Just Add Water

That's really how it felt yesterday, taking Saxony to our trainer's barn. I've never had her trailered anywhere. Would she load? Yes, she would, and she did. During the hour-long drive, she plucked at her hay net and stayed balanced and steady. She backed out of the trailer calmly.

Somehow, I swelled with pride walking her into the big, double-sided barn, even as she was offering all sorts of vocal stylings. For a grown mare, she has a baby-girlish voice full of squeals, squees and trills.

The barn is intimidating to me because it is so moneyed. Still, I've quashed that anxiety in myself for what my lessons give me. Last week I was invited to do a little trunk show of things from my Etsy shop, and the money was out in dining, deco and bling. Unless I was talking with someone about some fascinating old photograph or bit of equine ephemera, I blanched and hung back with the friends who'd come along to help. But having Saxony there at the barn changed that shyness for me. She's my peeps, I guess; I breathed easier. 

After we settled her in a stall, I sat down to watch B ride her own horse, listening down the aisle all the while for sounds from Saxony. She'd paw the floor from time to time, but was mostly silent, sampling the new hay. At some point, though, my instructor calmly remarked that Saxony had gotten out of her stall. She calmly remarked that. And yes, Saxony, unused to stall guards, had simply pushed through hers and wandered in search of my voice. I started to my feet and there she was, looking at me almost longingly. I took her back to her stall and closed the door behind us to linger with her for a while. She snuffled her hay and I just stood there stroking her shoulders and back.

After my friend S had her lesson and I'd finished mine, B surprised me by suggesting we start Saxony right then. Saxony was quite startled, herself. It's not a very good picture - I was too engaged and excited to pay attention to my camera.

It's not a day spa? Really?

And I felt, driving away from the barn at the end of a long day, many things. One, that it was the first all-horse day I've had in a such a long time. How wonderful they are, those days. Two, one chapter has ended completely and another has begun, a new chapter, fresh and only just hinting at what it contains. Three, the third, that I never rushed, never hurried, never commented in my own head about every step along the way. I took my horse where we will be for a while and all of it was good.

(I'm going to write my way through this big, new experience of taking a horse for training, but I can't begin in earnest until the festival where I work wraps up its season. I won't see Saxony for six days now, which means I'll miss five of her training sessions, but I'll be writing about all of it after that.)

It's Only an Ocean When There Isn't a Bridge

Or, How I Mythologized the Canter.

I'll be taking Saxony to my trainer in two weeks. We'll be there for four to six weeks. It's a first for me and I think it'll be a first for her too.

In my first horse life, after I graduated from wild summer-long bareback rides on a borrowed horse but found I hadn't left my love of horses behind, the options I saw were riding lessons or showing; I mean those were the milieus around me. People who wanted to learn to ride had riding instructors, and people who wanted to show had trainers. I would never show, didn't even have a horse, so I had a riding instructor. There was no middle ground; at least, I didn't know about any. I had some riding lessons and eventually I had a horse. She cost money, so I quit the lessons to pay her board. Several happy years passed during which I acquired two more horses. I became a better rider through miles and hours, but I didn't learn anything more about how to ride properly or well. Nothing, in fact.

When I came back to horses after 2o years off, I remembered the familiarity of them, the habitual nature of wanting them, the whole love of being able to touch them. I remembered all those things and it made it so easy to come back. What I overlooked was that I had never learned how to ride from beginning to end, through all three gaits, not to mention any of the other myriad nuances.

I returned to horses in the unexpected company of a fast, sturdy, opinionated mare who I eventually learned to be frightened of. I felt that I did not know how to ride her the way, perhaps, that she should be ridden. I didn't know what way that was, exactly, just that whatever it was, I didn't know it.  So I took riding lessons, the option I remembered from all those years ago. I hired someone to instruct me and "train" my mare. Fits and starts, fits and starts. There was never unity, never a unified course. I never "finished" those riding lessons and she never "finished" her training. (Understanding neither of those endeavors is ever finished, but I mean the basics roughed in.)

That's history and now is now. Before my lesson with B began today, I mentioned cantering. I was thinking that Saxony would be arriving at the barn in two weeks and those things felt connected, to me. "I'm not going to say never," B said to me, "but not until your sitting trot is there. You can't canter without it." I felt chastened and elated at the same time. Chastened like an eight-year-old, Oh, I'm not that good? Elated like an adult suddenly understanding something key, Oh, I can't canter without it? I get it. B went on to say that the canter is simpler to sit once a rider has command of the sitting trot.

It feels lame to write this, because I've had so much experience with horses, done real time with them in my own relative way. But no, I didn't continue with my lessons back then, so I never made it to the sitting trot. All these years intervening and then to come back seated on a high-spirited, spooky mare and find myself wondering what comes between the trot and the canter? Hmm. I just couldn't get Scout into a canter without both of us wigging out. There was a void there, so I filled it with fear, simple as that, and began to broadcast it, too. The canter became huge in my mind, mythic.

It didn't help at all that I had a riding instructor that used to call it "the C word." Literally. She'd say something like, "Just another couple of lessons and we'll start work on 'the C word'." Oceanlike, my fear of the canter grew, spreading as a sea of impossibility in front of me. It also became, in the negative space around it, the zenith, the height of my ambition: Cannot be a rider without it.

My thighs are just burning as I write this, sore from so much rising trot, sitting trot, rising trot, sitting. I get it. Someone has told me. I am being taught the sitting trot. It is hard, hard work, and I would go back there in an hour if I could.

Eating My Life

I miss this arena where I snap a longe line to my thoughts and try to move them out, pushing them past balking, bucking and distraction into some kind of steady, flexing rhythm. My mind needs that kind of work, lest it turn back on itself. It needs this place where I talk about what I long for when I can't be with it, plan the next thing for days that seem to never come. I have to say something when there's no time for me.

The festival is eating my life this year. I miss my horses. Thinking of them is compressed between tasks, endless words, numbers, phone calls, repeat calls, walking the festival amid the blazing heat, lifting, bending, watering the screaming plants, phones in both hands, radio at my hip. Enforce this, create that, ask him, follow up with her -

And there go the jousters riding bareback across the parking lot. I twist to watch them from my window, stinging a little at the sight. The idyllic mood I imagine them to enjoy has nothing to do with reality, it's just a dream of my own longing.

In truth, joust horses rarely connect, mostly won't connect; they could be gone before the next show. They live a narrow life defined someplace between livestock and labor. The dull uncertainty in their faces shows, but they are used to it. As animals will, they live for the next meal. There, astride them, the joust boys look happy and relaxed, and they are. It's not a show day, there are no screaming crowds, no armor, no dust, just a morning ride to stretch the horses before the heat comes to choke the day. I watch, a little pained, knowing my mares are okay without me, enjoying  better care than the joust herd ever will, but still, but still...

I saw them two weeks ago when the farrier came to do trims and look at Scout's mysterious hoof hole. Her cave-in was the result of an impact of some sort. She struck it against a fence post, took a glancing kick, or experienced a blunt trauma that knocked out a chunk. He shaped it much as we would a broken fingernail, smoothing rough snags and rasping away the load-bearing edges around it to keep it from cracking. I marveled at him being down on his hands and knees, face inches from her hoof, studying the divot with true professional curiosity.

Arriving for a brief interval into the lives of the horses both helps and hurts. I've really let them become a kind of compass for me, a rudder, a bellwether. Bellwether. That's it. As if it's they who lead me toward what I want to become and I am falling behind.

Moving Day Two - Saxony Joins Scout

There was a moment when I laughed out loud, giddy with happiness and relief, my heart lifting at seeing them together. Scout asserted her supremacy through a quick show of squealing and striking. Saxony consented and that was the end of it. I stayed for hours, watching them and reflecting on the presence of horses in my life. I feel fortunate and rich for having my mares, each so different, each so strong, each connected to such different parts of me. The future has finally begun.

Backblogged: Realizations and Revelations

On Monday, I moved Scout to a new barn and Special K moved her adorable little Arab with us. It was a long and wonderful day, one in which revelations and realization occurred throughout.

Philosophical revelation: Go to a place where life is new.

Born at the new barn, not even 24 hours old.

Logistics realization: Where possible, move your horses together.

You'll be just fine here, you'll see. You've got Gambler.

Practical realization: Some horses know hay feeders, others, not.

I don't get it. I am hungry. How is he eating?

We rode to our new barn in spirit-lifting weather, dawdling and looping for 90 minutes, engineering to arrive with the horses a little worn out. Scout and Gambler went into a paddock together, and it became clear that for all her posturing and bossing, Scout is entirely dependent on Gambler. Nose pressed against his withers, she clung to him throughout their exploration of the new yard.

Emotional revelation: Wary Scout is so attached to her people.

You guys are coming back, aren't you? Can you come back now?

It was the best of days, it really was. As the sun moved west and shadows fell over the east side of the big barn, K and I sat together on an old park bench, bagging Equi-Shine and watching our horses reading pee-mails and patrolling their new perimeter. Next chapters are inspiring and exciting when begun together, for the horses and for their humans, too.

My Sure Sign of Spring

It's not in the eight-inch-deep mud, not in the sun-glinted  sheddings whisked away on the wind, not in the restive bits of play that the horses manage on such clumsy terrain. They are waiting too. They want to run and buck, twist and shift in the herd, have some space to move out wide open in themselves.

Work always defines the seasons for me, so I'm used to my calendar being skewed, out of sync with the year. Even the festival's rhythm has been altered this year, however. The grounds linger in doldrums, waiting to erupt into life. There was snow in the air just the other day, ceaseless rain before and after, all greyness the rest of the while. The park waits, poised to burst.

Sitting at my desk, watching the latest feral cat pace back and forth before my open door, I was thinking of days to come, feeling jittery within, seeming placid without. I should have been working, because this draggy winter has put me behind. We're none of us thinking of the festival yet, not with hail slurring like lava across the freeway. I don't have my game face on, haven't found my preseason war footing.

But today spring returned, carried on the sound of a plane whining in the sky, its engine humming and hesitating, first closer, then far away. It's the acrobat. This is the first day he's gone up to the sky, back after the long winter. I've grown accustomed to his practice, his looping and diving over and over again high in the sky. I listen for him like the sea and hear him all summer, especially in the dog days, practicing with a discipline I can only imagine. I was surprised to hear him today. The pilot is airborne again. Spring must be here to stay.

The B Sides

A Fearsome Beauty ~ The B Sides

And... inhale. I'm about to begin a second blog, private and by invitation only. It won't be everybody's cup of tea, but I think some of the subject matter will be familiar to those of us who are passionate to make and keep horses a core part of our lives. I hope to hear your stories too, because perspective is all and sometimes the truest compass can be found only in the wisdom of others. I know which way is forward, but I can get lost sometimes for the looking back.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you can leave your email address in the comments or contact me directly at MuddyKowalki@gmail.com for an invite to A Fearsome Beauty ~ The B Sides.

Mind the Gap

I had the strangest sense of distance from the horses. Last week I went to Philly with H.G. for a few days. We visited friends, the kind of friends it always seems wrong to be separated from, so easily do we come back together. Naturally, given time, conversation inevitably turns to us moving there or them moving here or all of us moving to some Switzerland of our own making. Neutrality offered in the face of the enemies of our dreams, or something like that. Money enough, time enough, space enough, vision enough. Guts enough, too.

Travel like this makes it easy to imagine that other life. Led by the hand through a captivating city, food, drink and shelter provided, all seems easy, all seems possible. I got really drawn into the sales pitch this time, I did. But for a carriage horse here and there, the horses fell away. It's like I imagined my life without them. Not "like." I did. In fact, I imagined my life without my life. No bills, no work, no stresses, because none of that pertains when we are guests in others' lives.

Back we came and on Wednesday I went out to do the P.M. chores. Winter is skulking away, but its tail is long this year and drags in my way. I stepped from one semi-frozen muddy hillock to another, making my way across the dry lots, noting the horses as I went. Bay, dark seal brown, chestnut, light grey, dark bay, black.

I had to tip, scrub and refill the water tanks. I started with the one shared between lots 2 and 3. While I worked, Dark Bay stepped up behind me, lipping at my jacket. Black whirled away from him in impatience. Chestnut and Grey watched me through sleepy eyelids. The tap at tank 2 is slow running. I pumped the handle and settled in to wait. It was peaceful. They were just horses. I knew them, but I wasn't connected to them. Strange. Like I went too far away and returned trapped on another side.

But the environment began to take over. Horses in their world cast a spell on watchers like me. My, my, someone has grown rather portly this winter:

 

She stood whiffling at me, Scout, content in her swaddling, slack-lipped and patient, not as mud-encrusted as she could have been, calling me back.

What a Difference a Day Makes

Round about Thanksgiving night, lots of people were thinking about Denali and her people, dreading the day to come. But, horses. Who ever knows? Denali threw a curve ball and got a bit  better, putting a heartbreaking moment on hold. Now we wait with our fingers crossed, hoping that her owners can keep their sea legs long enough to learn to live on ever-shifting terrain. In one day, so much changed. At least for that day, today, and maybe even tomorrow, Denali seems to have made other plans. In the vast disembodied ether that is the internet, a hundred and a half voices let out a collective sigh of relief. 

Breathing Her In

I haven't ridden Saxony since last Thursday (a dear friend came to stay for the weekend, etc.), but, more than that, I find that I miss being with her after even a day or two away. After yesterday's ride on Scout and Gambler, my friend and I stopped by to give Sax some garden-fresh apples and carrots. Note to self: Have Saxony's teeth checked soon. She grinds apples into applesauce, much of which dribbles to the ground.

I think Saxony either touches a place of peace in me or creates it all by herself. Whichever it is, I just go calm, almost tranquil, whenever I am with her. Over and over again, I am struck by the kindness in her face.

After Thursday's ride, I had a chance to take some pictures, the kind of pictures that show how I look at her, not so much pictures of her, if that makes sense. We'd had a nice ride and I'd felt another bump of heart warmth. My attachment to her is growing.

There's champagne left on her lips from our conversation through the reins, but I don't think she's sure about the French-link snaffle bit yet. Note to self: Have Saxony's teeth checked soon. She might be fretting over this bit for a reason.

She watched me step back, trying to capture a full shot of her in her tack. I couldn't get back that far. My Patrick Keane dressage saddle fits her well, especially with the half pad.

 

This face does something to me. I trust it. I stood there looking at her, forgetting pretty much everything else. I was just breathing her in. I think I will do this a lot. I feel like I have a new friend.

Snap out of it already, why don't you!

Learning Saxony No. 2

What did I learn about my kindhearted mare today?

That it is not easy to get a good picture of her, for one thing. Here, she appears to be wearing some other horse's neck and pretending to have a badly undershot jaw.

I had some strong hunches about Saxony from the moment I first touched her. They turned into pretty solid concepts with my first ride on her and since then have settled into things I think I just know about her. E came by to ride her tonight, which was exciting for me because I had been so keen to have her assessment. I'm ready to bust out of the gate with this mare, and I wanted to hear my trainer's thoughts.

Walk, trot, canter, go, stop. Saxony knows each of these at a blunt, basic level. It's the nuance and subtlety that she's missing. She stops from the mouth, not the seat, E said. Check.

Saxony is disorganized, doesn't know how to carry herself even and under, round and flexing. She's used to going long, straight and low. That's why she stumbles occasionally, said E, because she drags her feet. Yes! Check.

Kindhearted mare, I've said. She's a mother mare, E said, smiling, the sort of horse who takes care of the rider. She told me Sometimes that can come across as Mom knows best, so Mom will decide. Right now, could there be a more perfect horse for me? It's hard to think so. She needs to stop being a mom and I need to stop being a baby.

This trainer that I have worked with through a horse too hot for me and a horse too troubled for me looked at me from Saxony's back and said She's the perfect project horse for you. Check. I know she's right and I'm glad she's right. We will help each other get better as horse and rider, creating a creature partnership, and I just can't describe how good I feel about it. I have had a hard year with horses, between Scout's injury and having to give up Dar. It's hard to believe all of it brought me to her.

Shuttered

The event I work for is readying itself for winter's sleep. Autumn overtakes the park. Amid the shortening days, our tall trees shed their leaves in drifts across the grounds. This is a moment I come to every October as one of the last people still living here. For me, it always feels like the end of the year, and that's how it's been since I began working for the company. My sense of time has been trained season to season, not those of nature, but of the show. So I walked the park tonight to see this past one go.

Across the glass-like south pond, the ship already wears its winter lashing, held fast and anchored to survive the storms of another blizzard season. The light falls quicker than I can walk. Every trace of the 175,000 people who came to visit has been erased; it's as if they never were.

Except for the impossible golden light glowing through my apartment windows. Up there, all 11 cats are snoozing in the space-heater warmth, some curled inside-out, others fat in piles on the bed.

Over it all hangs the harvest moon. This is how each year ends for me. This, and with horses. The horses I've had in the past six years have come to me at the end of a season. I bought Scout from the jousters at the end of the 2004 season. Dar, another reject jouster, came home with me at the end of the 2009 season. I bought Saxony in September. She had nothing to do with the festival, but that doesn't matter. It's something about coming to the end of the season, the year as I know it, that finds me reaching for horses. I took Scout and Dar, both project horses, through fleeting autumns and straight into winter. Winter is the time I find most natural for bonding with horses, and it seems I set it up that way.

It will be no different with Saxony. I haven't said much about her, and that's because being sick has kept me holding back, trying to rest, even as I champ at the bit. She is a whole new story, one to begin at the beginning, and though she's mine, I don't feel I've begun with her yet, not at all. My tack is there, it fits, and I've been on her a couple of times, but it's not quite real. She waits.

Things That Fall Out of the Sky

I put Dar into a place I could finally carry and keep him when I wrote about him on August 31st. That's also when I understood that I was ready to move on, eager to move on. The next day, this notice showed up in an email:

Lovely black Appendix Mare: 9 years old, 15.3hh, loads, clips, bathes, great on trails alone or with others, good on roadside riding, rides English or Western, loves to jump, dressage prospect but would need fine tuning in the ring, sound, sane, no vices, pet personality, up-to-date on shots, worming, farrier, negative Coggins 2010. Moving, must sell. Good home only.

I wasn't looking, not to say as much, anyway, but something in the advertisement moved me to call. Here she is going through a pre-purchase exam during yesterday's rainy morning.

A Kind of Freedom

The festival is over. We made our numbers amid wretched economic conditions and oppressive weather. Just three days after closing the park is nearly empty and the animals are reclaiming their places all over the site. Skunks come out to play after dark, chipmunks streak across the fairways all day long, and we keep a sharp lookout for unexpected arrivals because this is when people begin to dump unwanted pets at the foot of our long driveway.

Show seasons compress like a sponge clenched tight in a fist. With closing day, the grip relaxes and the sponge begins to open. Those of us who move our lives here for the summer look up, look around. Exhausted, we prepare to move on.

I felt that sense of compression strongly this year. It squeezed my decisions and reactions into odd, jerky moments, but often I was aware of little more than just the process of change happening within me. Sometimes I noticed my struggle over Dar. It felt like an event that was happening to me, but I had no time to really be present in it. It erupted from time to time, is all. But there was a process that culminated in my realizing there was no longer a real reason to look back. Somehow, I saw that Dar had moved from hope to memory; I was already looking somewhere else when I saw that I had left him behind. Looking at someone else.

They Linger

The festival I work for opens tomorrow. We call the seven days before opening day Hell Week. The population in the park swells from an off-season high of 10 or 15 staff to 1,500 contracted participants during a relentless, breathless ingress of RVs, tents, animals and people, hundreds of people. We hook our radios on our hips to manage the torrent, working until we can't work anymore. After this frenzy, opening day unfolds.


Thousands of guests pour through the gates. Images long familiar to me captivate them.

For me, it is the echo of horses everywhere and how much I miss my own.

I glimpse horses here and there every day during Hell Week -- pass by rehearsals, see the huge trailers moving slowly down our winding back roads, hear the neighing of circuit horses anxious to settle in. I have horses too, I think to myself, fussing at that silly, irritating feeling of being left out, of wanting to be part of what I'm missing. This is where my horses came from, this temporary world of other times, other places where people pay to escape, but which reminds me today of the world I'm longing to get back to, the one where my horses linger.

School of Work, School of Life

Dar accepted my gentle French-link snaffle bit and soon forgot about it as our groundwork continued. Weather permitting, we've been teaching him to move away from pressure on his sides, laying the proper foundation for leg aids. Though he had been ridden in his former life, it was always from the face, never from the seat or leg.

As always, we work to keep Dar present and attentive. As always, we work on Whoa, since that is where his daydreaming is most apparent. I've come to think of him as a cargo barge: it takes those ships miles to come to a stop. The call to port comes from the captain's bridge, winds its way down to the engine room, and then the brakes are applied. Dar always seems a bit surprised when he arrives at halt.

All of this has gone well. I've been so captivated by seeing my young horse beginning school, so thrilled to see his learning take hold, so relieved to see it working that I've written about it from that positive place. I've completely overlooked the difficult work that it can be and how that can be intimidating to someone who has never seen it.

Dar came to me with a poor, poor attitude. Early work with him last fall saw him responding resentfully, with pinned ears and a sullen demeanor. He turned to bucking as a way to threaten and escape at the same time. Balking or rushing were his preferred methods of evasion. His attitude created a question in the back of my mind, one that I kept wrapped at all times in a soft puff of hope. An unhappy, negative-minded horse bucking under pinned ears at the end of a longe line will make an impression on someone who is not completely confident. Someone like me.

I've written about Dar's remarkable return to good health and goal weight. I've written about working to bond with him, even as Scout demanded so much of my attention while she recovered from surgery. Since early March, I've been writing about how Dar's training is going, and I think it looks like it has been easy. And it has been easy. Only, I realized yesterday that I've said very little about how Dar's attitude is changing. Training a horse means training everything. Stand in cross ties. Lower your head. Come through gates quietly. Whoa. Pick up your feet. Don't think about biting. Stay in your own space. Change your attitude.

Change your attitude. Yesterday, Dar was ready to learn about steering. It was hard work for him. He made great progress. He made more progress than I did. I need to work on being quicker on releasing when he responds to the rein aid. I had a chance to take some pictures while E was working with him. In them, Dar faces his attitude as much as he faces the new task being asked of him. He is winning that battle.







School of work, school of life. After training, we turned Dar out with Scout. His second testosterone test came back negative. Time to introduce him to Red Death.

The Love of Caring for a Horse

This was Dar two weeks before I got him:
This is Dar today, six months later:
There was something on my camera lens that blurred focus here and there, but not enough to dampen the impact of the comparison, I don't think. I look at these pictures and feel proud. From an underweight, parasite-ridden sad sack has emerged an engaged, hammy and healthy 1,300-pound youngster who's just begun school.
We have so much to look forward to.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

They call it anecdotal evidence, stories about events or actions related by others, but not proven to be fact, not filmed or otherwise recorded objectively. After months of hearing bits of this and that about Dar's pissy antics at the barn -- broken rails, wrecked tank heaters, aggression over the fence -- all the while faced with only the same young doofus when I'm there, I finally got a clean, short glimpse of his inner jerk. He's been pushy at the gate, unhappy at being kept alone in a paddock. When he's brought in for the night, he's pushy at the barn door. I always ask him to back up and wait while I slide the door open. Then I ask him to wait another moment before releasing him to step through the doorway and into his stall. He always obeys me, but on Monday night, he snaked bared teeth loosely in my direction. Surprise! And yet, he only reminded me of one of our cats, Possum. "You did not just do that," I said, and backed him all the way to his paddock gate. No feeling of fear or not fear moved me; he was simply out of line. It was nothing personal.

Impatience: Let me go in.
Frustration: Why are you training me just now?
Belligerence: I've been on my own, you know. I can take care of myself.

Somehow I absolutely get where he is. I saw it in that instant. It's time to start defining reality for Dar.

Sheesh, It's Not Even January 24th Yet

British scientists determined, a few years ago, that January 24th is the worst day of the year. I don't know what science they used to arrive at that date, but it rang true to me the moment I heard it.

When I think about this blog -- this journal -- and why I started it, I can't help but be rattled by how things have changed since then. Scout was up for sale, a decision which had taken me an agonizingly, stupidly long time to make. Dar was a sleepy-eared, crabby oaf who seemed calmer in his temperament and movement than Scout had ever been; it felt easy to take him home. I had faith in the moment, because I thought I was moving toward dealing with my fear by starting over with another horse. As they say, the best-laid plans of mice and... well, mice, because that's how I'm feeling. It's been a hard, unhappy, oppressive few days. I'm overwhelmed with the new circumstances, anxious and sad, and I can't think my way out of how I'm feeling. This picture captures some of my dilemma.

In the foreground, Scout snarfs her way through a flake of hay, happy outdoors as if nothing's changed. What was probably the hardest part for her is done, but she needs weeks of simple turnout before I can ride her. She's been the horse capturing most of my attention over the past few months. In the background stands silly Dar, not able to believe Scout's lack of interest in him. Five months ago, it seemed certain to me that I'd be deep in training with him by now. Scout might not have found a new home, but I was prepared to wait for the right person to take her. The picture should have been the other way around, but circumstance has reversed it. I'm not prepared for that, and I don't see what to do. Some of this is simple self pity, I know. But not all of it. Some of this is just the winter; I know that too. But not all of it.

I certainly didn't imagine that I would not ride a horse for five months. But I haven't. I didn't imagine that I'd have two horses. But I do. And neither of them are easy. Dar pushes hard at his gate and destroys tank heaters with his mouthiness. Scout's injury means everybody at the barn has to work harder. Yes, I've been a good farmhand and honest boarder, but I'm out of the flow for not riding, for not having a viable horse. I feel the absence of it terribly.

These are just some thin thoughts I've put down to try to sketch in where I'm feeling, if not what I'm feeling. It seems harder than it should be, but maybe it is just that hard. I have to accept that possibility if I am to say another word. The pressure of my hopes, wants and fears has settled, for now, on the question of the horses.