Saturday

HUZZAH for the husband who’ll come out in the drizzle and fire up the hobby tractor (with the reluctant battery) and muscle a 5000 pound roll of no-climb horse fence and a fence stretcher and still be patient with me shuffling horses around—huzzah and ta-da and affection and joy. To finish the fence at last!! Almost as good as replacing the “place holder” bathtub we’re still using after thirty years.

A drier day and another fence.  But same husband and same fencING.  This time, he is risking his life on the electric fence.

The horses are in that seam between winter hay and spring grass. You can’t just put them out on the grass—if you did, they’d colic and die a terrible death. You have to finesse them – feed hay first, then, when their stomachs are full, let them out for ten minutes the first day (five minutes of which is taken up with the horse dance of joy – kicking, bucking, singing), fifteen minutes the second day and so forth. We got the tractor running while they were in the barn having their appetizer (just to make sure it would start – not a moment of horse-on-grass time to lose), then opened the arena gate and let the hordes thunder out, already striking up a bawdy chorus.

Same day as picture above.  By the end of today, that little pond was sixty five feet by about eighty feet and a good two inches deep. Oh, the sky?  Not that color.

Then we could get the tractor in to the arena, put up the wire, stretch it with the tractor and nail that sucker down – all of which took just about two hours. Which meant that the horses had to come back into the arena before we were finished. Which isn’t good. Not because the little dudes would be scared of the tractor (go figure – scared of a tarp, scared of a click in an electric fence, scared of rustling bushes – but of a rattling, roaring, smoke puffing tractor? NAW. They love it. When I’m driving it forward, they walk right toward me, ears forward in friendly greeting (we come from earth – and what might YOU be?)

I just like this picture cause I just LOVE this horse.

They rifle through our tools (sometimes carrying them off), and they have to sniff everything. You can’t back the tractor up without looking over your shoulder six times in case some curious quadruped has decided to check out the box scraper while you blinked. It’s like trying to lay carpet with a bunch of puppies in the room. Or like trying to make it upstairs to the bathroom through a gang of hungry toddlers.

I have no pictures of all this. No camera, what with the rain and all. Besides, I can’t shoot when I’m actually doing the thing, now can I?

As the tractor and I finally made it back out through the gate (the beasts had been bribed with hay and coaxed into the barn), I got smacked in the eye with a nasty little stone of hail—and then pummeled with the stuff as I parked. But we were finished – horses fed, no one dead (that’s a knock on wood), fence up, panels back in place, a job four years in the needing, done. And all before breakfast (because I got up late and G was ready to work). So lunch. Before lunch. Now – we semi-cleaned up and off to eat with the resident kids.

Notice the highly specialized tools we use. If this were today, he’d be in a parka and there’d be little drops of rain all over his beard.  Oh, and his trousers would be all muddy.  So nice to look back on it from the couch.

Saturday, checked off.

Addendum: We finished just in time. Thunder followed the hail, and then the sluice gates of the great eternal blue opened up and drowned the world for the rest of the afternoon.  The evening feeding was really fun – I wore a swimming suit, and the horses all used snorkels.  And it’s freezing.  And the  mountains are so white, you can’t tell them from the clouds.

Yay, spring.