Posts Tagged ‘flow’
Rehoming Horses
In less than a week, they will be gone. Our three horses are returning to the home from which they traveled when they came to us back in the fall of 2013. There is an invisible gloom darkening the energy around here of late. It feels eerily similar to the dreadful grief we endured after Legacy’s death in January of last year.
Happiness still exists, we just aren’t feeling it much these days.
Cyndie spent hours grooming the horses yesterday. I found myself incapable of going near them. It’s as if I’m preparing myself in advance for their absence. This place just won’t be the same without them.
For now, we still have the chickens. With the snow cover receding, and hours of daylight increasing, they are expanding their range again, scouring the grounds for scrumptious things to eat from the earth. It is my hope that they are getting an early start on decimating the tick population around here.
After Cyndie said she picked seven eggs yesterday, I asked if we were getting ahead of our rate of consumption yet. Almost three dozen, she reported!
Spring has definitely sprung.
I walked the grounds yesterday to survey the flow of water draining from the melting snow. We are benefiting greatly from overnight freezes that have slowed the process enough that no single place is being inundated now. It was the heavy rain falling on the deep snow that led to the barn flood last week. We’ve had little precipitation since, and that has helped a lot.
There are a couple of spots where the flow has meandered beyond the modest constraints in place to facilitate orderly transfer, mainly due to the dense snow that still plugs up the ditches and culverts.
Water definitely chooses to flow the path of least resistance.
I can relate to that. It feels like our life here is changing course in search of a new outlet for our energy to flow. Part of me feels like there should be a rehoming of ourselves, except we have no home to which we would return.
In a strange way, it’s as if I am experiencing a similar avoidance of being with myself, like the way I couldn’t bring myself to stand among the horses yesterday.
If this is not the place where I belong, then I already don’t want to be here any more. Unfortunately, there is nowhere I’d rather be right now.
When buds pop, and leaves sprout, I will breathe in our forest air. That will help.
But it won’t be the same without our horses.
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Inspiring Flow
Well, the threatened blast of a winter storm did deliver as predicted overnight Thursday and into Friday morning. We awoke to a white scene-scape with clouds continuing to unleash serious amounts of new snow. I cleared off the front steps first thing, so I could tell how much more we were getting during the daylight hours. Another inch fell in the morning, bringing our total accumulation to 10 inches. As soon as falling snow started to let up, I headed out to plow.
With temperatures following the storm predicted to rise well above freezing, all I needed to do was clear a path down the middle of the driveway. The sun would take care of the rest. Unfortunately, that simple task was made more complicated by how heavy and sticky the snow was.
Another unfortunate thing about the snow is how exponentially more muddy it has made the paddocks. It’s getting to be quicksand-like mud out there. I expect to be working on re-forming and re-opening a lot of drain channels today.
I opened the one on the back side of the barn yesterday, which involves shoveling out the slushy snow that causes the melt water to stand in place. Once the water has an open channel, it really starts flowing. In a major coup of drainage improvement, the water was not only traveling past the paddock, but even beyond the round pen before heading down toward the main drainage path. That is a great sign that my hopes for minimizing the water from above which previously drained into areas we don’t want it, can be realized. I didn’t think that was possible without more significant re-landscaping.
As good as that was, it wasn’t the highlight of my day. We have rigged one other trick to manage water runoff, and yesterday was the first time it was truly put to the test. We have placed one of our 100 gallon oval watering troughs beneath the downspout of the new gutter on the paddock side of the barn, and attached a garden hose to drain the tub. The hose is long enough to reach about three-quarters of the length of the paddock, where I have placed it into that flow channel from behind the barn.
It is working as well as I wished it could. Maybe even better. Now all the water from the barn roof that used to end up passing through the paddocks is going to be diverted around. That is a huge amount of water and will really help improve the condition of our paddocks. It’s inspiring!
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Relative Something 