the porch beckons

Finally got a shot of the trumpet vine making its way steadily onto the front porch! I'm taking a break from the internet for a bit. Enjoy the season!

taking another break

I'm in one of those moods where the internet is feeling like a big giant drain. It happens a couple of times a year, and I've found if I shut it off for awhile I get my balance back.

So that's what I'm doing!

Hope everyone stays cool, writes great pages, and has loads of fun with horses and donkeys - see you later!

rolling with the heat wave

It's been an interesting few days with this heat. Sunday, the hottest day thus far (101.8 in the shade according to my thermometer outside) my husband had to go pick up a refrigerator from my parents' house. They have gotten new appliances and generously offered to let us have their "old" fridge - much newer and more spacious than ours, so we accepted.

So off he went, in the un-AC'd Jimmy pulling our horse trailer to haul the refrigerator home. He had to remove the refrigerator doors, which meant a trip to Home Depot for a specific tool. Getting that thing from the trailer into our kitchen was a sort of nightmare. (especially since it was done in the dark of night) I'll leave the details to your imagination. By midnight, the new refrigerator was reassembled, plugged in, and cooling to get ready for the switchover.

Yesterday, Monday, I woke up feeling pretty good even though the forecast had been revised and we were looking at yet another 100+ day. We had hay, a new refrigerator, and our wonderful massage therapist was due to arrive at noon, to give Keil Bay an equine massage, and then come inside to do a hot stone massage for me.

Sweating through morning chores, I fed breakfast, did waters, gave hay, and walked my long walk down the hill, remembering that I was not dumping manure, but making a labyrinth. This was momentarily cast aside when I saw that the dear husband had taken some liberties with my labyrinthine path. There were several very un-labyrinthine piles in the very path itself. I grumbled all the way back up the hill. It was without doubt the sort of stomping, grumbling walk that screams Out of Balance.

When I got to the barn, there was silence. SILENCE. For a very brief moment I enjoyed it, and then I realized why the silence was unsettling. The fans were off. I had turned them on. Something was wrong with the fans. On a 100+ day.

I checked the plugs, checked the fuse box, and then it occurred to me to check the lights. The power was out. Which meant no more water from the well. I went inside, and found that the power was out in the house as well. Which meant no AC, no telephones. I took my cell phone out to the trustworthy clear-signal-spot on the deck. For five minutes, every time I tried to call out, it switched to roaming status and a recording informed me I could not complete the call.

I finally got calls in to the power company and my husband. Apparently there was a power outage in our entire area, and although they were aware of it and working on it, they had no idea what exactly caused it or when it would be fixed.

I proceeded to spread the virus of crisis to my daughter, who, in her wise way, just looked at me and said "It'll probably be over in 30 minutes. Just relax."

It's a very sobering and proud moment when one's 11-year old daughter comes through with such wisdom and calm in a moment of stress. She does this often, and I took a breath and tried to relax.

When the massage therapist arrived I was somewhat calm. We went out to the barn and decided to do Keil Bay's massage under the huge pin oak by the barn. This pin oak has a lot of good energy. I think of it as the winter solstice tree, and in the summer its shade is where we do most of our hosing off of horses. It's a good tree.

But I was agitated, and babbling about the electricity, a revelation I'd had about Keil Bay's training, and a dozen other things that kept popping up inside my head. I was not centered. Keil Bay would not settle into his body work.

We worked with him for a few minutes and I kept talking. He kept fussing. Then the fans came on, and we decided to go in the barn aisle and try again. This time, hushed by the fans, reveling in the wonders of electricity, I stopped talking. Keil Bay settled down and let himself relax into the motion of H's hands as she worked the muscles and did her magic.

As is pretty common with Keil Bay, he answered the question of the moment - how do I get this horse to stand still? Stop talking like a tape recorder. Hit the pause button on my own mind racing forward. He also answered the bigger issue I've been struggling with about how to proceed with our work together in the saddle. I need to stop trying to hire translators when I already know his language. The work with Keil Bay and me is just that - OUR work. He can teach me what I need to know.

When he was done, he took a walk around the barnyard, showing off his glossy coat, gorgeous dapples, and his characteristic swinging panther walk stride. It was like the exclamation point at the end of a sentence. You Got It, says Keil Bay. In the moment, and in the bigger picture.

Inside, my own massage was wonderful. The stones are such a presence, and H. remarked that she loved seeing all the stones around our house. They are in every room, grounding and centering.

My daughter headed out to the barn as I was beginning the massage, to hose Salina and check on everyone else. The air was blowing, the water was flowing. We'd weathered the morning's curve ball.

If while reading this you had the thought that my stomping up the labyrinth path, angry at a few misplaced piles of poop, just might be connected with the entire area losing power for several hours, you are not alone. I thought that too. My temper flared and it wouldn't surprise me in the least to learn that just as I rounded the curve to the uppermost part of the path, let loose with a few expletives, and got into perfect stomping form, the fuses blew. In a many-mile radius. I often find that when I get completely whacked out, the universe obliges me with some very literal metaphors. And to the degree that my little hissy fit contributed to the cessation of fans and ACs and well pumps all over the county, I apologize. I do suspect given this streak of heat we're having there were probably a chain reaction of hissy fits that added up to one gigantic fuse blowing.

Today we're looking at high nineties and hopes for a thunderstorm this evening. We could use it. The thunder and rain and flashes of lightning are the perfect antidote to extreme heat and swelter of southern summer. All my life growing up in the south, the thunderstorms punctuated the heat and the intensity. The temps would rise, tensions build, tempers flare. Hissy fits would be thrown. And then the crashing and booming and hard rain would blow it up and wash it all away.

This is exactly what we need, and I'm going to be thinking about it as the day rolls on. Waiting for nature's cathartic solution to the heat. Saved from another hissy fit by a wise daughter, a good massage, and Keil Bay's "you feel it, I act it out for you" approach.

More when the heat breaks.

making hay while the sun shines

Yesterday evening I rode with my husband to pick up a load of hay, our first of the season from the favored local growers we love. I had never been to the hay farm before. We went first by the house, where his wife showed me around, offered to give me a seedling of a lovely umbrella tree I admired come fall, and then led us down the country road to the field where the hay was being baled and stacked.

On the way out a great blue heron sailed in and landed on a dead tree in the pond.

The part of the county where we were is simply stunning. It looks like something out of an old movie, and it almost seemed like time slowed down as we drove, slowed down and then rolled backward.

The hay grower's wife helped my husband load bales and I counted. When we were done, and had written a check, she asked if we'd be okay to wait a few minutes because the hay stacker was on its way with another load and she didn't want us to meet on the narrow dirt driveway on our way out. A young man helping out brought a glass of cold water to my sweating husband. We stood and watched until suddenly the tractor, hay stacker, and a cloud of dust came barreling down the lane.

He backed it up expertly and deposited 517 more bales with the already huge number under the gigantic shelter. I don't think I've ever seen that much hay.

To someone who has horses and has stressed over finding good hay, lived through a year of drought, and paid top dollar all winter, this was akin to standing by a bank vault holding millions of dollars stacked in piles. Wealth, indeed.

Even more charming though was the chance to see the hay come in from the field, listen as the men talked about a broken belt that would delay the baling, the thousands of dollars it would cost to replace it, and laugh because what else could they do? Curse, I suppose, but they went with the flow of the moment, which was selling good hay to happy horse folk, who felt the price was more than fair and were somewhat pie-eyed at the sheer amount of the green stuff under that shelter. Not to mention mightily impressed with how much care and knowledge and risk goes into making hay.

There was something quite magical about the evening, hot as it was, with the slight edge of crisis cutting the sweet scene.

My husband asked on the way home if I might one day write a story about him. This is as close as it comes, right now. He careened down the road while I fussed about the speed. We both remarked on how wonderful it would be to live on several hundred acres with all that rolling grass and the big century old trees guarding the farm houses. Dealing with the heat and the rain and broken belts.

We stopped by the grocery store on the way home to pick up sherbet and popsicles. He was covered in hay dust and wore rubber muck boots, and didn't want to go in. But he did, and the timeless quality of the evening extended a bit further. The way the light was in the grocery and the bits of hay being left along the way reminded me of the open air market my father ran for a brief time when I was little.

So the story wasn't one I'd written, but it was one we lived for a couple of hours, that started years before and made a circle back to itself. Little girl in the open air market eating the rare white twinsicle, who wanted nothing more than a horse. Woman in a small town grocery store, walking out into the hot dusk to a horse trailer filled with hay, carrying lime and orange sherbet and lime bars and hoping they wouldn't melt before she got home.

extreme heat

We've had unusually high temps the past few days, and today's forecast is 100, tomorrow's is 101, and Monday's is 99. With the humidity factored in, the heat index is even higher.

Thankfully it looks like we'll be back to a high of 90 on Tuesday, with the chance for rain 4-5 days in a row next week. We'll need it by then - the blazing sun and high temps with no rain is doing a number on the pasture.

We struggled with several weeks of extremely high temps each summer for the past few years, and I have a routine for dealing with it. This hot spell caught me off guard though - it's usually August when this happens!

We do night-time turn-out once the daytime temps consistently hit 90, so that the horses can enjoy their grazing during the cooler part of the 24-hour day. I don't lock them in stalls, but I do close up the barn from the sun, turn the big fans on, and give them hay in their mangers so they can munch and rest. Yesterday, in spite of the high temps, there was a breeze, so I also put some hay in the shady parts of paddocks, and they self-regulated most of the day, moving between the stalls and the shaded areas, finding their own comfort.

When it's this hot I also offer cool hosing at least twice during the day. Keil Bay and Salina will nearly always opt to be hosed, and I focus on chest and neck, then groin. Cooling these areas seems to offer the quickest and most effective relief.

On really hot days, when the heat index is over 100, I also offer cold water sponging in between the two hosings. Yesterday even Rafer Johnson, who thus far has not wanted water put on him at all, acquiesced and allowed his chest and neck to be sponged down.

I'm even more meticulous with the water in their drinking tubs than normal when the temps go up. I keep the levels in the big tanks low so I can dump and scrub and refill daily or twice daily, and I make sure their stall buckets stay clean and cool as well. Normally for temps this hot I'd put out big buckets of water with an equine electrolyte mixed in. I've found this is very useful in keeping them hydrated, and they will drink these tubs dry when the weather is this hot.

Today I don't have the electrolyte we normally use - Quench, made by Horsetech, and it's not sold locally so I can't get it. I'm debating whether to go get some Apple A Day from the feed store right now. I love the Quench because it has NO sugar or artificial flavoring or sweeteners. They drink both fine. In a pinch, you can use Gatorade mixed with water.

We muck many times a day during the summer, so the stalls stay clean and comfy.

Fortunately these very hot spells don't last too long, and what feels like incredibly oppressive heat shifts back to just the usual heat of summer.