Relative Something

Every day that it doesn’t rain or snow is a day toward drying out our land. When the overnight temperature drops below freezing, it adds a little freeze-drying effect to help things along.

Granted, it makes it impossible to clean up the overnight manure in the paddocks with my plastic tined scoop tool. It’s no match for the frozen mish-mash of mud craters left by the horses that subsequently get filled with their droppings. I just tell the horses that it’s an opportunity for them to live as most horses do for a while.

Nobody we are aware of would spend the kind of time we do to create such a vast expanse of manure-free paddock space for four retired horses. Well, this time of year, our mares get to witness a lot more composting in place.

The surface dries in a gradient, but not entirely linearly. Partway down the slope tends to dry the fastest, while the area uphill from there, just beyond the barn overhang, stays muddy a little longer. Just this side of the chopped willow tree that can’t figure out how to completely die, stays wet the longest. That water needs to travel from around the driveway loop all the way across that paddock to get to the drainage swale crossing our property from north to south.

The process can take days. I guess we’ve gotten used to it, so I am rarely surprised to find it’s still wet. What is surprising is that one day we will find the ground suddenly seems bone dry. Like it had never even been wet. Like it hadn’t been absolutely saturated for days on end. Nope. It becomes dry and dusty, hard as a rock.

Until the next time it rains. Or, bite my tongue, snows twelve inches.

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