Horsekeeping (44 page)

“Isn't it lovely to see them go trotting by?” I encouraged Scott to grasp the beauty, the rarity of it.

Silence.

So I became a stealthy trespasser on my own land, adding trails and land-bridges across culverts that Scott grew to enjoy despite himself, or so I convinced myself.

Our alfalfa field rested under corn that year, and though generally protective of every inch of tillable pasture, farmer Duprey obliged us, leaving an unplanted perimeter path that corralled us out of his crop. We delighted in trailing alongside the feed corn that grew eight or nine
feet high by harvest, chastising the horses that snatched a leafy snack here and there. Once, Bandi walked the long way back to the stables with a bent stalk sticking out of his mouth, chomping on it occasionally, ready for a barn poker game.

The kids trail-rode regularly with Meghan on foot leading Hawk and Jane, and Elliot loose-reined and relaxed on trustworthy Cleo, trotting and cantering through the woods and fields. The day I mustered enough courage to join them on Bandi was a milestone not lost on any of us and marred only, as Elliot noted, by the absence of Scott to round out the family portrait. It wasn't quite the misty scene I had envisioned long ago—my anxiety hijacked pure pleasure—but it was good enough.

Elliot and Jane had grown confident and skilled in their riding and horse care. Elliot tacked up without assistance and favored his flying mount of leaping lightly onto Cleo while she moved forward from the mounting block.

“Remember, Elliot,” Bobbi cautioned each time, “not all horses will tolerate those theatrics.” He'd smile devilishly in return: he felt he knew his Cleo.

His jumping over cross rails was attentive yet relaxed, not jeopardized by the occasional fall. He and I shared a lesson on occasion, and seeing him ride the fences so easily gave me the urge to try. And he liked it all, jumping, dressage, trail rides and, since driving a horse was not enough, he also learned to operate our new John Deere electric “Gator” that transported us through the fields from our house to the farm. A cross between a miniature pick-up and a golf cart, it tops out at 30 mph, is serenely silent, and lacks the rollover dangers of ATVs. With Jane gamely bouncing along in the tailgate, Elliot practiced through forward, braking, turns and reverse. I graded him on his safety and skill, and this rite of passage was the high point of his summer. Though he participated in several day camps from soccer to theatre, he also squeezed in barn hours of mucking, cleaning, leading, feeding, sweeping and grooming. I was informed he was an excellent worker, diligent and willing,
though slow initially. We raised his hourly rate once he speeded up, as agreed, but often neglected to pay him as he forgot to ask.

Jane didn't fully trust Cleo after her tumble, but forged her own relationship with Hawk. She pioneered his riding-under-saddle career since no one else, not even Meghan was small enough to test him out. Sixty pounds being Hawk's safe limit, it will be a sad day when Jane gains another thirteen. Hawk showed Jane special regard, even though she ponytailed his forelock and took donkey years to clean each hoof. He honored her carefree faith that he would take care of her. On him she learned to trot and post, not easy with his short-legged, choppy gait. What was scary on Cleo became an easy adventure on low-to-the-ground Hawk. Then she actually cantered him.

“Look Mom, I'm galloping holding only the reins . . .” she'd shout in passing as she craned her neck around at me and still didn't lose her balance.

“Great, Jane, but look where you're going. . . .”

Neither Hawk nor Jane had any knowledge of leg commands so he and Jane worked out their own system. No one ever tired of watching this duo, horse and rider in perfect proportion only small, and most things in miniature captivate.

Spring and summer whooshed past, and all of a sudden we noticed the absence of Jane tears. She was managing to keep her distance from horse's hooves and cats' claws and reliably led Hawk around the barn and out to his grassy paddock all by herself. She logged many happy stall hours with Hawk, two peas in a pod. She was learning the language of horses.

One perfect summer day Jane and I made an impromptu picnic after our rides. Plain turkey sandwiches tasted gourmet to the growling of hollow appetite that follows strenuous effort. The airy shade of the gazebo refreshed us just as I had dreamed it would. Satiated, we gazed at the sunlit paddocks of horses swishing their tails and lunching on the grass, occasionally lazing over to a richer tuft.

“Mama, is there anything more beautiful than this farm?”

I let her words drift on the crystalline air and withheld my tears.
Wordlessly we both understood that no, there were few moments more perfect than right there, right then. The view of well-kept, peaceful horses out in nature, particularly in spring, is among the most picturesque known to humans who have been studying and depicting them since we lived in caves. Their elegant design of graceful power that they permit us to harness creates a beauty of form and function that stirs many of us deeply. Their sculpted musculature, the sleek sheen of the shorn horse and the woolly coats of wintering ones, the varieties of size, color, shape and personality that blended over thousands of years have yielded an exquisite creature humans should treat with more respect and honor than we generally do, whether they pull plows or carry top-hatted riders to the Olympics.

 

 

WHEN I REPORTED MY DAY WITH JANE TO SCOTT, he relayed more child wisdom from his own Jane file. An ancient “burying ground” fronts our road: a white-fenced, pine tree-cathedraled plot respectfully tended by the town, with revolutionary and civil war headstones memorialized on patriotic holidays by miniature flags. Jane questioned these “signs” and Scott explained that cemeteries hold and mark the dead.

“Oh, I see,” Jane said. “When you want to feel close to them in your heart you go and visit them. You go and stand there for a while and do nothing.”

It is easy to cringe at sappy thought and especially language, our taste for sentiment ruined by the cheap sound bites of Hallmark cards and emotion-manipulating movies, not to mention the thick skins of irony we don as armor against cruelty and death. But children's proclamations seem devoid of ulterior motives, pure in heart and mind, unburdened, fresh reflections of what they see. Parenting and nature experiences, when lived spontaneously and in the flesh, can still be authentically moving even within our wary, jaded adult contexts.
Relax the head and listen to the heart
, Hawthorne would say.

Jane and Elliot are still soulful little people, as perhaps children are
until by necessity the world grinds childishness out of them. Or, maybe we parent them towards innocence only to relieve them of the privilege so they can cope as adults. Romantic notions aside, I know the farm has helped my family interpret and really
see
nature's beauty and appreciate its twinned gifts of constancy and variation. Tasking within nature, working the horses and the land, engaged me deeper than my hitherto passive admiration. These transcendent moments slow time by encouraging my family and me to set aside our brainy defensiveness and, simply, be. They open us. We brush a universal plain by concretely experiencing the local, the physicality of our landscape. We meld as a family connected to place. The emotion of it can be embarrassing to adults, but kids regularly smother self-consciousness. They make childlike passion fine and real, whether you are six or sixty.

Elliot and I shared some of our best moments sitting on the large rock out by the gazebo with Bandi and Cleo on long lead ropes chomping grass. Sometimes my son would hop up on bare Cleo and lie prone along her sun-warmed back.

“This feels wonderful, Mom. You should try it,” he called out, his rein-free arms and stirrup-less feet dangling at her portly sides. I almost did.

Or, all three of us lying in the summer grass with the bunnies in the plastic gated enclosure from K-Mart, stroking, holding and watching them hop and pause to tenuously nibble a blade or two. We debated their cutest parts: Jane liked their twitchy transparent ears, and Elliot could barely stand it when they pawed their faces or cuddled close to lick one another clean. In broad daylight a coyote stalked us as we dawdled in the bunny pen, not twenty feet away. Healthily large, he stared us down until we rose, waved our arms and shouted him off. Jane and I convinced brave Elliot not to track this brazen creature, probably lured by the smell of fresh rabbit. Nature's dark side.

We kept our eyes peeled for the red-tailed hawk that patrols our fields, also hankering after some farm-raised chubby bunny. Eagles had repopulated our area, predators large enough to pick off our dog Velvet without
any trouble, let alone two rabbits. Adventures big and small abounded if we widened our apertures and realigned our lenses, and my dream of our farm as a place that instills respect and appreciation for the land, nature, animals and people sympathetic to those ideals had materialized. Yes, I thought, this barn family was easily worth any cost; in fact, the expense began to feel a bargain.

All perfect except that Smudge, our friendliest barn cat had disappeared. Meghan searched and searched, and we could only hope that she would turn up again, mud-streaked and full of encounters we could only guess at. I held off a few days and then broke the news.

“Is she dead?” Jane asked, all eyes.

“Well, I don't know Jane, she could be.”

“I bet a coyote got her,” said Elliot, intent on his game of solitaire. His stoicism surprised me.

“Maybe she'll still turn up,” I said without conviction. “I like to think she found a home somewhere else—maybe even as a house cat.”

Shouldn't they be more upset,
I wondered? I had planned on our horse business teaching us lessons of living and dying, the circle of life in its G-rated, natural, non-hyped, unsentimental version, and I suppose I got the minimal trauma I bargained for. Weeks passed and no Smudge. We concluded we had seen the last of her black-and-white smudginess flexing her claws into Scott's legs, her skulking through the parking lot, and her scaling the hayloft ladder. We began to talk about Weatogue's favorite kitty in the past tense. I dreaded discovering her as a lifeless lump along our roadside. I began to feel guilty about fostering barn cats. We spay and take care of them, but by definition good mousers are quasi-feral. Shelters won't turn strays over to barns out of concern for their safety, and feral cats murder a significant percentage of songbirds. They can be ruthless torturers and killers and are not native to our country. We had all found mouse wombs around the barn, the only body part Ninja disdained. “Yuck! What the heck is that?” Jane exclaimed as we squatted and peered. Are we exploiting cats or preserving their “felinity”?

 

 

ELLIOT TURNED ELEVEN IN JUNE, and Jane, six in July. With age and experience came some welcome freedom alongside the hard facts of lost, sick or dead animals. Elliot's skill driving Hawk persuaded us that he and Jane could responsibly cruise the fields solo. Meghan equipped them with a two-way radio, checking in like a taxi dispatcher.

“Meghan to Elliot, Meghan to Elliot, come in Elliot.”

“Elliot to Meghan, we hear you loud and clear.”

“How's it going out there?”

“Great.”

“Where are you?”

“We're in the woods.”

“In the
woods
? With the cart?”

“Yeah. Hawk jumped a log.”

Meghan and I concluded they had traversed a stick and that all was well despite our concern for the cart on the narrow, curvy trail. We strained not to meddle, trusting Elliot. For two city kids whose every move is carefully monitored this gift of independence was worth a few gray hairs. And their carefree spirit spurred my memories of my own childhood invincible fearlessness. I envied their powerful optimism; that they had to
heighten
the drama with their imaginations—actually held ambition and capacity for more—kept me from curtailing their adventure. It contrasted all too depressingly to my fear and ambivalence about riding. But the kids' driving inspired me, and rather than give up, I would spend the summer in the saddle to see if I could steel my nerve.

So, I rode several times a week, except in that patch of July when the wall-thick heat had us watering down sweating horses several times a day and scurrying to hardware stores for stall fans to supplement the mammoth but still insufficient air movers in the aisles. In summer we reversed schedule: horses out in the cooler night and back in the barn to umbrella the sun. How serene to visit a full barn during the day, particularly heat weary horses content to relax in the shade and dusty slants of light, turning their broad sides to any slight breeze. Horse lethargy inferred safety
and appealed to me, they were too sluggish to agitate or move quickly. I watched horses sleep on a regular basis, many of them lying down.

Before one scheduled lesson, I arrived to find Bandi flat out on his side, catching some Zs.

“Meghan, what do I do? Wake him up?”

“Well, you can . . . but Bobbi never does.”

I looked at my watch: I had limited time. I looked at Bandi. His head rested on the floor in the shavings near the stall door and his protruding belly gently heaved, so I sat down in the aisle, leaned against the edge of his stall and stroked his nose and ears. His eyes fluttered, never fully closing for long, his tail half-heartedly swished away a few flies, and his breathing labored some because his massive body compressed his lungs, but he was mellow enough that my attentions didn't alert him. I admired him dozing, amused by the string of drool that puddled under his hanging lower lip. How charmed I was to be so near a huge animal in repose, and though I missed my ride, I happily traded it for a little piece of horse heaven. I loved my kids all the more having surreptitiously watched them sleep—quiet, safe and at peace, marveling at the design of them, and now Bandi was dearer to me, too.