Still, Lives

I interrupt my regularly scheduled program of over-analyzing and hamster wheeling to acknowledge the presence of things that require nothing more of me than to get out of my head and notice them.

I'm an existentialist. I don't perceive that a godlike entity or higher consciousness created all living things and cast them as players in a divine plan. I guess, instead, that here is here, that it is now, and all the rest, no matter how compelling, is daydreams. But... I admit to imagining that some kind of natural blessing exists in animals. I take it as a positive thing to have the endorsement of their proximity.

My festival summer is about to begin, so I'm preparing to move my life out of the city and into another time. H.G. and I surveyed our shops lately and were happy to see several guest tenants making use of them.

I confess that I take things like these as signs, recognitions, even, of my place in a world where I'm not so different from anything or anyone.

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.

Postscript Molly

Molly comes home tomorrow. This sweet, sensitive mare, always bonded to whatever boy is nearby, always  maintaining her girlish figure, got lucky. The DMSO treatment has worked wonders to speed the healing of her injured nerve(s), the full-leg splint has been removed, and now we wait to learn what her home care will consist of. Everyone wants to help her recover fully before winter arrives. We're all so relieved and eager to have her back.

This was the first time I was the person to discover an injured horse. I think I handled it all right for a first-timer, but it was hard for me to stand the pain she was feeling; I wanted help to come faster than it could. I felt desperate to help her, and it took some time to accept that nearness and touch were all I had to give her in that distant pasture.

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.

4 of 4, A Language All Their Own - Scout Comes Home

We've all kept close to Scout this week, those of us who love her, those who provide care to her, even some who have never met her. But are any of us as close to Scout as these two are? No. We can't be, because we don't speak the same language. At best, we are middle men. Between what they are and what we want them to be, between what they do and what we want them to do. As a human being, I was on the outside of this reunion, exactly where I should have been. But it was a privileged place to be.

Wait! I know this place! She was full of excitement. Scout had been at another barn for one month, but this small farm had been her home for two years. Half a second was all she needed to recognize where she was.













They knew her, too. The air was electric with chill and the first light winter snow.













Someone told me once, years ago, "Oh, your mare is a killer. She should never be turned out with other mares." Tell it to Keely, who missed Scout terribly. What happened? Where were you? Why are you in there? Come outside. (But those are just my words; they have nothing to do with what was going on between them.)















They crowded around Scout's window. But poor little Gambler couldn't see her.














Scout soon realized something had changed. Everybody was out in the paddocks. There was someone new out there, too. I think she started to feel it in her gut. It was one thing to be on stall rest at a strange barn and then at the clinic. It might be too hard at home.













Keely agreed. Together, they began to work at the window.














When Keely finally drifted back to her hay, Gam got his chance. Scout wasn't terribly interested in visitors by then. The reality of her dilemma was becoming clear to her.















Bringing her home was the fourth of the hurdles I worried how we'd cross. Now I see, though, that every day that Scout must stay in her stall will be another hurdle. She can't change her nature, I only hope that she can change how she relates to it.

Home

It was a beautiful day to trailer him 30 miles to his winter home. My reject jouster is used to being hauled in a slant livestock trailer, so a simple two-horse looks strange to him. But all it took was several tries, front hooves stepping up the ramp, then stepping back down.

He's barely vocal. He didn't call out. He never looked back at the spartan paddock pockmarked with deep, dry mudholes.

HG and I followed behind the trailer, and as we drove, I realized that I've decided to keep this horse. I could have given him back, because that's the arrangement that was made. I had nine months to decide, enough time to discover what in him isn't right for me, enough time to become intimidated by him. But the moment you start making choices for a horse -- what food, what vet, what stable -- you own him. When I backed him out of the trailer at the best horse bed & breakfast in the state, I felt...such a smile.