Springing

Today, at least, spring is finally here. The horses are very funny with it - full of beans and joie de legumes. It has been a bit dicey trying to pace their exposure to the new grass, since the recent and continous heavy rains mean I have had to pull them off the pasture several times since the wet makes the ground cover very fragile. They sulk. Now that it’s nice again, I am encountering meaningful stares and pregnant nickerings about the timing of gate openings to the grass. And it’s not so easy getting them back in again, I can tell you. Horses are very cheap dates - I can’t imagine a human being so exhilarated about a patch of green stems, unless he or she is a golf course manager.

The newest little wrinkle is a morning (mourning?) dove who has built a nest in the topmost part of the indoor arena. Good choice for the bird, not so hot for the horses and riders. My housemate took his computer out there to emit raptor cries, in an attempt to get her/them to relocate, but no joy. It was pretty funny - such a 21st century approach to animal pest management. Anyway, since the nest is 35 feet in the air through a thicket of rafters and struts, we have decided to look at it as a learning and teaching opportunity, since there is no way to remove it. Hopefully the young ones will be hatched and fledged in short order and there will be a number of bird-flapping-proofed horses to show for it. Plus it’s now dry enough to use the outdoor arena.

Happy spring!!

Recent events

Yes, it’s been a long time again since the last post. Always with the excuses, you say. But really, this time it’s a good one! Two weeks ago Saturday I was out early for chores, since I had four people arriving for Easter weekend, and twelve people sitting down to dinner on Easter Sunday. My mental list was scrolling down, setting forth all the things which needed doing after chores - the table, the cleaning, the cooking prep, the flowers, etc., etc. Also, it was snowing, for Pete’s sakes, and there was already two inches on the ground. So I was resigned to Long Chores, including blanketing everyone and I was therefor out early to get a jump on it. My first stop was a calm, nice, quite large horse whom I had blanketed many times before. I threw the sheet over, and didn’t get it on at first since he is pretty big. So, while he was eating his breakfast, I tried again, more forcefully. So forcefully that the tummy straps flew over his back and hit the stall window with a clatter, startling him. He jumped a bit, and hit me, so that I staggered at speed toward the opposite wall and after hitting it I fell, really really badly. So badly, in fact, that I couldn’t get up. I laid there like a bug on its back in the pee and poo, whimpering and hoping to heaven the agitated horse (still with his sheet half on) wouldn’t step on me. Which he didn’t, god bless him. But it was quite a long time before I could move enough to turn over and crawl out backwards, and then I laid on my back again in the barn aisle for another long time, still whimpering, before I could struggle up and into the house where my housemate finally found me.

So, let’s go visit Penn and play hospice!! Not only could I not greet my guests later that day, I couldn’t do anything at all. Not vacuum, not set the table, not walk at all, in fact. I had to be carried to the table for the meal, I got stuck on the toilet. This episode opened whole new horizons of incapacity for me. If people wished to visit me, they had to pay court to me on the couch in the living room, where I laid in state like a French demi-mondaine (sp?) in her salon, issuing Vicoden-informed nuggets of wisdom and wit. The weekend was a hoot, I must say. After that, not so much - many days on the couch not able to either sit or stand without quite a bit of discomfort. The miracle is nothing was broken or fractured, nothing is bulging or compressed. I am very, very lucky. People came in almost every day to minister to me - in particular an osteopath and a body worker who helped quite a bit. I am walking now, though I still can't sit much - but today's personal best was that I changed and washed all my bed linens! Doesn't sound like much, but it is, actually. I am reminded of a comment by the later Christoper Reeve who remarked (after his paralysis) that he really missed things like rummaging in the silverware drawer....

The cool things about this episode are several:

One: it has long been my conviction that without me personally involved in most everything, general collapse would ensue. Not so!! Help - competent help - boiled out of the woodwork, taking care of not only daily routine chores and water tub cleaning and hay moving, but also scooping the kitty boxes, loading a new toilet paper roll, feeding the dogs and cats, getting in food..... The list of things I couldn’t do was endless, and someone was always there to help. Neighbors I barely knew contacted me to see what they could do for me.

Two: my personal speed level has always been very fast. (Note: I have always thought that personal speed compatibility was the greatest single indicator of success in couples. A person who walks/thinks/reacts/talks at a significantly different speed than their partner will not last with him or her.) Now, my speed is slow. I am starting to do things, but at a very different rate, and in a different way. I must think out beforehand how it will work, and what I need to set up by way of tools, etc. It affords me quite a bit more psychic space, which I find both interesting and rewarding. I don't know how long it will be before I am fully recovered, but whatever....it's fine. The horses continue calm and content, masked against flies, grazing happily - it's good.

Moral - it’s an ill wind that blows no good? That’ll do.

Chicken tales

Things are quiet here - aside from the mess-stress. Spring always does that - it may be the season of hope in the suburbs, but in the country it means full realization of how much there is now to do, since the gentle and misdirecting snow blanket is gone. At least the chickens are laying in full spate now - between six and twelve a day. Quite a few for a household which doesn’t eat many eggs at the moment...though the dogs enjoy their evening egg w/kibble meal selection.

I love chickens - they do have personality but they certainly lack intelligence. This does not bother them at all - so much to do, so little time...endlessly self-important clucking about doing hardly anything at all, day after day. Here is a chicken tale - this actually happened.

We had a Black Australorp hen one year who developed a crop impaction. The crop is the little pouch behind the beak where the food hangs for a bit and gets ground up before making its way to the stomach (as I understand it). The openings from one place to the next are pretty small and blockages can occur. The hen’s crop distended to the point where it was dragging her little head down and the other hens were beginning to pick on her. A call was put in to U-Conn’s Ag department, and an officious official listened to the issue and then instructed us to “whirl” her. We said we needed more to go on - he became impatient. “Just what I said! Take the chicken by the legs, dangle her at 6:00, whirl her around in a complete vertical circle, and jerk to a sudden stop back at 6:00! The centrifigal force will pop the obstruction out!” And that was that - we were introduced to a new Term of Art concerning chickens - Whirling. And so we did - we whirled that poor chicken twice a day for days. Lots of stuff came out her little beak, but her crop impaction did not improve.

As a last resort, I begged a visiting vet (who has sworn me to anonymity in his fear of mid-night chicken emergency calls) to please conduct the only other remedy according to the chicken book, which was surgery. After a silent moment he said he would try, if we could find him a chicken diagram and a scalpel, since he was not in the business of chicken medicine. So I photocopied an outline diagram of a chicken with an arrow pointing to the crop area, and went to my housemate to ask for a new exacto-knife. I found him talking to a stranger out in the woodshop, and asking permission to interrupt I got the exacto-knife but fussed out loud about the lack of an anaesthetic. “Don’t need any”, the stranger blared authoritatively. “Birds have no neural net in their breast area.” I stared at him - “No offence, but who the hell are you, and how do you know this?" I asked. I was informed huffily that he performed cardio-thoracic surgery on pigeons for a living - slit their little fronts open to insert instruments before throwing them into a wind tunnel. There was no come-back to that information, I must say - it was a genuine Monty Python moment.

The next critical moment arrived with the vet, who had one of those little Dr. Ben Casey circular lights strapped to his forehead (apparently left over from vet school) and a quantity of blue fluid in a tupperware tray to sterilize the exacto-knife and the curved upholstery needle we had found to sew her up again. We arranged ourselves in the barn tackroom with the chicken settled on my lap on her back, her little feet sticking out in front of her: the vet leaned over and nervously made a cut. Not much happened - this crop was wicked rubbery and resistant to penetration. He tried harder - in fact, began sawing. At once the three of us reeled back (we were accompanied by a horse trainer who happened by). The stench was overpowering - fluids spurted out of the aperture, and fibers emerged. He sawed again, and what came to light was a fist-sized ball of felted fibers, so matted and disgusting that there was never any hope of the chicken breaking it down. The opening had to be considerably enlarged in order to get this thing out, since it wouldn’t really compress. Finally the mass was out, and there was a great empty flapping pouch on her little chest. I was reeking by this point from the blood and ick, but the hen was composedly setting there as if she was on a picnic - making little crooning hen noises and interestedly looking around - she didn’t seem to notice anything unusual (see sentence above about chicken intelligence).

Now it was time to sew her up, but neither the vet nor the helper had their glasses on, and they couldn’t manage the thread the damn needle to save their lives - it was interminable. After fits and starts the stitching was done, and the hen placed a little cage while we all three stood around and looked at her to see what would happen. We were all sagged and wrung out, but she was hungry!! So I cooked her up some oatmeal gruel and she recovered just fine...it wasn't long before she started laying eggs again. The vet was back the next week to take pictures of his surgical triumph, and I think he has dined out on the story many times. The final episode was a bit sad - a year later her crop swelled again, so we whirled her and she had a heart attack and died. Couldn’t take any more, I expect. The moral - even if you count your chickens well after they are hatched, there is no certainty in this world.

The Secret Life of Things

It’s been a while since I wrote - I was away with a group of old friends helping to clean out the family home of another recently dead old friend. The two of us who were executors only had one week, and the task was overwhelming. The parents - along with our recent friend their son - were artists, and there was - on top of a lifetime of regular stuff - a serious collection of art and art supplies. Three of the canvases were designated for a museum, but the rest was to be divied up among friends and then gone through and sorted out for either a secure storage area for remaining friends, or to charity, or to an estate agent. My job was the artwork - and it was just everywhere. Framed works were hung and piled everywhere upstairs and in the basement, and also in an enormous flat filing cabinet of perhaps twelve very large drawers. This was filled with work dating back to the parent’s art school days and early life work. As an example, one drawer alone held ten or so oil portraits - unframed and stacked one on the next. They were just lovely, of complete strangers to me, but fine work that I couldn’t imagine throwing away. There was a similar stack of watercolors - really very, very nice art. Fortunately, as to these pieces, I was able to reason with the estate agent, proposing that if he framed and matted them he could sell them, since they were good art. He seemed to agree - I hope so. And I swear the art supplies (destined for a local school classroom) were spawning in the walls.

And the art was just a patch on the contents of the house - furniture, appliances, tableware, dishes, electronics, books, clothes, rugs, bedding, toiltries, a pantry full of food, on and on. The normal destinations for this sort of thing were not available - the house was in the Hamptons on Long Island and the several charitable organizations contacted “did not go to that zip code”. Seven of us worked dawn to dusk packing and finding destinations - but in the meantime, we talked quite a bit about the nature of things and the laws which govern their existence.

My conviction of many years is that there are invisible eddies and currents along which the secret life of things is conducted - having not much to do with what we humans think of as control over the situation. Here is an example: many years ago I was walking through a Cambridge (MA) residential neighborhood, and I found a right hand sheepskin mitten. My size. I picked it up, since it was in great shape. A week later, I was walking on the downtown Boston waterfront, and found a left hand sheepskin mitten. My size. So now I had a set which was warm and my favorite and I used them happily for several years together with a lovely wool knit cap from Scotland. The mittens were always stored in the cap when not in use and put in the exact same place. One day all three of them simply left - no forwarding address. I didn’t lose them - they left - for whatever reasons govern the actions of things. The above is but one personal example of this phenomenon - I have many more.

And when it comes to a houseful of things, it is interesting to watch both how their accumulation and dispersal take place. Regarding dispersal - some seemed to leave with reluctance (it took many tries to get them out the door), and others simply flew out, all happy about the next chapter. You really have to wonder who is in charge - all of us were groaning under the burden of so many things and kept observing how as SOON as we got home we would begin cleaning out our own stuff since it was just hell to visit on our heirs/agents/whoever this task of dealing with so many objects. Yet as far as accumulation goes they keep coming into our lives of their own accord - I don’t even SHOP for pete’s sakes and my house is crammed. It is much harder to keep them out than let them in - don't you think?

And let’s not even go there about the barns......

Almost Spring at Back Acres Farm

The last narrative on March 3 talked about taking a young horse for surgery in Rheinbeck, NY., and how the owner was beyond anxious for the horse - feeling like a horrible father subjecting his trusting dependent to elective surgery which would make no sense to the horse, etc. The story got a lot more interesting, actually. The boarder got several urgent phone messages from the vet the next day - unfortunately when he couldn’t take the calls - and the messages were simply scary - “Call me NOW”, and “Please call immediately”. The boarder instantly leaped to the worst conclusion, of course - the horse was dead. Actually what happened was that the surgery began as planned - to do a standing surgery in stocks to remove the undescended testicle under local anaesthesia - but the horse could not be safely sedated enough to tolerate the stocks. So Plan B was implemented - that of general anesthesia (less desirable because draft horses apparently don’t do very well with it). They began the surgery, located the missing testicle and attempted to draw it out, and it wouldn’t come. So in went the little camera to see what was up, and there was a TWENTY POUND TUMOR in there, tangled up in the doings. So large, in fact, that the fluid with which it was filled had to be drained out before the tumor could be removed. A routine surgery turned into a five hour surgery under general anesthesia - not at ALL what was planned for. And it was a plain miracle that this enormous tumor, attached at one end to a sort of cord, had not wrapped around a bowel yet. Which would certainly have happened soon, and when it did it would have looked like a very serious colic episode and/or bowel obstruction. This in turn would have meant a horse in agony having to be trailered for a minimum of two hours on an emergency basis, rather than what did happen. It seemed clear to us that the horse’s Higher Power was yanking on his human’s Higher Power’s sleeve, saying DAD, get me some help, please! It’s the only thing that explained the boarder’s weird rush to surgery for his horse, in spite of the fact that he actually did not want to castrate him.

The upshot is that the horse had to spend a week in the hospital with pretty serious incisions to deal with, and now needs up to two months of absolute stall rest at home. He is tucked in to the new barn with an outside window and his best friend next to him by day....the window between the stalls has had its bars removed so they can play Face - which they do. At night his other friend is next door, and it’s working pretty well. The incisions look really good, and a full recovery seems quite likely: what a satisfactory outcome, calloo, callay!!

Other than that - gosh it’s muddy. My weekday barn help has the happy facility of liking to play with water - so there are little berms and swales snaking around all the barns sending water here and draining it there, in a mostly successful attempt to keep the water out and away. Every year we tweak things more and the barns are less at risk - even this year, the watery incursions have been minimal. Life is good.

Video from our Playshop on Liberty Dancing with Bonnitta Roy

Here's a short video clip from the recent Playshop we hosted with Bonnitta Roy and the Horses at Alderlore on Liberty Dancing. It's a really fun way to connect with your horse on the ground and a creative way to introduce Dressage Principals to your horse before you go to mounted work.
http://backacresfarm.com/

Early March Tales from Plainfield and Back Acres Farm

It’s been a busy week around here. On Sunday there was a mini-clinic with Bonnitta Roy, who teaches "dancing" with horses, using liberty work principles and human body language. The session was filmed and will reportedly be seen at some point on her website at alderlore.org.   Other sessions are posted there - so cool to watch. It was quite something to see - lovely, in fact.  Even though the weather was cold, the participants were highly enthusiastic, and there will be a follow-up clinic scheduled soon.

Two new horses arrived this week - a Hanoverian/TB mare belonging to a neighbor who needs one to two months of care, and a lovely Percheron/Trakehner cross from down South. We are dealing with the usual integration scrambles - keeping everyone calm, identifying optimal turnout and pasture buddies (or not) in this season with its footing from hell, making sure health and safety issues are taken care of as best we can.  I find myself wondering if new children in a day care situation are required to come with vet and vaccine certificates? I never had a kid, so don’t know the protocols - but friends with children seem to accept with both irritation and equanimity the fact that the children (and they) are routinely sick throughout the year by reason of the germs the kids bring home from school.

Yesterday a boarder and I drove to Rheinbeck, NY to the equine hospital there to take a young draft for cryptorchid/castration surgery. The owner had hoped to avoid it by waiting for the other testicle to descend, since abdominal surgery is by definition invasive and carries potential dangers, but the time had come. The hospital was lovely - very clean - and the vet-surgeon was beyond helpful and attentive. A white board was soon COVERED with diagrams as to the different possibilities including the up- and downsides of each  approach.  Informed consent was certainly an option after he was through explaining.  But the outing was tough on the horse and tough on the owner:   the young horse had been trailer-trained but never taken anywhere so far away (on bad roads), and then he was upset by a strange environment. The owner felt as if he had betrayed his horse-friend who trusted him in getting on the trailer, and now the horse - who wasn’t even sick - was going to have a difficult couple of days, and wouldn’t understand why. A real conundrum for any male horse owner - we talked quite a bit about it on the way home. Any castration is nasty for the horse - no way around it. This one, of course, was more medically indicated since apparently an undescended testicle has a much higher liklihood of becoming cancerous - so the surgery was probably indicated in any case. Still....