Relative Something

What day does your cleaning crew show up to clean around the barn? Ours arrived yesterday (in the form of me) and did a fantastic job sprucing up the horses’ living quarters. Even though the air temperature was only in the single digits (F) in the afternoon, it was twenty degrees warmer than when we showed up to feed the horses in the morning. The difference was enough to allow me to work comfortably without feeling like all of our survival was on the line.

I hunted down an ice scraper that worked wonders to knock the frozen pigeon poop off of the placemats. Before Cyndie arrived to serve the buckets of grain, I raked up all the scraps of hay that tend to collect in the corners and along the walls.

The horses are always wonderfully accommodating when I am moving amongst them to do my housekeeping tasks before we bring out their food. During the periods of extreme cold, I have also taken to showing up at their buckets when they get close to being finished to break up the portions that have frozen to the bottom, corners, and edges. They all seem to recognize the reason I am there, and they allow me to mess with the food in the few seconds when they lift their heads between bites.

All of my actions are intended to make their surroundings as nice as possible for them. They have all been through hard times, and we want the place we are providing to be the absolute opposite of whatever stresses they have previously experienced. They are living their retirement in a place that we hope in time will erase any residual tension they might still carry from the rough periods of their previous lives.

I don’t mean that to sound entirely altruistic because there is a selfish component to all this housekeeping as well. I prefer the way the place looks when it is clean. Even if they didn’t appreciate their accommodations being well-tended, I’d probably continue to tidy things up just for my sake.

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