Posts Tagged ‘horses’
Extra Excitement
We stepped out of our geothermally air-conditioned home yesterday morning into an almost tropical humidity that had me sweating after just a few strides. There had been a rambunctious thunderstorm in the wee hours before dawn, and the weather service was warning that the day could bring even more severe storms in the afternoon.
It was not going to be a day for mowing. After breakfast, I decided to do some rearranging in the compost area.
I removed the pallets from around the most active pile and positioned them beside it. Since the pile was still cooking pretty well, I’m going to leave it standing for another day or two before stirring it up and tossing it back inside the pallets for a second round of composting.
While I was working on that, I suddenly heard the sound of splashing down at Paddock Lake.
Three of the horses were really getting into it as I approached with my phone to record the action. Mix walked away just enough to stay out of the frame. They kicked so much that it looked like they were trying to empty the puddle by working together at the same time.
After I was back in the compost area behind the trees, I suddenly heard the pounding hooves of running horses. They had sprinted out into the hay field, where they stood atop the high spot to survey their surroundings, looking like lords over their domain.
They weren’t out there for very long when the pounding hooves started up again, and I could hear them racing back to the barn overhang. I always wonder if their sprinting triggers memories of their days racing against other horses on the track.
All this activity happened in such a short span of time that I wouldn’t have had a clue if I wasn’t working near them in that moment. The horses spend the majority of their time standing under and around the overhang, so it can seem like they are practically sedentary.
It’s nice to have witnessed proof that this is not necessarily true. Just because I wasn’t around to notice doesn’t mean they haven’t been sneaking in a little extra excitement every once in a while.
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Sour Dock
Also called Curly Dock, we learned of sour dock from a local farmer who was supplying us with small squares of hay back when we had the Arabian horses. He pointed out that it was the only weed in his hay and that horses didn’t like it. It’s toxic for livestock, so I don’t blame horses for not liking it.
Yesterday, Cyndie and I took a crack at digging up the larger sprouts around the paddock, since they are too much for the string trimmer to chew through.
Some of the stalks are beginning to swallow our fence wires. While we were working, the horses wandered over to inspect our progress.
Cyndie had been putting the stalks into old feed bags, but they filled up so fast that she went back and got a wheelbarrow. Mia came over, grabbed a mouthful, and pulled a bunch of them back out of the bag. I thought she was going to eat some, but no, she just dropped them on the ground. She knows sour dock is toxic. I think she was just messing with us.
Then the mares turned around and formed a line to graze the short grass in the paddock.
Each time I finished digging up one plant, I would find another one nearby. Soon, I realized that this would become an endless task. Our two big fields may not look like there is a lot of sour dock at first glance, but wherever there is one, you can find another close at hand.
The weed is difficult to pull up because the main root is carrot-shaped and can reach ridiculous depths. I wish our attempts at growing carrots looked as good as some of these.
We filled two wheelbarrows full and are now left with figuring out where to dump them so as to avoid any possibility of spontaneous regeneration. It does enough of that on its own.
Away from the fence lines, we resort to mowing the fields to disturb the cycle of growth. The back pasture is more than ready for me to bring out the big tractor and brush hog to knock down the weeds and shorten the grasses to a more enticing blade height for the mares.
The front field we let go until the guy who grazes cattle on the neighboring field has someone cut and bale for feeding his cattle in the winter.
It was so fun having the horses come mingle with us as we worked that we’ve decided to find other activities to do in their spaces that might add a little excitement to their day. Their life of retirement is pretty much filled with napping, grazing, and waiting around for feed bucket servings.
They could benefit from occasional disruptions to their routine, triggering an urge to satisfy their curiosity.
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Getting Bit
Before the horses came into view on my way to the barn, I heard an uncharacteristic whinny from one of the horses. As I came around the wall of the overhang, I found three of the horses coping fine, but Mia was flinching and stomping her feet and whipping her tail. She was obviously uncomfortable with the amount of harassment being dished out by the flies.
A day or two earlier, Cyndie had spotted big welts on Mia from her reaction to the bites. I returned to the house to interrupt Cyndie and her three lunch guests for a consultation. Since she hadn’t covered Mia with a fly sheet earlier, she decided to leave her friends and come with me to help Mia without delay.
The sheet is white, so at a glance from a distance, I couldn’t tell her apart from Mix. This morning, Mia was walking with an awkward timidity because the straps around her back legs bugged her. We agreed that the sheet could come off for the time being.
She still has on her extremely fashionable hand-me-down fly boots to protect her lower legs. A brisk wind would do wonders to reduce the abuse they suffer from flies, but we don’t have much say in making that happen.
I suffered an insect bite of my own yesterday. Found a tick firmly attached to my upper arm that I needed to enlist Cyndie’s help, again, to extract. We will be monitoring the site for evidence that demands professional analysis. In the meantime, I will seek to ensure I have all my critical affairs in order.
My dreary attempt at bleak humor aside, I have been bitten by so many ticks in my life and dodged major consequences that I’m fully expecting this to resolve similarly. You’d think I would take it more seriously, given Cyndie’s experience with Lyme Disease, but her situation involved an unknown source of infection and a lengthy period of confusing symptoms before being identified.
My distress would be much greater if I didn’t see the tick that bit me and know it hadn’t been on me for more than a few hours. Experiencing symptoms of illness with no known cause, like getting bitten by a tick that is almost microscopically small and never realizing it, scares me a lot more.
Both Cyndie and I chose long ago to accept the gamble of risking exposure to ticks in order to fully experience our outdoor activities at Wintervale.
This latest tick bite does have me missing the chickens a little more than usual today. They would have gobbled this critter up long before he had a chance to get me, I’m sure of it.
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Rewarding Things
As I was making progress with the string trimmer along the fence line yesterday morning, I had the thought that it’s one of the most rewarding things to see the fence freshly trimmed.
On my walk back toward the shop, I found Mia and Mix lying down while napping in the tall grass of the hay field. Light was doing the same thing inside the large paddock fence. I thought, one of the most rewarding things is, seeing the horses feeling so safe and content and lying down together.
Before I started packing for the lake, the backyard needed mowing. The dandelions were getting as tall as small trees. Not wanting to leave the mower deck all weekend without being cleaned, I parked the mower on two planks so I could scrape the accumulated grass clippings off the bottom of the deck the moment I finished. It led to the thought that it’s one of the most rewarding things to so easily scrape the deck clean while the gunk is fresh and damp.
We then packed the car, left Asher and the horses in the care of our friend, John, and headed to Hudson for the “Taste of the Valley.”
It was a beautiful night for a picnic. We enjoyed repeated rewards of flavors and textures. It was almost impossible to keep track of how much we’d eaten. Cyndie and I shared a lot of bites with each other.
The most rewarding thing came at the end of the day, as we arrived at the lake just after sunset and successfully avoided colliding with any wildlife when driving during the hours of low visibility. Still, we spotted one black bear in a distant field and one deer grazing precariously close to the road.
We stayed up late to watch Stephen Colbert’s last Late Show. Poor CBS. The broadcast company has become a shameful shadow of its former self. It’s been rewarding seeing how many people of good character have voiced their support of Stephen Colbert, and that his popularity has only grown since it was announced that CBS had canceled his show.
It was a good end to a very rewarding day.
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Just Ask
My curiosity was genuine. A year ago, we had the asphalt company that put in our driveway come back to patch cracks and reseal the entire surface because it seemed the original protection hadn’t lasted as long as expected. Over the winter, those same cracks just opened right back up.
I was a little disappointed, but surmised the natural freeze/thaw conditions were the culprit, not necessarily a bad job on the sealing/patching quality. It seemed to me that hiring them to come back and give it another try would be throwing good money after bad.
But after weeks of walking over these disconcerting cracks and moping about them each time, I finally decided to call the owner to ask if he would come look for himself and to offer his professional opinion about the crack repair not lasting. Mostly, I wanted him to know exactly how the driveway they installed looked after only four years.
You never know how this kind of call will go, but to my surprise, my timing was perfect. They were finishing a driveway in the area, and he would be able to come look at it that very afternoon. Doubling my surprise, two company trucks pulled in together. He brought two of the guys who do the work so they could all see it and put their heads together to come up with a solution.
Oh, I forgot to mention, before they even arrived, he texted me that he intended to make any improvements necessary at no additional cost. This all happened on Friday. The crew is coming today to repair any cracks that need attention.
All I needed to do was make the call and ask the first question.
“Could you come out and look at it?”
I give some credit for the fortunate results of my query to the fact that I wasn’t trying to get something for nothing. A form of altruistic reverse psychology, maybe? Something like that.
Meanwhile, here’s a shot that reveals how dry it’s getting around here:
Like the static formed by rubbing a balloon on hair, Mia’s swishing tail was building up a static charge.
If she would just ask, we could wet it down for her. Maybe that is why the horses seem so happy when Paddock Lake has water in it.
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Showing Age
It feels like a Saturday morning around here, for no obvious reason, especially since weekend days are rarely different than the rest of the week for us now that we have no employment responsibilities. The weather, the horses, the music we put on during breakfast; they all influence in some way, but I suspect it is something deeper in my unconscious.
I composed an email yesterday to kick off planning for my high school class’s 50th reunion next year. Funny, how it triggers recollections and reminisces of people and places from so many decades ago, even as I carry on with my current routines, tending to our property and animals with hands that look like an old man’s.
My long-term effort to use the winter accumulation of manure in the paddocks to create a rise over a drain tile is coming along nicely.
The horses haven’t paid much attention to it lately. Some years, there has been a lot more evidence of them messing around along the edges of the pile. I look forward to them doing that to break up the dried manure that rolls to the bottom, to mix it into the existing, predominantly clay, soil.
We are in a bit of a dry spell that has finally put an end to standing water in the low spots of our trails through the woods. It has also dried up Paddock Lake.
The horses have been working on expanding the borders by their antics of stomping and kicking around to get back up after they lie down in it. Their interest in it seems to disappear as fast as the water does.
They reached a fresh level of shedding over the last couple of days. This morning, we watched Mia pushing her butt so hard against the almost completely dead willow tree that it looked like it was going to topple over. She succeeded in scraping out massive clumps of hair.
A wild turkey gobbled in the distance, and the sun popped out for a few seconds between a sky full of thick clouds. The day seems like a Saturday with a mostly open agenda. A guy could go for a bike ride if he didn’t have a log home guy stopping by at some undetermined time to quote a wood maintenance project. Both the logs of the house and the log-looking siding on the shop garage are showing their age.
I can totally relate.
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Labyrinth Day 2026
Never mind that the first Saturday in May is when the Kentucky Derby is run every year; this is also the day when labyrinth walkers the world over walk as one at 1:00 (in each of their respective time zones) to meditate on peace, creating a wave of energy that circles the globe.
I gave the lanes of our labyrinth a final mow yesterday and then steered the riding mower along all of the grass walking paths around our property. We’ll spend this morning tending to last-minute details and then become greeters for potentially a record crowd for Labyrinth Day on our property.
The labyrinth is looking as good as we could make it this time of year. The main thing missing is leaves on bushes and trees, and flower blossoms on plants that bloom. Early May is too early in the growing season to do our property justice, but folks will get the gist of how special this place is.
Cyndie is expecting quite a few people who have never been here before. We are looking forward to sharing the glory of our paradise with newcomers. I asked Cyndie if we should close off the hay field to limit the horses to the back pasture near the labyrinth. We decided that they are so beautiful to watch out front that we’d let them continue to have full run of their territory.
Do you think our horses are aware that the big “Run for the Roses” race happens in Kentucky today? That world is a long time ago in their lives. They might have a sense that other horses are running, but I’m pretty sure they are fully submersed in their lives of retirement, which has absolutely nothing to do with track racing.
At one o’clock this afternoon, all minds will be focused on world peace. I suspect the horses will be picking that signal up loud and clear.
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Accepting Attention
There is nothing more satisfying for me lately than seeing the horses looking thoroughly contented. We started their day yesterday by closing gates to confine them to the paddocks in advance of an appointment with a farrier. Being suddenly restricted from the acres of fresh green grass didn’t appear to bother them much.
I noticed two of them napping on the ground and decided to wander out and scoop up a couple of fresh deposits that had recently been dropped. While I was out there, Swings decided to lie down as well. Light stayed on her feet, but was doing her own version of snoozing in the warmth of the morning sunshine.
Before the farrier arrived, Cyndie and I showed up to put halters on the horses. Only Swings showed some initial resistance to the idea, but soon cooperated. What followed had me a little surprised. Our contact from This Old Horse, Maddy, arrived, and she joined Cyndie in grooming away the hair the horses were shedding. The fact that none of the horses objected to the intensity of attention was very uncharacteristic of them.
After a bushel of hair carpeted the ground, Cyndie began brushing out manes, using conditioner to detangle knots. While she worked, we moved one horse at a time to the other side of the overhang for the farrier, Jamie, to take care of their feet.
Light was first, because she doesn’t always stand well for the procedure. Jamie was wonderfully patient and completed all four hooves with only minor noncompliance. Cyndie brought Swings over last, arguably the easiest of the four.
We then opened the gates to the fields and gave the herd of old Thoroughbred mares full run of the place again. They calmly made their way out into the sea of green to graze. Out there on a sunny day, they are the picture of bliss.
When Asher and I showed up to serve the afternoon feed, three of them slowly made their way, one by one, back to the paddocks as I was getting things prepared. Swings chose to linger on the grass. I know enough now not to fret over their timing. I hung out all four buckets and took Asher back to the house for his dinner.
Opening the app to view our surveillance camera, I could see Swings munching away at one of the buckets while Mix was taking bites from a hay net, and Light and Mia stood by looking perfectly satiated.
Having these rescued horses accept all this attention and then appear so wonderfully satisfied is incredibly rewarding. They’ve come a long way from the stressed condition we witnessed when they first arrived here.
I’ve learned a lot from them about allowing time to pass for deep healing to emerge. The process of reclaiming their fully deserved equine health probably never really ends.
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Sailing Again
The shade sail is up for the season!
Cyndie floated the idea of trying to make this happen before she needed to leave for an appointment in about an hour. If it wasn’t for her prompt, I would have let this slip to some other time. Since she asked, I decided to jump and make it happen.
I hadn’t thought through the steps in advance, so I just dove in and made decisions on the fly. Everything seemed to work just fine, and we got it completed in the allotted time. Later, on a walk with Asher, I spotted Mia already standing with her head and neck within the shadow. It is a wonderful reward every time I see them taking advantage of the shade.
While Cyndie was waiting for me to retrieve a second ladder, she noticed the horses’ eyes were getting swarmed by flies. Seems early to me for them to need masks already, but why wait?
Not long after, I spotted one of the gray masks on the ground in the hay field. It was Swings who had wriggled her way free of it. I waited until they were eating their afternoon feed to offer Swings a different version of mask, and she willingly accepted it.
I think the masks are begrudgingly accepted by the horses as a necessary evil. The face coverings are annoying, but not as annoying as the flies.
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Dodging Downpours
Thunder and lightning dominated our morning, all the way from the wee hours when I was trying to stay asleep, through our walk with Asher in the woods, and tending to horse chores. It wasn’t a constant storm, though. The rain was intermittently gushing and then stopping completely for varying spans of time.
We chose to delay even starting out the door until one obvious radar blob cleared our airspace. Our walk was pleasant, and we stayed dry everywhere except our boots, awash in the sloppy footing.
During the interval we were with the horses, we ended up trapped under the overhang two different times, waiting out short cloudbursts that suddenly occurred. Each lasted only a short time, allowing us to continue with our tasks without getting soaked.
Cyndie noticed a new level of hair rubbed into the braids of twine we wrapped around the overhang support posts. The mares were biding their time under the protection of the roof with some self-grooming while the deluges were pouring down.
Now that the rainstorms have moved beyond us, the world outside looks too soggy to be inviting. A little sunshine would do wonders to inspire us away from otherwise leisurely indoor pursuits.
I expect that Asher will encourage us to get back outside on his regular schedule, no matter what the weather offers. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
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Relative Something 