that deserve to be cut into a thousand pieces.
Maybe not each of those, but I’d enjoy a crack at assembling a puzzle out of the first one. I’m a sucker for the period when the seed plumes of our ornamental tall grasses show up and look a little like fireworks displays.
I started the day yesterday with a 6-month teeth cleaning appointment which is a necessary evil that isn’t all that fun to endure but feels great when completed. The day only gets better after that, even if the only real work undertaken involves managing the manure composting area.
It has been hard to keep the piles cooking lately. This time of year the composting process slows down, forcing me to move some piles before they have broken down as much as I’d like. It helps me to have as many piles as possible cleared out to leave plenty of space for dumping loads of frozen manure throughout the winter months.
This year we are still using the composted material to fill low spots around the edges of the driveway pavement remaining up by the house. It’s rare that I don’t have uses for the custom soil cultivated from our horses’ manure, but after the driveway landscaping is completed once and for all, I may be looking for a spot to stockpile accumulating inventory.
The horses never slow down their production, regardless of my finding new ways to put it to good use.
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Autumn Walk
The ground has started to dry up after the most recent soaking and the sky slowly grew sunnier and sunnier yesterday afternoon making for a particularly picturesque leash-walk with Asher.
Warm, however, was not how the air temperature felt.
I have no confidence that Asher is able to associate being confined once again to the leash with his recent rash of unacceptable sprints across the road to disrupt things at our neighbors’ but it’s the only solution immediately available in our bag of tricks.
The challenge it creates for us is finding ways to burn off some of his big energy with games and exercises in the house. He got a little wound up in the house but he was amazingly tolerant of being tethered every time we went out.
I thought this flipped-over oak leaf with the deep puzzle-shaped recesses was particularly eye-catching. I didn’t recall ever noticing leaves with this shape on tree branches. A few minutes down the trail, boom! There’s a small oak with the same shape of leaves. Doh!
The trail in the woods offered more mystical nature specimens, especially this classically shaped toadstool.
Had me looking for a troll sneaking around in the trees nearby, especially the way Asher was sniffing the ground.
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Sharing Space
I guess it’s nice to see big and small creatures getting along but part of me feels bad when the pigeons poop on the backs of our horses. It’s bad enough that the birds act like our barn was built solely to provide them comfortable space to raise families. As they grew more at ease around the horses, I noticed they began to show up to scavenge pellets of feed while the horses were still eating, sometimes even stepping right into the pans.
Now some of the pigeons have started standing on the horses’ backs.
I sure hope the pigeons are eating a fair share of the flies that are always trying to share space with the horses’ faces.
Meanwhile, I’m back to sharing space with Cyndie who has safely returned from a trip to Santa Fe where she and her friends’ visit just happened to coincide with the Ring of Fire solar eclipse. Not bad timing on their part.
I took full advantage of her return to opt out of dog duties for the first time in too many days. Asher made Cyndie walk through the dark last night to the neighbor’s house where, for the third time in three days, he wanted to share space with their [I’ve since learned] cockapoo.
She was very unhappy about that, which was just the way I felt the first two times he trespassed over there.
I’m afraid our plan of allowing Asher the freedom to roam our property off-leash has taken a serious turn in the wrong direction.
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Not Ever?
Once again, Editorial Cartoonist Clay Bennett’s work resonates for me. Agreement, disagreement, …words tangle in attempts to convey life and death complexities that, when reduced back down to LIFE and DEATH, shouldn’t be quite so complex. What level of vengeance… Never mind.
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Think about it.
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Can’t Complain
Relative to the news and analysis of my ongoing experiences being chronicled here, I can report from my thoroughly biased perspective that we are emerging this morning from the day-long soaking rain with fresh anticipation for Cyndie’s return late tonight.
One aspect of caring for non-speaking others that I deeply dread is my inability to interpret their expressions of needs or wants. I can’t say that Cyndie deals with these situations any less stressfully than me, but when she is taking them on, I am relieved of sole responsibility.
I’m pretty sure I misread Asher’s whiny pleading last night. I had made the mistake of getting too close to the road with Asher roaming off-leash and he suddenly bolted for a house on the other side of the road to harass their dog while entirely ignoring my attempts to command his obedience.
He was thrilled over being able to lap up whatever was in bowls on their front steps (cat food?) and manically sniff every nook and cranny around their property, peeing on only half of them. Their little barking Bichon Frise-like breed dog had retreated to their back deck. Luckily, Asher was too curious to be confrontational and merely invaded its personal space when conducting a full inspection of their deck.
Our wonderfully sweet octogenarian neighbor, Eileen, was bold enough to grab Asher’s collar when he finally trotted up to meet her. I was busy panicking that he was going to jump on her and knock her over. Since I hadn’t brought a leash along on this walk, I tried walking him by the collar close enough to our property before letting go so I could run with him back to the safe confines of our property.
Asher made a U-turn and went right back to their front door. Eileen stepped inside to grab a leash to loan me so I could get him home.
Inside our house, Asher whined and paced from door to door, wanting to get back outside. I assumed he wanted to go right back over to where that little dog that barks all the time lives.
All this was happening in soaking rain. I can’t complain about the long, slow precipitation. It was perfect for our recently planted grass, but it made it complicated to step outside with the dog. Asher persisted for so long that I decided I needed to put on his vest with a leash, get myself geared up for battle against the elements, and take him for a walk.
He didn’t poop right away. He made me walk several circles through the thickest woods before he finally relieved himself of what looked like uncomfortably loose excrement.
No wonder he was whining.
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Mia Protecting
Our dog, Asher demands a lot more attention than the horses so I gave him an extended session of intense physical play thinking that would earn me a chance to switch to looking in on the horses later. Getting down on my hands and knees in the front yard, Asher and I wrestled hard as he challenged me to take away the variety of balls he would bring my way.
Whenever I got a free ball, I would throw it as far as possible for him to chase. After he pounced on it and turned toward me in a crouch, I would provoke him from afar which would trigger him to charge toward me at full speed. That enabled me to practice my best evasive moves at the very last minute to avoid a collision.
It really helps to be able to see him coming.
When I made it out to check on the horses, they were milling about in the paddock. As I was making my way toward Light there was some movement among all the horses and Mia started backing toward me. I assumed she was just making space for Light who was in front of her. As I adjusted my position to come around in front of Mia to approach Light, Mia pinned her ears back.
I was the only one near her and that signal, combined with the backing toward me a second earlier, helped to clarify who she was “talking” to. I don’t think she wanted me bothering Light at all, whether I had good intentions or not.
She didn’t need to tell me a third time. I retreated to the other side of the gates at the overhang and watched from a distance. Mia stayed beside light as they slowly made their way toward the far side of the large paddock.
Later, as I was coiling up hoses in front of the barn, I kept hearing one of the horses let out a scratchy squeal. I guessed it was coming from Light but never witnessed it.
Mia and Mix were in view, so I knew it wasn’t them. When I stepped around the corner to look, Swings and Light were just standing there like nothing was going on. Light may be going into her heat cycle, in which case I will give her all the space she needs.
I’m impressed and rather pleased to see that Mia –notoriously the lowest-ranking member of the herd– was stepping up to control activity for once and not just reacting to what was going on around her.
That doesn’t mean I gave her a free pass when she nipped at my glove as I held it out for her to sniff as I was picking up empty feed pans later. That was just being unnecessarily snooty on her part. Too bad I can’t wrestle the horses like I do Asher.
By the way, he doesn’t get any free passes from me, either. I can’t let him win all the time or he’ll think he’s the boss of me.
I mean, I know he is, but I don’t want him to think that I know he is.
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Side Views
Asher and I spent a little time out behind the house yesterday morning in the space that I think of as our “side yard.” It produced this collection of views that caught my eye…
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I hope these provide a sense of the beauty and tranquility that we are blessed to enjoy in our little paradise. Maybe not so tranquil for the burrowing rodents that Asher seeks to root out, but otherwise, heavenly in the fall, under majestic old trees on a bright, sunny day.
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Relative Something 