Relative Something

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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