The new addition –

A few minutes ago, G announced cheerfully that today, M had been gone eight months!

 Only he was wrong.  He had it wrong.  Nobody around here is allowed to round up anything relative to time passing—time is only what it actually is.  Money, you can round up any time you want – if it costs $45 bucks, tell me $50.  That’s a good thing.  Today, M has been gone seven months and thirty one days (or the rough equivalent).  So I don’t want to hear anything that cheerful until tomorrow.

I dropped my phone in the arena this morning. 

I was late to feed because I was getting Max off to his other grandmother’s. At this moment, I am sitting in stunned silence , or I would be if G hadn’t just come in for lunch.  I even had the beginning of the second chapter of a book I’ve been fighting with for several years – it came pouring into my head in the shower a few minutes ago—and that starts the frantic juggling act of dealing with the logistics of getting myself from point A to point Keyboard without losing any of it.  Of course, I lost most of the energy, but I got down the seeds, which is good.  Which is amazing.  Which is astonishing. 

It was the phone I was talking about.  I dropped it in the arena, just outside of the barn.  If you lived in a cabin and you were trying to figure out where to build the outhouse and winter was coming on with the threat of tons of snow and rain – wouldn’t you build it as close as you could to your back door?  Evidently, horses would.  And since they only process about forty percent of what they eat, and since almost all they eat is alfalfa and grass hay, what they deposit on the ground is mostly just fiber.  Not all that gross.  Until it’s been snowed on and frozen and rained on and thawed, and there is lots of it, and the water is pooling all over, and it’s all turned into worse than primordial slush, which is what I dropped my phone into.

I love Lysol.

Today, I am put into mind of the old story about the man who went to his village rabbi, complaining that his mother-in-law was living in his tiny house, and he couldn’t stand it.  No room.  No privacy.  No quiet.  So (this story is much better told in person, and gets better as my brain remembers it’s New York cadences – so long story short) the rabbi advises him to move his cow, his goat, his chickens – all of them into the house.  And over time, like once a week, the guy goes back, and the rabbi allows him to remove one animal at a time.  In the end, he puts the cow out and is AMAZED at the room, the privacy, the silence.  And whaddya know?  The mother-in-law is STILL THERE!!

You can get the same effect with one five year old boy.

So here is a typically huge collection of pictures gleaned out of the last week or so: for your pleasure, I hope.

February Snow

And just when I thought we were out of the woods—

If you want the full effect, you’ll have to click on the shot. The air is peppered with snowflakes.  Insane with snowflakes.  I think this is the snowiest day we’ve had for years, and it’s coming straight down, not wind-blown, not a blizzard, just a matter of fact downpour of flakes.

More of the same – but you can see up there that the clouds are breaking a little.

Five minutes later, this sudden, odd light.

So bright, but so odd and gray and angled.

The storm, still stalking us, but from afar.

New Subject: the newest member of the barn family.  Our little, used JOHN DEERE (which nothing runs like a). G  has been searching the KSL ads for months.  And finally, we found this guy, who we have named Bob Olsen in honor of our friend who built our barn, worked in the temple, could back our four horse trailer into a tiny space with his eyes closed, had the loveliest Australian accent, and then succumbed to cancer.  We figure this little hard working piece of contrary metal will honor him pretty darned well.

With Frazz’s right ear.

With the proud grandpa (who was looking at what, I wonder?)

Tractor owner, unloading his machine.

Change of subject: Frazz’s un-birthday.

With his lovely Mom and the present I gave him.  Which actually turns out to be very charming.

I’ve posted this picture a couple of times over the years.  But the boy keeps changing.  He looks like a boy, now, not like a little child.  Don’t be fooled.  You’ll notice he still favors making his own tracks.

And nerding around on the hay.

This is the other barn cat: Mrs. Norris.  He is not actually an axe murderer.  He is just calculating how far he will have to jump to land on my shoulders, which is where he always wants to be when he is not slaughtering mice or pooping in my barn. (It is perfectly correct to mention pooping when you talk about barns.)

The lovely and delicate Findis, who does not, as far as I can ascertain, poop in my barn.

I asked the Frazz: “Since your mother is not here, and will not have a violent reaction to horse hair on your clothes, how would you like to actually SIT on a horse this time?”

I was not sure of his answer; in the past the very thought of such a thing has brought on a storm of emphatic reluctance.  (I know – storm and emphatic – but really, I needed both to paint the picture.)

But this time, he was all for it.  “Yes,” he said thoughtfully.  “I would like to do that.”  So we got to the barn, and (careful of his really, by that time, fairly gross boots) I lifted him up on Zion’s back.  Zi is my horse, and I know him and love him and he’s small enough, I could keep hold of the back of Frazz’s pants in case Dustin flicked an ear and sent the rest of them screaming out of the barn in a fit of self preservation.  Then G came and I made him stand in the slop while I took pictures.

Because Zion was eating, he was very willing to stand still.  Assuming no flicks of Dustin’s ears.

Frazz settled on Zi’s back as if he’d been born on a horse.  His weight was right, his balance was right, his legs were long and his heels down, and his hands, one (as directed) full of mane, rested on Zi’s withers.  They were suddenly fused, like one creature.  It was really kind of odd.  

And the really odd thing was that, when the pictures were all taken and G went to drive the tractor up the drive to the barn – Frazz was offered a ride on the tractor and DECLINED.  He just wanted to sit there on Zion.  I am still blinking about that.  So I stood in the muck and held on to him, and when Zi finally decided he wanted to try his luck with the feeder across the barn, I hauled Frazz off quite neatly and safely.

You can just see that human seat belt off at the left, fingers clamped firmly on the waistband of those little jeans.

And now, my dears, I understand the secret of Gin’s photographic genius.  It’s almost impossible NOT to get a good shot of this kid.  What a face.  And do you get a sense here of the complete centering of weight on that horse’s back?  Unfair.  I need to develop a seat like that.

Finale: boy and horse.  Dustin deigns to accept a bit of hay and Frazz dares to offer it.

Now, we are waiting for the huge, record breaking storm that’s pounding California – that dumped seven feet of snow or something on the Donner pass, which is exactly where Gin and K were headed when they drove away and left this boy with us grandfolks.  We can always hope that the weather will discourage the dentist and his wife from putting down roots that darn far away, and will drive them back to the mountains where they belong.  Hope.  Hope.  We have so very much to thank California for . . .