Posts Tagged ‘horses’
Harsh Environment
It’s not always easy, carving out survival in all the crazy extremes of weather possible in the great outdoors. It may seem odd at first mention, but I think snow actually softens the blow of winter months, both figuratively and literally. We have received very little this year, and what did fall has mostly disappeared. After the rain and re-freeze, followed by a few days of melting, we settled into a pattern of cold that has created a particularly harsh environment outside.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The ground is hard as rock and every other step is slippery from spots of ice.
Dezirea showed up with a bloody cut just under the joint of her cannon and pastern bones. If you look closely, there is a less obvious cut similarly located on her other front leg. I wondered if she maybe broke through some ice in the drainage rut that crosses the back pasture.
There isn’t any snow deep enough to have broken through a crust to get a cut like that.
Cyndie is up at the lake place for the weekend, so I sent her a text with the image. She asked if there was any blood on Hunter’s back hooves.
Hmm.
I hadn’t thought of that. Of course, there wasn’t.
Dezi was moving around just fine and didn’t seem any worse for the wear. There has been no further bleeding from the cut, so I am letting time do the natural healing it always provides, while also watching for any changes to the worse.
Delilah and I walked the pasture to look for any possible hazards or signs of a possible cause. Finding absolutely nothing, I’m beginning to think Cyndie may have identified the more likely culprit.
I sure hope Dezirea is dishing out as much as she is taking in the ongoing roughhousing happening among our three-horse herd.
Makes me miss Legacy that much more. Tomorrow is the first anniversary of his departure from this world. I’m definitely feeling it.
Toward the end of his life, Legacy’s poop took on a strikingly loose consistency. In an unsettlingly timed turn yesterday, while cleaning up after the horses in the paddock, I came upon a pile that was uncomfortably similar to what we used to see from the old herd leader.
Maybe the horses are feeling a little sick, too, over memories of what transpired a year ago on that oh-so-cold January thirteenth night.
A harsh environment, indeed.
.
.
Fine Love
I was clinging to life yesterday, what with an intermittent drippy nose and a congestion headache invading my otherwise stellar health, and from beneath my snuggly blanket, I kept hearing lyrics from a John Hiatt song, over and over in my head.
I’ve seen an angel or two before
but I never asked one to be my wife
Cyndie and I have taken turns caring for each other over the years, and when it’s my turn to be the patient, Cyndie becomes an angel of mercy for me.
She took this picture yesterday morning that gives the impression of some kind of energy emanating from our barn. I expect it is a couple of dissolving jet contrails that painted the morning sky in such dramatic fashion, but I’m happy to imagine that it means something about our place.
Love is one of the pillars by which we live our lives, and it continues to inspire our imaginings of what might be possible on our precious property in the rural countryside. The last few years have been a struggle, in a variety of unrelated ways, not the least of which was the passing of our herd-leading horse, Legacy.
The ongoing painful dysfunction of our government that for over two years has been providing a daily scourge of depressing results hasn’t helped, either.
Cyndie and I are in a bit of a holding pattern as to what comes next. It was a response to her discoveries working with horses, and our time spent with Ian in Portugal that brought us to this property. I was happy to join her in this adventure to unknown possibilities.
Back to John Hiatt’s song…
I left my map way back there baby
I don’t know where we are
But I’m gonna pull my pony up
Hitch my wagon to your star
“Real Fine Love” Written by: JOHN HIATT Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group
I’m not sure what comes next, but it seems to me that it would likely have a focus that emanates from that barn.
Whatever it is, it will be infused with a real fine love.
.
.
Year Ends
Today is the last day of 2018. What do you make of that? I think it’s just another Monday, strikingly similar to all the others, no matter where they fall in a year.
Our animals don’t seem to notice any particular significance to the date. The passage of time is doing our balding Wyandotte hen a bit of good. New feathers are slowly growing in.
They have all handled the day of rain and following freeze well enough, mostly by spending the majority of the ensuing days beneath the overhang with the horses. For their part, the horses show signs of understanding the precariousness of the icy slope, but it hasn’t kept them from braving the danger to walk down to the waterer, even though we put a tub to drink from by the barn to save them the trip.
I noticed several marks of slipping hooves which was rather unsettling, but they are choosing to make the trek of their own free will. I trust their horse sense in this instance, partly because the last time we tried to outsmart them, it didn’t go so well.
Walking Delilah around the perimeter trails has become a treacherous exercise of trying to walk like a penguin over very unpredictable surfaces. She hasn’t been slowed much by the conditions, so there is an added challenge of being pulled along by her, faster than little steps accommodate.
When she stopped to give a prolonged inspection to something that caught the attention of her nose, I spotted this single stalk of some plant that was dropping seeds on the snow. It looks like such a delicate process playing out, despite the harsh elements nature has been delivering lately.
It’s just another Monday, and life goes on.
I don’t know if it is something of a placebo effect, but since we are now over a week beyond the shortest day of the winter solstice, I got the impression it was already lighter outside during our late afternoon walk.
Or, it could just be the dawning of a new year.
Farewell to 2018 and greetings to 2019! It’s all just a series of individual moments. May we benefit by paying attention to them all.
.
.
Dangerous Formula
Take one part 3-inch snow burst, follow it with a day-long steady rain, and then finish it off with a quick drop in temperature to produce a solid freeze. What could go wrong?
We are currently enduring some of the worst footing since we moved to this property. It has us genuinely concerned about how to best protect our horses from critical injury.
Rain saturated the new snow on Thursday, creating an amazing amount of soupy slush. The snow on the ground absorbed as much water as possible while still being considered snow. It was basically thick water. After an overnight hard freeze, the conditions on Friday morning morphed into an uneven, rock-hard maze of slipperiness.
The splattered wake of tire tracks in Thursday’s slush are now locked solid in a bumpy, slippery, frozen echo of that rainy day.
The ground just beyond the barn overhang in the paddocks slopes down quickly enough that we sometimes worry about the horses staying safe on it on good days.
They were inside for the night when everything froze up, after getting miserably cold and wet the day before. We feared how they would handle the insane slipperiness if we put them outside without warning. The grassy footing of the back pasture seemed like a much better place to start.
They would still need access to the automatic waterer, so we opened a gate that would allow them to walk the flatter ground into the paddock as needed.
All good, in theory, but there would need to be a trick to the execution that we totally failed to consider.
Our plan was to take them out the back door and walk across the grass, past the chicken coop, to a double gate that they probably have never used. The catch was, with three horses, and only two of us, we wouldn’t be moving them all at once.
Without anticipating the consequences, we took Cayenne first. I walked her, while Cyndie managed the gate. Cayenne was expectedly cautious about the odd scene we were leading her through, so we took our time. Back in the barn, Hunter immediately voiced his dissatisfaction with our strange departure with one of the herd.
This also was to be expected, so we weren’t concerned. We would be back to get him and Dezirea soon enough.
Once inside the back pasture with Cayenne, I removed her halter.
Can you guess the next part?
She immediately headed back to familiar territory and Hunter’s call, and not as carefully as we wished. Since we had already opened the gate to allow them access to water, Cayenne trotted quickly back into the icy paddock, running right up that slippery slope to get under the overhang.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
To avoid further running, we decided to bring the other two out under the overhang to join Cayenne like normal. Unfortunately, just as we feared, Hunter lost footing on the icy slope right away. A back hoof slid out from under him, and in an athletic reaction to catch himself, he stomped on Cyndie’s foot with the opposite front hoof.
She yelped, he pulled off instantly, and calm was restored. Nothing broken, but definitely bruised.
This morning, when Cyndie went down to open the barn and let them out, she reported the horses showed no interest. They appeared quite satisfied with the safe footing in their stalls, despite the cramped quarters.
.
.
Snow Wrecker
The worst thing to happen during snow season is a rainstorm. Dry snow is so much better than wet snow. Wet snow becomes slush after a time, and after the day-long rainfall we experienced yesterday, we ended up with nothing but a soupy slush.
The ground is frozen enough below the snow that water won’t soak in. Instead, it pools until the water reaches an outlet to the next lowest spot.
The drainage from the paddocks that flows across the back pasture was running like a river when Delilah and I braved the rain for her mid-day walk.
She made it across without much effort, but my big feet were going to make a definite splash. I stopped to gather my courage and plan my maneuver. Delilah busied herself with a face wash while waiting for me to take some pictures.
Everything I tried to do was made significantly more complicated by the umbrella I was fumbling to keep over my head.
As we neared the road on this typical trek around the property, I spotted the stump where our mailbox is usually mounted. That meant a snowplow must have roared past and tossed up a blade-full of the slush; a mass that packs more punch than my plastic mailbox can survive.
We found the box portion unceremoniously discarded upside down in the ditch, soaking up rain. Luckily, the plow had blown by before the mail delivery arrived, so there were no drenched bills inside.
Delilah growled at the odd scene as we approached.
I guess I kind of growled, too. Expletives.
The paddocks are a disaster of packed down slush, transformed into a dangerously hard and slippery wet surface against which the horses struggle to maneuver their hefty weight. We didn’t bring them inside overnight Wednesday, despite it ending up being the smarter thing to have done.
I brought them inside last night, with hope they might appreciate it even more, after their previous misery.
Even Pequenita was able to express her opinion about the nasty conditions outside yesterday, even though she is supposed to be an exclusively indoor cat.
Before the rain had totally destroyed the several inches of new snow that had fallen on the deck at the beginning of this weather event, I was preparing to light a fire in the fireplace. I opened the door to grab some kindling from the box out there, without noticing the cat had positioned herself right in front of me.
‘Nita walked outside before I had a chance to corral her.
Two steps into the sloppy snow, she just stopped. It was not a good day for an escape.
Maybe not good for her. Escape is pretty much all I want to do from this weather fiasco.
Rain has no place in our northern snow belt during winter. Bah, humbug!
.
.
Festivities Underway
The week after the winter solstice has become a time of amplified car commuting in my mind, ever since we moved an hour away from family in the Twin Cities, to rural countryside in western Wisconsin, where we have animals that need tending.
For some occasions, we have been lucky to find sitters to live in our house and care for our horses, chickens, and dog, but holidays are a tough time to ask others to do the job, at the expense of their own family gatherings.
Generally, that means we do the hour drive to participate in a few hours of holiday festivities, and then duck out early to make the hour drive back home again. Although the commute has become second nature for me to get to the day-job, the short time between trips each day around Christmastime makes the driving seem much more significant.
And, on Christmas day, we do it twice in one day.
It is not ideal, but it is always worth it, on both ends. We never regret time spent with our animals, and the time with family is forever priceless.
This year, we have an added bonus of relatives visiting from Norway. That wouldn’t be my relatives. The Fisknes family are from the Ravndal clan on Cyndie’s family tree. Cyndie’s great-grandmother was a Ravndal. We drove out to Eden Prairie last night to greet the family of five who are initially staying at the home of Cyndie’s brother, Steve.
After Christmas, the plan is for them to spend a night or two with us at Wintervale.
We don’t have oodles of snow to show off, but that might just change right in the middle of their visit. Precipitation is coming, but there is a sad chance it could be rain and snow mixed. Yuck.
The horses are enjoying the lack of snow cover during their brief forays onto the frozen grass of the back pasture. Yesterday, when I opened the gate for them, Delilah and I lingered in the field with them to appreciate the moment.
All three horses emptied their bladders in quick succession, and then followed that up a short time later with a rambunctious roll on the ground. Seemed like a very business-like routine in preparation of an afternoon of free grazing.
I am getting prepared for some free grazing of my own. Our kids will visit us this morning for our little personal family Christmas brunch, and then we drive to Edina for Christmas eve gathering with Cyndie’s cousins on her mom’s side.
I will sneak out early to drive home. Christmas morning, I finish chores and drive back for the Friswold gift exchange extravaganza.
The festivities are definitely underway.
.
.
Wishing Again
I wish one thing didn’t necessarily come at the expense of another.
I wish it would snow.
I wish it would stay dry and warm.
I wish time would just stop.
I wish what comes next would hurry up and get here.
I wish I could see the world through horse’s eyes.
I wish there was more peace on earth and nothing but goodwill among all people.
I wish nobody ever learned how to hate.
For all the thankful, heartfelt, and peace-loving salutations that saturate our days around the winter solstice, I wish the December holidays of every religion would last all year long, even as I long for all the hullabaloo to be over and done with.
I wish people would be a little less certain about our understanding of the universe and a lot more accepting of mystery.
I wish we could all laugh a lot more than we cry, even though some of us also cry when we laugh.
I wish you all the very best this holiday season.
May all your wishes come true!
.
.
.
.
.
Really Enjoying
Despite the unhealthy air quality associated with our current weather pattern, I am really enjoying the visuals all this fog creates.
Once again, Cyndie comes through with some wonderful shots…
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
She said the horses looked like they had been sprinkled with powdered sugar. Their backs and even their tails were flocked with frozen crystals from the fog, but she wasn’t close enough for it to show in the pictures.
Who knows what today will bring. There have been predictions the sun will shine later and the temperatures will climb above freezing. I won’t complain about that, but this freezing fog sure has been fun for the spectacular visuals it creates.
Dawning Colors
I couldn’t pass up Cyndie’s offer of pictures she took yesterday morning. One special thing about the short days of winter, morning chores align nicely with spectacular views of predawn light shows.
While I was inside brick walls, Cyndie and our animals had a front row seat for some of nature’s best.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I sure wish I could have seen it live.
.
.
Relative Something 