Top Ten Signs That You Suddenly Own a Horse

1. The back of your car is filled with large sacks of grain-based products, out of which trickle multitudes of compressed pellets that find their way into every nook and cranny. (Here the Bags of Unusual Size lounge next to the old toy barn, which harks back to the days when small plastic horses were enough to satisfy the Resident Child's equine dreams; it was en route to another young horse-crazy girl and so the Subaru's cargo bay unwittingly became a symbol of Past, Present, and Future.)

2. Your stock pot periodically disappears, then reappears with a lining of bran mash cemented to its interior. Fortunately, at a critical moment you were able to prevent its being employed as a bucket to soak a bruised hoof.

3. Half of the refrigerator is occupied by massive bags of carrots.

4. The size of your bank account is inversely proportional to the size of the bags of carrots.

                                                            

5. When you do have the temerity to buy food for the humans in the household, there is nowhere to place said food on the table because the table is full of bits and bobs of horse tack.

6. Laundry does not get done, but by golly halters and bridles are buffed and shined and hung on the hooks where laundry should go.

7. You find the legs of tables, chairs, and the piano bound with fleecy cloth because Somebody is practicing how to do polo wraps on a horse's legs.

                                                   

8. As a result of parking near the stable on hot days with the windows open, so many flies frolic inside your car that one day you find a spider making a web on the interior rear-view mirror.

9. Horse-crazy girls other than the Resident Teen leave various and sundry bizarre horse-related items in the car, such as a pink rake used for scratching the back of a horse and a faux-jaguar-furred fly mask.

10. You discover that a pair of shoes for a horse cost more than you spend on a pair of shoes for yourself. And he needs two pairs at a time. Every six weeks or so.

Tiny Tots on Pint-Sized Ponies

Beautiful horses, dapper riders, and skilled horsemanship abound at a horse show like the Evergreen Classic in Carnation, Washington.

But one of my favorite events is the lead-line class for the smallest riders, the ones whose legs are still so short they can do little more than perch atop their ponies.

In a lead-line class, the person holding the pony's lead line is in control. The rider's job is to concentrate on having good riding form and exhibiting a certain amount of poise.

Each rider is asked a few questions, generally simple questions such as "what's your name," "how old are you," "what's your pony's name," and the like.

The child is interviewed while the pony's standing still and then demonstrates sitting at a walk while the handler leads it back and forth or in a circle.


They're terribly cute, and, being so young, often surprise the interviewer with their responses.

One little girl, for example, upon being complimented on her purple coat and the purple ribbons in her hair, announced cheerfully to the world that her underwear was purple, too.

Another girl, asked what kind of a class she would like to ride in when she's a grown-up, replied, "A BIG lead-line class."

(I love the idea of a bunch of adults on giant horses being led into an arena for a "big grown-up" lead-line class.)

One child, asked if she knew her ABCs, proceeded to sing them heartily.

This inspired the next few tots to recite their ABCs, too, including one girl whose version had something of the hesitant, breathy quality of Marilyn Monroe's rendition of "Happy Birthday" for President Kennedy due to the microphone's amplification of her breathing.

One chipper little lass, so ebullient as she entered the ring and awaited her turn, abruptly burst into tears upon being interviewed (a visiting-Santa-Claus reaction that has no doubt occurred in many a lead-line class worldwide).

Nearly half of the kids either looked off into the distance and said not a word, or giggled into their shirt collars. The baby below had a very good reason for not answering: She was only 18 months old.

It's hard to believe that someday they could be galloping around on giant horses and leaping over fences more than 4 feet tall, though of course I never thought my own child would one day be big enough even to ride a bus all by herself. They surprise you that way.

Unknown competitor on what looks like a mount with some draft horse in his background, Evergreen Classic

Fuzzy-Wuzzy and Fully Woolly

The birch in its fall glory

It's hard to leave behind a garden that you've cultivated for nearly two decades. One can't help but feel sort of parental about living things carefully tended for years and years. 

So it felt very sad to say good-bye to the birch tree planted the year before my child's birth, the vine maple bought at a farm stand as a spindly sapling now grown to three-trunked splendor, the vibernum and dogwood shrubs framing the living-room window, and the perennials that faithfully reemerged every spring like good friends who travel far and wide but always stop by while in town.

The garden at our new home is still terra incognita as our first priority has been unpacking all those wretched boxes and moving furniture around. 

A professional landscaper created the space, aiming for an easy-care garden of shrubs and small trees, with one small densely planted flower garden. So it's got some structure...and appears to be just begging for the cottage-garden treatment, when time and budget permit.

In the meantime, I did some poking around in the flower bed to see what was there, and came across this fellow hanging out on a dock leaf.

The caterpillar, nearly two inches in length, was exceedingly fuzzy and exceedingly placid. It scarcely budged even as I turned the leaf over to observe it from all angles. 

After some research online and in books, I'm guessing it's a caterpillar of the Virginia tiger moth, commonly known as a yellow woolly-bear. This makes it a cousin of the more familiar brown-and-black-banded caterpillar of the Isabella tiger moth, called just woolly-bear and known in folklore for predicting how severe winter will be by the ratio of brown and black on its fuzzy body.

It took a while to find its head.

Yellow woolly-bears range in color from black to a yellow so pale it's nearly white. Golden yellow is the most common hue. This one's vivid orange-red is a variation often seen. I don't know if certain shades are linked with different areas of the country.

Virginia tiger moths are a widespread species, found across most of the temperate United States and Canada. 

In the Pacific Northwest, they're abundant at lower elevations and are found in habitats ranging from coastal rainforests to meadows and farmlands. And, as you can see, Cottage Lake back yards.

Caterpillar feet

There are two or three generations of caterpillars each year, and the last generation overwinters as a pupa.

This one will surely be looking for a safe place to settle down , if it hasn't already done so by the time I hit "publish" on this. It will spend the soggy season as a glossy, dark pupa cloaked in a cocoon made of its own bristles.

I couldn't find anything particularly fascinating or noteworthy about this particular species in any of my books or online, but it does have some pretty cool relatives in the tiger-moth family. 

Adult moth, from Wikipedia

One species, for example, is able to make ultrasonic clicking noises with a set of membranes, called tymbals, on its thorax at a rate of up to 4,500 clicks per second for the purpose of jamming the sonar of bats and thus avoiding being a bat's midnight snack.

When our resident woolly-bear grows up, it'll emerge in springtime as a fuzzy white moth fringed antennae and a row of orange and black dots on its abdomen. How long it will be until spring, and how harsh our winter will be, is not in the skill set of this woolly-bear...but after last night's furious rain, thunder, and lightning, I hope it's found a place to live that has a sump-pump, french drains, and clean gutters.

The Trailer of Doom

You can lead a horse to a trailer, but you can't make it get in.

That is what we neophyte horse parents learned the other day when we confidently rolled up to the barn to transport Avi to his new home in a borrowed trailer. Nothing, not even offers of apples, carrots, and peppermints, could induce him to step into this vehicle, which he seemed to think was some dreadful tumbril about to transport him to certain death.

Never mind that he'd ridden in trailers of various sorts since he was a little one. This van was Different, and therefore it was Dangerous.

"he won't load it's a no go" came the text message from the Resident Teen, which I received as I sat waiting patiently for an hour or so at the new barn, watching for the trailer's arrival.

The big event would have to wait another day or so while we looked for a larger trailer, one with a ramp that would make it a cakewalk for Avi to stroll aboard.

And so on Friday, determined to move the horse even if it required a winch, we rolled up bright and early to Avi's barn, where four horse-girls were already busy wrapping Avi's legs in polo wraps to protect them on the ride.

An hour before, he'd also received a dose of Quietex, a pasty concoction that was supposed to help settle any jitters and calm his nerves. 

All doozied up, Avi strode unsuspectingly out of the barn and into the lovely morning sunlight of a beautiful summer day.

The horse-girls disappeared along a track through the forest that led to a quiet area where we'd parked the truck and trailer. Tony followed them, schlepping a net full of hay that would go into the van to induce Avi to step inside for a little snack.

At first Avi approached the trailer like a pro.

But then he noticed that although it looked like an innocent horse trailer, it was actually a tunnel straight into the fiery pit of Hades. "Not going,"  he said.

A half hour of standing with forefeet on the ramp and hind feet off to the side commenced, broken up by occasional walking-in-circle episodes and lots of proddings on the rump. (And yes, that is a sign of his disgust with the proceedings in the corner of the picture.) We wondered if they made a product called Cooperatex.

Finally, most likely through sheer boredom, Avi suddenly plodded aboard. The horse-girl team and Tony immediately swung into action, along with help from two stable workers who'd happened by. Whump went the butt bar (which is exactly what it sounds like--a padded bar that is locked in place behind the horse's backside). Slam, went the ramp. Avi lifted his tail and produced some more evidence of his disdain for us all. Slam, slam went the two top doors. WHAM! WHAM! went Avi's hooves as he kicked the lower door in irritation.

Ten minutes later, Operation Stubborn Mule pulled up at the new barn. The horses in the paddocks neighed shrilly to welcome the newcomer--or rather, to warn him that they knew what was in the horse-box and that they all had sturdy teeth and hooves. Avi emitted a weird mooing sort of neigh in response and lustily kicked the walls of his trailer some more.

After all that fuss, however, he tiptoed out of the trailer and into his new digs at the barn. "Cool," he said as he nosed around in the bedding (a material made out of pine chips that works basically like a horse-sized version of clumping kitty litter).

Then he noticed the hay. There and then he decided this was definitely a 5-star establishment.

Late Summer: Walk in the Woods

I trailed my daughter as she and Avi ambled through the woods on a late-summer morning, a day that dawned clean and fresh after a furious downpour of nighttime rain. They were soon out of sight, leaving me on my own in silence that was punctuated now and then by the caroling of a winter wren.

Several trees growing from a "grandmother stump" 

A ravine, one among many--no wonder the news here is full of stories of ponies stuck in ravines

These two soon receded into the distance

Detail of old wooden table languishing in the woods

Beautiful leaded windows on old farmhouse

Old farmhouse in woods

A Tooth-Rasping, Bone-Cracking, Foot-Filing Sort of Day

"I  have a funny feeling about this."

We are into our second week of horse ownership, and it was time to have a well-baby checkup for the 1,100-pound (give or take a few hundred pounds) baby.

The veterinarian who gave Avi his pre-purchase checkup--a quick look-over to make sure he didn't have any significant problems that hadn't come to light--gave us succinct advice about finding the perfect horse.

Basically, that there was no such thing as a perfect horse.

"I tell people that if they want a good horse, don't get a horse," he said gruffly, "but that if you're determined to get a horse anyway, get this one." (Meaning, of course, not our particular horse, but whatever horse he's examining at the time.)

We already knew that, like any off-the-track Thoroughbred, Avi's joints had probably endured a lot of pummeling (racehorses are being ridden when they're still babies and they work hard; a two-year-old Thoroughbred has already gone through training and is being raced at an age when youngsters of other horse breeds are just getting acquainted with saddles and such; it's bound to take a toll on young bones). A huge percentage of them also suffer from gastric ulcers, due to stress. So it was likely that, despite his excellent care, Avi might have them, too.

And we knew that he had what's known as a "lazy flapper" or "roaring"--a condition in which one of two flaps in the windpipe doesn't stay properly in place and gets sucked into the horse's airstream, which as you might guess seriously limits its respiratory efficiency and endurance. Avi had "tie-back" surgery to nail that little flapper in place, but it didn't take, thus bringing an early end to his racing career.

We'd also been told he's a real tenderfoot. He's got four feet of different sizes and sensitive soles. It's a good thing he doesn't have to shop for shoes at Macy's.

Part of Avi's going-over included chiropractic work. This is what chiropractics looks like when it's done to a horse:

I am being somewhat misleading here because it was just funny to witness what looks like somebody doing to a horse what we always tell children not to do to cats and dogs. The vet explained that she was working on decompressing the horse's spine; she also applied pressure with hands, forearms, and elbows to various points on his neck, spine, and shoulders, and worked on his head and legs.

Avi seemed to enjoy the attention and was visibly relaxed. He was even more relaxed after he was given a sedative to prepare him for some dental work.

"Whoa. Where am I? Who am I? WHAT am I?"

Be glad that you are human (as I assume you are, if you are reading this). Because when you go to the dentist, you do not need to have your head in a sling and a gigantic mouth speculum inserted between your jaws and strapped to your head. (This explains the sedation.)

You also do not need to have an electric file thrust into your mouth--a file so loud that the dentist has to wear protective earmuffs to spare her hearing.

Equine dentistry is not for the faint of heart. It's a vigorous workout. The vet wore knee guards as she spent much of her time braced against the floor as she rasped, or "floated," Avi's teeth (horses get sharp points on their teeth over time, which makes eating painful and also wastes hay, as they dribble and drop a lot of it when chewing hurts).

Finally all the dental work was done, and all that remained was to let the horse fully regain consciousness before allowing him to have access to hay and grass again.

"I have no idea what just happened."

Less than 24 hours later, the farrier arrived to trim Avi's soup-tureen front feet and replace both front shoes, one of which had already been lost.

This meant more filing--but nothing that required sedation. Getting shod was no big deal for Avi because he'd been through it umpteen times already.

Modern-day farriers have wonderful modern-day tools at their disposal, but their craft is inherently much the same as it ever was. There is still the ringing of iron on an anvil, the roar of flame, the dull tapping of nails, and the sizzle and burning-hair stench of hot metal applied to hoof.

And, at the end of it all, a horse cantering around his pasture, testing out his new shoes. No more sore right front sole!

When Wishes Become Horses, At Long Last

If you had told me, when I was about eight, that someday I would really, truly have a horse, I wouldn't have believed you.

But here he is.

His name is Avi. And to be precise, he's not mine. He belongs to the Resident Teen. But I can bask in the glow of  her adoration of him.

He is a six-year-old Thoroughbred gelding, born in Kentucky.

He actually did some racing (more on that in another post), but retired from that and so joined the ranks of many other off-the-track-Thoroughbreds, or OTTBs, as they are known.

His second career began straightaway as he went into hunter/jumper training at a local stable.

He even picked up a few ribbons in his new job.

And it was at the stable where he met the Resident Teen, who is also in hunter/jumper training.

Before you could say "double-jointed snaffle," we had ourselves a horse.

Well, whoa there a second. Not so fast. First he needed a vet check.

And then he had to get into a trailer in order to travel to his new stable. He wasn't having any of it.

Eventually Avi must have decided it was getting boring to stand on the ramp being gently poked by a crutch (one of the experienced handlers loading him was laid up with a badly sprained leg) and so he responded to the encouragement at his other end and stepped in nicely.

A short ride later, he followed his new rider into a pasture to check out the surroundings.

Later, he met some of his new companions, all of whom were intensely curious about the newcomer.

I think I am still in rather a state of shock.