Posts Tagged ‘horses’
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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Creative Solutions
In more than a decade of living here with horses, I have never gotten around to making an effort toward improving my primitive methods of composting their manure. If I were truly serious about maximizing my operation, I could have put in a base material on top of the bare ground and installed a roof to avoid rainstorms from saturating the piles.
Yesterday, as I was turning over the lone pile that has been cooking for a while, I was dealing with the inevitable tendency of the drying material to resist holding a cubic shape. It naturally slides off to become much more of a pyramid. Since the outer 6 inches won’t be actively composting, the narrowing top portion of the pile is much less efficient than a cubed shape.
Having contemplated a lazy man’s method of a walled fixture to square up the sides, I finally took steps to test my theory.
With my mindset of wanting to reuse materials, I headed down to the hay shed and scrounged for three pallet possibilities. Right in front, I found a scrap roll of 1/4-inch hardware cloth covered in pigeon droppings. How appropriate, I thought.
I stapled the hardware cloth to two of the pallets and relied on the third having minimal gaps between its boards. Grabbing some loose polypropylene twine lying nearby, I put everything on a wheelbarrow and headed to the compost area. Crudely tying the corners of the pallets together, I tossed the pile inside, easily making it much taller than previously possible.
Why it took me so long to do this is a testament to procrastination.
There is an area in the paddock where the clay soil at the surface is pottery-grade quality. When it gets wet, the weight of the horses sinks their feet down a dramatic depth. The soil around that spot has less clay, but is equally messy when wet. So it doesn’t make sense to me how the horses can create a dry path at an angle across the middle of this otherwise disastrous zone.
I don’t know how they do it, but I wish they would make paths like this in all the other messy areas of the paddocks for all of our sakes.
Creative solutions R us.
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Random Crashing
It’s all about the weather. The conditions we awoke to yesterday morning were right up there with the most challenging we have faced, primarily due to the precipitation falling while temperatures were right around freezing. It wasn’t a harsh cold like a winter day, but a little bit worse in the way of bone-chilling, soaking wet cold.
The horses were shivering more than we liked to see, and Mia’s blanket was half off and dragging in the mud. Luckily, she stood still while we removed that and put on a fresh dry one. While the horses were occupied with their morning feed, Cyndie began cleaning out the inside of the barn so we could offer them a chance to come inside. We decided on a plan of leaving the stalls wide open and giving them the ability to come in or out as they wished without restrictions.
Since the last two times that we put them in stalls and closed the doors were disastrous, mostly due to Mix’s PTSD tantruming, we wanted to test whether they would choose to come in on their own to get a little extra shelter if we didn’t lock them in. There was fresh water, hay, and a small serving of feed in each stall.
They were all pretty skittish about coming in and showed no sign of being comfortable enough to relax and take advantage of the shelter. There were frequent moments of urgent exits and crashing into doors and each other, but then they would wander in tentatively again for another try. Swings was confident enough to spend extended time eating and drinking in the first open stall. She was comfortable enough to pause for a pee while in there.
Eventually, she made her way to the opposite corner stall and spent a little time checking it out. Mia barely made it inside the front door because Mix and Light were busy not making their minds up and nervously rushing out as quickly as they had tiptoed in.
After we grew weary of waiting for them to calm down, we kicked them out and closed the door so we could get back to the house to feed Asher and have some breakfast for ourselves.
When we came out around noon, the ice accumulation on tree branches was growing to between 1/4 and 1/2 inch thick. Whenever a gust of wind shook loose the ice, the crashing sound on the metal roofs of the shop-garage, and the barn made it sound like entire branches were coming down.
It was good the horses weren’t inside the barn because that would have freaked them out big time. The temperature was climbing a few degrees above freezing, and the horses appeared to have warmed up enough that they had stopped shivering.
We decided to keep the barn shut, but we swung the alleyway gates out so they could have access to the center space under the overhang that is normally reserved for us, leaving the door into the barn closed. Watching them on the surveillance camera, we saw Mix claim the center spot, which left Mia with an entire side of the overhang to herself.
They were done crashing around, so all that remained were large shards of ice raining down out of the trees at random when wind gusts shook them loose. It was no less unnerving for us.
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Distributing Treats
We thought the rain would arrive during the afternoon yesterday based on the radar scans, but it didn’t start falling until well after dark. In the middle of the afternoon, we made a special trip to the barn to team up on putting rain sheets on the horses. To my surprise, Mia didn’t move away as we were covering the other three while plying them with treats.
Since she was right there, I tossed a lead rope over her neck and offered her a few treat bites, while Cyndie quickly wrangled a sheet over her back. Mia was doing fine, but there were leg straps on the back that Cyndie didn’t want to bother Mia with, so she was trying to knot them up to keep them from dragging. While she was doing that, the other horses started to crowd us, hoping for more treats.
We ended up in bad positioning, and Mix decided to lash out at Mia with a kick. That riled us up, and things got a little chaotic as Cyndie and I took turns chastising Mix while trying to calm all the others and not lose the progress on getting Mia’s sheet fully buckled.
It never pays to take shortcuts. We really should have staged them on separate sides before starting, but having them all standing together made it tempting to go for it before any of them had time to reject the idea. In the end, we got them all covered in advance of the cold and wet conditions that could last for the next few days.
Cyndie saw a video of a homemade indoor activity challenge that we thought Asher would go for, so we collected the pieces and strung them up yesterday.
His favorite toy of late is a ball that we put some of his dry food in for him to roll around until individual bites fall out from all the gyrating. We thought he would surely get excited to flip the cups and bottles on a string to gobble up all the pieces that drop out.
Well, he showed little interest in having anything to do with this plastic trash that he knows is off-limits when it is in the recycle bin. I thought it was good that he could see the treats at the bottom, but he’d probably like it more if they were painted bright orange to look more like dog toys similar to his ball.
He doesn’t need to see the food inside them; he knew what was in there from across the room because he could smell it. He simply wanted those enticing tidbits to be in his orange ball, the way he likes it.
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Overlapping Naps
Asher and I headed down to the barn mid-morning to retrieve the feed buckets and clean up any fresh messes under the overhang. The first thing I noticed when we stepped out of the house was Mia standing all alone in the round pen. We found the other three horses huddled together on one side of the overhang, positioned so the warm sunshine was covering one full side of each of them.
It was a normal hour for them to be napping, and they appeared to be all in at the moment. Mix really should have found a spot to lie down, because she was ridiculously close to toppling to the ground. Her head sagged lower and lower as her slumber deepened, until it almost touched the ground, and her back legs buckled, jarring her awake for an instant.
When I finished cleaning up around them, I opened the back door of the barn for Asher to lead us on an agenda-less walk. He slowly made his way past the old chicken coop until we were parallel with Mia in the round pen.
There, he sat down to survey the distance for activity, so I sat down beside him. This is one of my great joys of retirement. There was nowhere else I needed to be and nothing else I needed to do in that moment. When Asher eventually lay down, I did, too. I placed a hand on his back and closed my eyes. If I fell asleep and he moved, I hoped I would notice.
I didn’t feel myself falling asleep, but when some sounds and movement suddenly brought me back to consciousness, I could tell I had dozed off. The sound that woke me was Mix arriving and posturing to lie down just on the other side of the fence beside us. She must have gotten fed up with almost falling over. Beyond Mix, I noticed that Mia had already lain down to nap inside the round pen.
It was a wonderfully idyllic scene, the four of us all napping together, except that when Mix lay down, she rolled on her back and rubbed her face and sides on the grass before settling, and those gyrations happening so close to us brought Asher to his feet to observe the spectacle more closely.
I wanted the horses to be able to enjoy a moment of deep sleep on the ground, so to give them more space, I got up with Asher and invited him to continue our meandering stroll around the property.
It was okay that we didn’t get to linger there with them. I was tickled that Mix had shown up to join us while we were snoozing. We were doing overlapping naps.
The horses don’t stay on the ground very long, anyway. As Asher and I followed the back pasture fence line around past the labyrinth, I could see that Swings had come to the far side of the paddock to join in the ground napping, but Mix had already returned to her feet.
Midday napping in the warm spring sunshine is a luxury not to be passed up when the forecast for the next 4 days is filled with threats of cold air and a freezing mix of precipitation.
Of course, Asher and I will simply move our overlapping naps indoors until winter finishes with its latest unnecessary after-the-fact tantrum.
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Relative Something 