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I tried. I really did. And I cannot resist the temptation to post this.
My lovely horse.
Running through the field.
Where are you going
with your fetlocks flowing in the wind?
I want to shower you with sugar lumps.
And ride you over fences
Polish your hooves every single day.
And bring you to the horse dentist ... ?!
From Father Ted.
(Do you think it has anything to do with this???)
Horse + girl = energy.
Lovely.
Check out T3XA5's marvelous photos on Flickr.
I am feeling rather smug atop my big Percheron.
We are venturing out at a ground-eating walk down the rutted road just behind the ranch. Toby's hindquarters roll like dark waves and break over my hips, advance and retreat like the tide beneath my sitz bones with each step forward. We wade downhill into a cool pool of early autumn air. I am admiring the dolphin-like arc of my horse's neck, the coarse and unruly mane that is becoming less resistant to taming, the way the brand new bit catches the late afternoon sunshine.
When suddenly Toby's neck and head disappear between his two stiff front legs, and he is crow hopping. No! I correct him sternly. I pull on the reins, but this is like that time I went deep sea fishing and got a sail fish on the other end of the line. There was no way I could reel him in.
My rear end parts company with the bareback pad, and I am sailing through the upper regions of space, diving into the clear sky, cannonballing into the heavens, over my horse's withers, broad shoulders, neck, ... and I find myself thinking, clearly and distinctly—Oh man. This is going to. Really. Hurt. Bad.
I land in the mud, on my well-padded behind and a shoulder.
Sure glad I wore my helmet.
Remarkably, it doesn't hurt all that much. And as I come up for breath, slowly, tenderly, rubbing that big sore spot that used to be my butt, I see Toby standing a few feet off, head drooped, ears pricked forward, blinking once, apparently waiting for me.
I think I would be kidding myself if I said the young horse looks sheepish or guilty. Frankly, he seems more confused about what I am doing here on the ground when I was just up there on his back you know. But at least he does stand like a stone while I clamber up on board.
Not nearly so smug.
Check out dok1's, Twan Teunissen's, and belindakelle's photos on Flickr. Nice.
Did you know that we are rapidly switching from being rural to primarily urban dwellers here on planet Earth? (Hat tip to Solara.)
One of my fondest memories happens at this time of year. I'm 14. My dad lets me and my 11-year-old sister drive his gray and red 1948 Ford tractor around and around the pasture, eventually turning us loose together down the rural road. She drives. I stand on the back, hands on her shoulders.
We are wearing flannel shirts and blue-denim overalls. My hair is in two long braids. Our barn burns bright red in the late afternoon light. It's cavernous loft is stuffed to the brim with hay.
The maple trees are a crimson tide against the fence. There's an entire forest on the other side, filled with shadows and all the mysteries of the universe. A cold clear creek runs not too far beyond that. In the winter, I will glide across it on ice skates. My mom waves to us from her seat on the hand-hewn mounting block that's been outside the two heavy sliding barn doors for over 200 years.
Last night, a deliciously cool undercurrent wafts along the foot of our mesa, meandering along the Pecos. My family sits outside almost every night now, watching the sun go down. A horse whinnies from the barn. We cling steadfast to the final vestige of summer.
And I pull my old gray flannel shirt closer, clinging to this rural way of life. I wrap it up in my arms. Hold it tight.
I am brushing my big horse Toby. Down the neck, over the withers, along the belly. He is making goofy faces of sheer joy. I am running my free hand along behind the brush when I feel it.
The winter coat. It's coming on. Soon my sleek and handsome percheron will be transformed into a wooly mammoth.
Yeah, and you thought they were extinct.
I keep this photo in my office because it just makes me smile.
2001. Utah. Winter. I am admiring the buffalo across the barbed wire when this handsome fellow saunters over. (He was so friendly, I think he must have been some kid's 4-H project.)
I have a friend who says that he would have made a beautiful sofa to go in her living room. Now that's just not nice.
Wish I could have brought him home with me.
I've never started a horse from the very beginning before. It's a little scary, because I don't want to mess things up. In fact, I've dragged my feet about really working with Toby because I've been filled with indecision and a sense of just plain old scared. After all, I'm no professional horse trainer, I tell myself (several times). What if I do this wrong? What if I do that wrong?
So, what do you do when you don't have the money for a professional horse trainer? And this is something you've always wanted to do besides? Well. You just trust your knowledge. And your intentions. And you start.
And it's very exciting.
I find that during this training process, in the midst of all that thinking and little wheels turning about where my weight is, keeping light hands, open the rein and invite him into the turn, use that outside leg to bring his hindquarters around the circle, how am I going to help the horse learn this or that, etc., etc., etc., I am tapping into something much deeper.
An iridescent pool full of dreams.
An ancient art form.
And ... to my utter delight ... something about not being separate from anything, but a part of it all.
Way cool.
Flickr photographs. I love these extraordinary photos of horses from Ride n' Fast & Take n' Chances. willis.dewitt and UGAclint have captured the essence of the Sangre de Cristo peaks.
The momma cat who had her four kittens in our barn is gone. Either 1) she deserted them right after they were weaned (bad momma, bad) or 2) she got eaten up by coyotes (poor momma).
We named them Simon, Charlotte Gray, Shiner Boch, and Bob. Two of the kittens are pretty wild, despite our best efforts to tame them. And two of them are very tame.
I've had two of them fixed already. My vet got me some help for paying for that with an organization called PAWS. Two more to go. Or I'm going to have a cat explosion in my barn. Which will make Matilda-the-tenacious-heeler very unhappy.
Related links:
Tale of a barn cat
El gato diablo
Gargoyles
Whoa… Check out Wild Media’s exquisite photostream over at Flickr. I think her photos are breathtaking.
Don’t look at your form, however ugly or beautiful. Look at love and at the aim of your quest. ... O you whose lips are parched, keep looking for water. Those parched lips are proof that eventually you will reach the source.~ Rumi.
Molly over at HolaMole (In Sonora, Mexico) wrote me earlier about her beloved appaloosa horse “Handsome,” who she said in reality wasn’t handsome at all, but after being called by this name for years, began to believe that he actually was. Wonderful story about a special woman and a special horse. In a recent post, she also writes : Another valuable lesson I'm learning is that Mexicans as a generalization do not judge people on their looks, but more on their hearts. Somehow the folks I have met are so much better at looking into your soul and deciding if they want to be friendly with you or not.
I dreamed last night that I was not an almost-45-year-old woman, but in my early twenties again. I was wearing the little black, off-the-shoulder, Audrey-Hepburn-type dress that my mother designed and made for me. With a hemline just a few inches above the knee, the V-necked bodice wrapped around my then-tiny waist and ended with a simple flourish of a bow. Oh, it was pretty. And so was I. Fresh like the rain. My lips were smooth and red as a rose petal. In the dream, I was listening to a jazz pianist in a round room full of windows from floor to ceiling, my elbows propped on his glistening Steinway.
This morning I am frowning into the bathroom mirror at the wrinkles etched around my eyes, my mouth, across my forehead. Rough-hewn into my face by ten years of hell in an abusive first marriage that, most of the time, blessedly, I simply don’t think about.
God, I hate them.
I search the face of the woman in the mirror. Certainly it was someone else who put up with all of that, I think. Or did it happen in one of those strange alternate realities like you see on a SciFi Channel TV show? Perhaps another dimension? The Twilight Zone.
I remember thinking that he was handsome then.
My hazel eyes stare back at me. They are brighter than the rest of me. Like gems.
The inside does not always match the outside, I think. Pretty is as pretty does, didn't someone sometime say? (Very possibly my mother, the woman from Oklahoma ...)
Several years ago, my (before I gave her to my daughter) Andalusian mare Caprichosa cracked the coronary band (kind of like your nail cuticle) of one of her hind hooves. We never found out exactly how it came about, but the horse squealed piteously from the top of the pasture, unable to move, calling us to her. From the injured place the hoof split into an ugly, jagged crack that threatened not to heal and to only get worse as the hoof grew. I remember looking at it, thinking of the delicate anatomy of the horse’s hoof, all-too-painfully aware of the soft quick inside, where bone can separate from the wall, leading to ... well, I couldn’t think about it then.
I cleaned the mare’s hoof with iodine, wrapped it with a disposable diaper and duct tape, dosed her with butte, then called the veterinarian. Fought the panic rising in my throat because Caprichosa, my beautiful white mare —the one gift that the not-so-handsome-after-all first husband gave to me during that time, that lifetime ago that happened on some distant planet—is the irrevocable, indelible agent of change in this woman’s life. My talisman. You see, she helped me to save myself. He gave her to me, and I left pretty quick after that.
My husband of almost six years now, my wonderful man, my Dennis—the horse and wife whisperer—told me we’d do whatever it took to get the mare back to rights.
It took a specialty farrier to literally sew the two pieces of the cracked hoof back together with surgical wire. (I nearly passed out during that procedure.) Special shoeings thereafter. A lot of money that we scraped up from somewhere. And a year of pasture rest for the hoof to heal. Caprichosa still has a ridge running down the front of that hoof. She always will.
The mare and I have both been cut to the quick. But. I guess. You can be quick. Or you can be dead. And we are both very much alive.
When we ride in the mountains, Cap’s hoof holds up in the high and wild and fiercely beautiful places of lightning and hail and stone and thunder. And so do I. Like the bright, white mare of the Celts, she has carried me to places that I didn’t even know existed. Or ever would. Or could.
I guess wrinkles are not so bad. I'm going to try to make peace with them.
The inside does not always match the outside.
Related Links:
Horse Scent
Eagle, Andalusian, and La Llorona
We are wilderness
Donna over at Velvet Cage talks about The Roots of Riding, and traces hers back to an aunt.
Here’s a photograph of my aunt Anne at about age 10 standing on the back of Prince, with the mare Jessie in the background. Today she raises Arabians and her daughter also raises and trains horses.
This wonderful photo reminds me of my own big-spirited, horse-crazy ten-year-old!
Check out Amaranth's simply beautiful girls (two percheron mares) over at Sparkling Soul.
I have had light horses all of my life. Toby is my first draft. I don't think I'll ever be going back either.
Oooooooh, that is such a nice looking harness! I have to start saving up my money for Toby's harness (I'm going to do a farm collar with hames) and a little cart. My husband has been threatening to buy me a plow for him to pull. (Don't have one of those for the Kubota.) I spoke to a harness maker in Tennessee a while ago who told me that I can use my Percheron for all kinds of chores around the place. She said that, after all, a good draft horse is kind of a lovely tractor with fur.
