Married with Horses: The Hay-Gloo
Kimberly was hooking up the horse trailer when I entered the barn. Vander, Pepper and she were headed to the last hunter/jumper show of the season. Kimberly was spending the next couple of nights at the show in the trailer. I had to work a short dinner service at the restaurant, take care of our and Jack and Claudia’s animals and finish some more work around the farm.
Besides, after our most recent horse show experience, Kimberly didn’t pressure me to go.
I arrived at Jack and Claudia’s just after sunset still wearing my chef’s coat, kitchen pants and clogs. I entered the house and was immediately “attacked” by their five dogs who likely smelled all the steaks, salmon and pork chops I’d cooked that night. They sniffed and licked and wagged and barked. Needless to say, I felt loved.
The six of us went outside to check on the horses. The dogs took turns chasing each other around the yard as I entered the giant pasture, which ran the several-hundred yards from the back of Jack and Claudia’s property and wrapped around the front of the house.
It was the first chilly night of the season. Through the crisp, dry air, many stars, a couple of planets and the band of the Milky Way were clearly visible. I turned on the outside spotlights, but most of the pasture remained in pitch blackness.
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I walked further into the darkness, but neither saw the horses nor heard a sound. The horses had plenty of grass and didn’t need grain, but they all needed to be accounted for.
“Ponies!” I shouted into the darkness.
At first I heard nothing, then a thunder of hooves with the ground shaking beneath me. A modest “stampede” broke free of the darkness with horses galloping past me just inches to my left and right.
All eight horses ran a few circles each before gathering around me. Raben and Corey top the pecking order and inspected me first. My chef’s coat must have smelled somewhat of the seasonal fruits and root vegetables the restaurant cooks with. Raben tried her best to chew on and bite off my coat’s knotted, cotton buttons.
One after the other, the horses checked me out and let me scratch and pet them. The herd’s social butterfly, Vicki, waited patiently until everybody had been through once before she came back for seconds. I think she’d let me pet her until both my arms fell off.
Raben’s colt, Stellan, also returned for seconds. When I think back to his birth earlier this year, I’m amazed by how much he’s grown. There’s no way I could pick him up now. Stellan is a smart horse, and I wonder sometimes if he remembers that I helped him stand up and get his first drink of milk.
The dogs and I returned to the house where we all sat on the couch together so they could lick the spots of food from my clothes. Perhaps this was a new, environmentally friendly method of laundering my kitchen uniform.
I bid farewell to the dog and pony show and drove straight to our barn. I mixed the horses’ beet pulp and grain and dropped all the buckets. I hung out in the barn with Hazel, Macy and Sascha while I waited for Justin to finish eating in the small pasture so I could turn him back out with the others.
I mucked the stalls, swept the tack room and organized the bottles on the wash stall shelves, but Justin still had half his bucket left. It wasn’t hard to figure out why.
The other horses had long since finished their dinners and returned to grazing.
“Hey guys!” Justin nickered though the fence. “Whatcha doin’? Hey! Come over here guys!”
“Hey, slowpoke!” I shouted at him. “What are you doin’? Why aren’t you eating? Do you want to go back out with the girls? You need to eat!”
“Aw geez,” Justin said to himself as he returned to his bucket. A few seconds later he was back at the fence, talking to the others. They didn’t seem to notice him at all.
The night was getting cold as was I. I knew if I went inside I would not want to come back out to take care of Justin. I climbed the stairs to the hay loft, pulled out a couple of heavy-weight horse blankets and bedded down in a small pile of loose hay.
The last thing I remember is Macy and Sascha burrowing in between the blankets with me.
When I awoke I looked at my watch. It was 3:15 a.m. I was warm and sleepy enough that I considered just going back to sleep. The cats gave me dirty looks as I peeled back the top blanket and let in the cold night air.
