Henk writes
Wow. It’s almost September, and I haven’t written a blog post since Mila was born at the end of April! I blame it all on Lil, of course. She’s been too self-absorbed and busy doing who-knows-what to tend to my literary career, and despite my other impressive talents, I just can’t work a keyboard. She still seems to find time to ride me, though… Doesn’t seem quite fair. Like perfecting my collected trot is more important than getting me a book contract!
But I won’t bore you with my problems. Here’s a re-cap.
Marvelous Mila
Charlee’s filly is the coolest horse to hit the ground since… well… moi. I knew it as soon as she was born, and couldn’t wait for a chance to hang out with her. They live in the stall next to mine, so we could chat, but for the first couple of weeks after Mila was born, Lil insisted on putting Mom and baby out by themselves. Then, FINALLY she brought me out on a lead rope to meet them nose-to-nose. Mila came right over to say “Hi,” which prompted Charlee to spin around a kick me. Really! I was offended, but then figured out she was just making a point and I couldn’t entirely blame her. If Mila was mine, I’d do the same thing, I suppose. After that it was ok, and now Mila spends more time with Wilby and me (he got added a couple of days later and I was floored when Charlee booted him, too) than she does with her Mom. We canter around, groom each other, find the tastiest grass to eat. Charlee trusts us completely with her baby, and we’d lay our lives on the line for that kid.
Chicken Massacre
Lil got the bright idea somewhere that she should get a flock of chickens. Imagine my profound shock when I found out that the purpose behind this bizarre move was to collect the unborn offspring of these birds and.. can you imagine?... eat them! I’ll never look at a human the same way again! I think the chickens find this knowledge too unbearable to live with, because they’ve been systematically committing suicide all summer. One took a nap under a parked car. Four or five have voluntarily crawled through the fence into the dog run and martyred themselves by way of the Great Dane (who always seems so disappointed when they stop playing and flapping and… die!). And then they got help from the resident raccoon who pried open the door to their coop every other night for a week and chewed the head off one chicken each night. Wow. And people think we horses are hard to take care of!
The Return of Pretty-Boy, And Its Aftermath
Soberbio, the Andalusian stallion whose children stayed with us for a while last year spent a few months here and completely messed up our relationship with Lil. He does tricks (like half-pass , Piaffe and Passage), and she got to try some of these things out. She liked it! Worse than that, Soberbio’s owner rode Wilby and me and told Lil there’s no reason we couldn’t learn some of those tricks, too. That after we’d worked so hard to convince Lil that we’d pretty much maxed out our natural talents. Now there’s no more putzing around in the arena. We have to work again! But the news isn’t all bad, really, because all the extra flexing and collecting has built up my neck to a thing of beauty, and I’m told my butt is awesome. Here’s a picture of the pretty boy.
Horse Rescue
Lil and Robert picked up the first “re and re” (retrain and re-home) candidate this weekend. He’s a 10-year-old Standardbred that’s retired from racing and looking for a new job. A group of women from the local women’s shelter has been coming to the farm for the past few months to learn about horses, and now they’ll be working with the new guy (his name’s Targui) to teach him how to be a riding horse. Lil tells me the idea is to have people helping horses, and horses helping people. I guess the women have had some lousy things happen in their lives, and being around us equines helps them feel better. She’s calling the new program Horseplay Sanctuary.
Well, that’s summer in a nutshell. I promise to keep Lil’s nose to the grindstone (or fingers to the keyboard) more regularly from now on.
