The Horse that Rolled

It is hard to imagine these days how much horses meant to me when I was a child.  There was seldom a day that passed that I was not somehow involved with horses in some way.  To my ultimate dismay this seldom ever involved actually being near a horse.  I had to fulfill my bottomless horse desire with drawing, daydreaming, watching Big Valley and other horse themed shows or talking about them.  My sister was also very horse driven which allowed us to commiserate together about the lack of horse in our lives and to conspire together to try and increase our horse opportunities.

Luckily for us our aunt who lived next door to us had a friend who had horses.  Billie was a very sturdily built woman who lived on several acres with her two kids and a half dozen horses.  I think there was a Mr. Billie but I never remember seeing him.  Billie was unlike my mother and unlike my aunt in many ways.  Number one on the list was her attire.  I don't believe I ever saw her wearing anything but jeans and cowboy boots along with some worse for wear tee shirt.  Now, my mother and my aunt wore jeans, but theirs were a variety that was not likely to be used for labor.  Billie's jeans were stained, torn and smelled of horse.

Billie also had short hair which was worn in a style called a 'shag'.  Basically it was many layers of stiff dark hair that didn't seem to get combed very often.  My mother's hair was always 'done' in some way that kept it stylish and caused her to avoid things that would 'undo' it.  The most different thing about Billie from female relatives was her personality.  She was loud.  She was outspoken.  She would use words that my sister and I were not allowed to speak and were not even supposed to hear.  We loved Billie.

Of course had she just been this loud swearing woman who dressed like a ranch hand I am sure I would have loved her still, but what really made us love her was that she had horsed - and she invited us over to ride them.

I clearly remember our first such outing and it was memorable for several reasons.  First was that for some reason my mother trusted Billie enough to leave my sister, my cousins and I with her.  Perhaps my mother had something really urgent she needed to do, or perhaps my aunt was using some sort of hypnotic persuasion technique on my mother, but she left us in the care of this scruffy, loud, un-motherly, swearing woman.  And she left us there for hours at a time.  Truly a memorable moment.

So my mother and my aunt drop my sister and three cousins and me off and drive away.  Billie waves and calls out encouraging things to them as they drive off and then just sets about getting all of us kids, including her own two into readying the horses for riding.  Since there were more of us than horses that could be ridden and probably because she didn't want too many of us on horseback at once she divided us into groups of two and set us about tasks.  We had to water the horses and saddle the horses and comb the horses and several other chores.  We who would balk at even the slightest home chore went after all tasks with wild, happy abandon.  Horses have a way of doing that to kids.

I was one of the first two riders.  Billie chose for me to ride Roper, a bay colored horse and her daughter who was a couple of years younger than me was set up to ride a pony.  As she boosted me into the saddle, Billie just instructed me to ride to the end of the field, which was about two acre lengths and then turn around and come back.  I took hold of the reins and held them the way she instructed and then clucked for the horse to walk.  Billie's daughter started off beside me and as we started crossing the field she said to me, "Don't let him roll on you."  I wanted to ask her what she meant, but the pony chose to trot forward and then Roper began to trot which caused me to bounce up and down in the saddle like a sack of grain.  We jounced our way to the end of the field and I set about pulling on the reins to get Roper to turn.

He decided he did not want to turn.  Instead, Roper abruptly stopped and began to kneel down, then slowly began to roll over onto his side.  This was something unprecedented in my limited horse riding experience.  I had just enough presence of mind to get off the saddle as Roper began to try to roll onto his back.  From across the field I could hear Billie shouting, "Don't you let that @#&* horse roll!!"

Often as a child I was given what seemed like incomplete information.  Things such as how in fact one was supposed to stop an animal that weighed hundreds of more pounds than you from doing what it pleased was entirely lacking.  I tried to improvise by putting my little hands on his neck and pushing, saying "Roper, don't roll."  This was not effective.  Roper proceeded to roll over onto his back.

Now Billie had not just shouted at me, she had begun to run my way and this was a sight as well.  She was a big woman and you might have thought her to be somewhat slow, but that would be a mistake.  Once she got going the momentum of her bulk had her traveling at quite a clip.  She reached us just as Roper had rolled over once and proceeded to let out the most loud and invective filled string of syllables I had ever heard.  This was not lost on Roper and he jumped to his feet immediately.  She took hold of his reins and told me to "Come on!" while she practically drug Roper back to the stable yard.

I was feeling pretty low at that point and thought my chance to ride had been forfeited when she commanded me to get back in his saddle.  "You're the one he pulled that crap with so you're the one who has to ride him."  She snapped a lead rope to Ropers bridle and once I was back on top of him she said "Now don't touch the reins.  Just hold on to the saddle horn."  I did just that.  No way was I doing to disobey this cantankerous woman.  She picked up a riding crop, stood in the center of a dirt ring and slapped the crop against her leg, telling Roper to get going.  He began to walk around a circle the length the lead rope allowed.

At first I was quite scared, but after several circles, things didn't seem to be so bad.  Billie grunted. and brought us to a stop.  "What way were you turning when he rolled?" she asked.  "Uhhh..." I responded trying to desperately think of which was my left and right hand.  Sensing that Billie was not about to put up with my personal failings I just blurted out, "Right."  Somehow this turned out to be the actual answer and was not the current direction we were circling.  "Okay," she said, "Then he is not going to like this next part, so you better hang on tight."

There was no time for me to even fully comprehend what she said before she had us turned and circling right.  Roper did not in fact like going in this direction and began to buck just a little bit.  She smacked him on the rump and he began to go even faster, slightly humping his back occasionally as he did.  I was clenching the saddle horn for all I was worth and each time Roper bucked I felt myself lifting from the saddle only to gratefully slam back down.  As he began to travel faster, still arching his back from time to time I began to list a little bit in the saddle when I came down and I was worried that if he bucked one more time I was going to fall off and then Billie would kill me.  Luckily she slowed him down and let me get off.

"Alright," she said, "That ought to do it."  Then she commanded me to walk the horse, take off his saddle, comb him down and feed him.  I did each thing she said without a moments hesitation.  One false move and I was afraid she was going to make me ride him again.  It began to dawn on me that Billie had a lot more expectation of me than my mother ever did.  In Billie's world you did not talk back, you did as you were told.  If you fell off the horse nobody was going to coddle you or even ask if you were okay.  If you were told to do something you did it, even if you weren't actually capable of doing it.  Thus I fell off the horse and didn't get hurt.  I rode a bucking horse and didn't fall off.  I took off a saddle that weighed almost more than I did.

Billie didn't just have this kind of control over us kids, but it seemed to extend to our mother's as well.  When my mother and aunt finally came to get us, Billie recounted our adventures, saying of my mishap.  "Yeah, that Roper tried to roll on her, but she is okay."   Somehow she said it in such a way that it took every bit of menace out of it so that my own overly protective mother did not even bat an eye.  My aunt's curiosity was piqued though and she said "Why would a horse try to roll?"

"Well," Billie drawled with one boot up on the lowest fence rail, "The guy that owned him prior to me taught him tricks.  So when the horse gets tired or doesn't want to work he will pull one of them. But we got it all settled out didn't we?"  She slapped me on the back with the last sentence.  I just nodded.  Oh yeah, we got it all settled.

That ended our first adventure with Billie and we went on to have many more.  Some were the best horse encounters I ever had and some were less than stellar.  None however were as memorable as that first one with Roper, the horse that rolled. 

The chickens have come home to roost...

Mud chickens that is.  For the last three days we have been receiving water from the sky.  A very unlikely event for 2011.  We normally will have over 34 inches of rain by this time each year.  This year we have 11 inches to date and about an inch of that fell in the last three days. 

We have become grudgingly accustomed to this year.  In addition to the lack of rain there has been many days of over 100 degree temperatures so that by now, when it is only in the mid to upper nineties, it feels relatively cool.  We have altered our lives to the extent that we water our struggling vegetable garden every single day.  We do this in spite of a water ban because of a happy little loophole in that ban.

If you water with a sprinkler system, you are relegated to watering only two days a week and those days are specified by whether your house address ends in an even or odd number.  The ban also requires you to water at certain very inconvenient times, basically from sundown to sunup.  The loophole is that you can water to your hearts content any day of the week and at any time if you hold the hose.  Now that is already our basic way of watering because it is much more efficient and effective than using a sprinkler.  If we were watering our vegetable plants with a sprinkler we would have either 1. dead plants because we would not be getting enough water to the plants we want to cherish and instead be watering the entire yard, or 2. have a water bill that pushes into four figures a month.  So the ban has not actually limited our watering of the plants.

The plants have shown their appreciation of this by dying by degrees instead of all at once.  The attrition level continues to climb as these poor plants, faced with a pitiless cloud free sun and temperatures more suited to cooking decide it is just not worth it and finally expire.  Others valiantly struggle onward.  The attrition has been worse on the cucumbers.  My husband has been nurturing and coddling these guys with cleverly placed shade cloths that he must remove at sunrise so they can get some sun but recover by noon or they just fry away.  If we get even one cucumber this fall it will be due to his undying cucumber loyalty.

In the beginning of September the 100 degree plus hatred of the Mega-Summer relented for about a week and we had temperatures in the 60s at night and 80s in the day.   The effect on everyone was transformative.  Unfortunately that kind of weather is so foreign to this part of the world it quickly continued its journey to its actual home somewhere far, far from here, but it did the job.  Mega-Summer was vanquished and although our temperatures have crept back into Summer realms, the waning daylight has effectively nixed any more of those 109 degree days.

And then it rained.  It wasn't just me who upon hearing the rain became startled and confused (what is that sound???) others reported the same.  I had to actually walk out into a pelting shower in order to seek the long forgotten umbrella somewhere hidden in my car.  It was raining - oh joy!!!

The joy has been somewhat diminished by its effect on a portion of our pathway in the garden.  At the first of the year when we were breaking ground on the new garden areas we found a brilliant solution to what to do with all the tons of clay we were unearthing.  We will just put it into the pathway and sprinkle it with grass seed and presto - instant grassy path.  We pulverized the clay and bought the grass seed and waited for a rainy day.  Fast forward about six months.  That clay path has become powder and now that it has rained enough to actually wet the soil it has become a clay bog.

This would be something that could be avoided except for two reasons.  A Border Collie and a Westie.  Now the Border Collie is doing what she thinks is a grand job in mixing up the clay for us.  It looks like a herd of Border Collies has passed back and forth through the pathway so that there are clingy little ridges of it strewn up onto the fence and surrounding garden areas.

The Westie who is older and therefore more reasoning about how staying clean will allow you better access to being allowed indoors avoids this pathway most of the time.  He does not avoid it when I am outside in the garden areas adjacent to the muddy path.  In fact, his sister the Border Collie likes nothing better than to ram his little body down into the mud any time he ventures into that area.  The net effect is muddy paws.

For the Border Collie the muddy paws are what you would expect.  A little under the nails and a little in between the pads.  For some reason, the Westie has feet that collect mud better than anything on this earth.  I was coming inside after scouting the areas I was going to plant my new squash plants (either destined for a wonderful fall garden or a continued source of plant sacrifice to the gods of unreasonable drought).  My husband was watching from the kitchen window and pointed out poor little Lewey's progress behind me.  His little feet had managed to attract so much mud they were like little puppy snow shoes, fully twice as large as normal.  His halting progress also indicated that this was very uncomfortable.  So, I scooped him up and spent a good 10 minutes in the tub de-mudding his paws.  The Border Collie also had to be debrided before coming inside.

This has all the makings of a big pain in the neck which is forcing my husband and I to come up with alternative solutions, of which there is really only one.  We have to fence off the muddy area.  Luckily we have the fencing for it, but unluckily we are out of fence posts.  This means we will either have to make the enormously bothersome trip to the lumber store or devise some alternate plan.  The problem with alternate plans is that the Border Collie absolutely loves the muddy part of the yard because that is where she has shouting matches with the squirrels, something that rates very high on the Border Collie obsession scale.  This will mean she will try with all of her abundant energy and intelligence to get around any barrier we place in her way.

It should prove to be an interesting time.

Dog Diaries

You might think that a dog's life is rather uncomplicated, but that would be a mistake.  A dog's life is incredibly complicated due in large part to their tendency to 'live in the moment' or in other words 'forget about almost everything that happened yesterday'.  This means that each day is a glorious new day of discovery unencumbered by such things a 'learning from one's past mistakes'. 

So the things you learned yesterday are new and ready for you to learn them again today.  Every day is an adventure with this framework and my dogs live their adventurous life to the fullest.  I on the other hand, watching their antics 'get' the whole 'memory' thing and am often driven to distraction with my little canine duo's exploits.

Take for example this scenario:

You want to go outside and your human has every intention of letting you outside as indicated by their body language, their actual language ("Let's go outside") and the fact that they are making a bee line for the back door.  You indicate your comprehension of this impending outside-ness by 1) running back and forth between the back door and the human in ever increasingly small sprints because they are getting closer and closer to the door, 2) jumping up on your human in such a way you actually push them back from the door they are trying to reach, 3) positioning yourself in the way of the backdoor and spinning, spinning, spinning so that your feet slap against the top of the washer and then against the back door and potentially the human who is trying to reach the back door, 4) ignoring every command to sit, quiet, back as you increase your frenzied attempts to go out through the closed door, and 5) cramming your body so tightly against the back door that it is almost impossible for your human to actually open the door. 

One might think that in your roughly 13 months of being let out that door without any resistance would register on your brain as an event that was 'going to happen' so you need not act like a frenzied gopher doped up on caffeine.  But apparently, this is one of 'those' times you are 'in the moment' and unable to actually make long term memories.

It isn't just the Border Collie who has the short/long term memory deficiencies.  The Westie has had a full 8 years of counseling that consistently reminds him to not 'chase the cat'.  He gets reminded of this prior to each and every time he goes out the back door.  I say "Lewey, No CAT!" in my most booming and top dog voice.  He looks at me like "Yeah, right, I know, I know,  'No cat' - I get it".  Then, each and every time he goes out he seeks to 'chase the cat'.  I often am following him out and grabbing him as he is desperately chasing the cat his mind fully absorbed in a primal game of Westie the Vermin Chaser.  I then shout at him, "NO.... NO... NO CAT!"  If I don't actually have my hands on him he will seek with every atom of his being to chase the cat in spite of this.  When I do lay hands on him it's like he is jerked awake from some incredible fantasy and he looks at me like "Whoa! What are you doing here?"

So I am thinking that an actual Dog Diary would be filled with many repetitious entries along the lines of "Today, I went OUTSIDE!!!"  and "I ate FOOD!" and "Mom said I wasn't supposed to chase the cat... since when??"  No actually that last one would never make it in because that would indicate that he actually comprehends that I don't want him to chase the cat.  He cannot comprehend a world in which a cat would not be chased.  Of course he is going to chase the cat.  That is what you do with cats, even the ones that you like.  So, no, the dog diary would never have that entry.

Another thing the actual Dog Diary would not have is any reference to any reprimand whatsoever.  They would never talk about 'getting in trouble' because that kind of occurrence evaporates from their brain the moment it is over.  There is a reason that reward systems of training work so well.  That is the only thing they can actually remember.  There would be multiple, multiple entries along the lines of '...and I got a treat!' or '... and then Mom told me I was gooooood!!!'

Of course what they think they are being rewarded for is not always what I think I am rewarding them for.  Positive reinforcement encourages the behavior that was happening right before the reward was given.  This can be very useful if you take a long view and realize that you are steadily approaching perfection.  This is especially true if you have a 'smart' dog, for example - a Border Collie.  They thrive on positive reinforcement and that reinforcement can come in many forms.

Sometimes all it takes for me to reinforce my Border Collie's behavior is a look.  You might be thinking 'Wow that must make her easy to train' and in a certain way you are right, it is just that what you might be 'training' isn't always what you want.  For example, this 'look' reward is what she gets when she interrupts me when I am using the laptop on the bed.  I will be in the middle of say, writing a blog entry, and she will position herself just to the right of my gaze.  A single paw is extended to 'tap' me on my arm and as soon as I look into her eyes she gives me this smile, which automatically causes me to smile back and then I have a puddle of Border Collie squeezing between me and the laptop.  She is so ecstatically happy that I looked at her she is oblivious to any other command.  My only defense is to keep my eyes down when she gives me the 'tap' and then I can command her to do something else.

So definitely in her diary there would be multiple entries of 'Mom LOOKED at me!!!'

Ah well that is all for now... she has tapped and now I am typing over a squirming dog.

9/11 - We've Reached the Top

At first I thought - no I won't write about it.  I was not directly involved.  I did not lose a loved one.  I don't have a valid reason to speak about my memories of that day.  But as I thought about it more, I realized that like almost all Americans, I was involved with the tragedy of the day.  I did lose something.  I do have memories.  So, I thought I would share them here and perhaps you may also have memories to share.

I used to think it was peculiar when people would say, "I remember where I was when I heard the news about ____ (fill in the blank for some particular event)".  I would think it was somewhat silly.  Who cares where they were when they heard something.  Why would that be so memorable?  Well, I understand it now. 

For me, it was while I was driving into work.  I was listening to the radio and the most important thing on my mind was getting to Whole Foods to get my lunch before I began my day.  Music was playing and then the show host came on saying something about an airplane that had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.  'Wow,' I thought, thinking of some small airplane piloted by an amateur, 'What a stupid move on the pilot's part.'  I barely gave it another thought as I went into the store and made my purchases.  I came back out and the show hosts were still talking about the initial crash and how another plane had hit the other tower.  As I continued driving the news became much more grim and my mind began to grasp that this was an attack.  An actual willful act, not an accident.  We were under attack.  What exactly did that mean?

I kept thinking as I was driving that it was all going to be okay.  They were going to put these fires out and it was going to be awful, but it was going to be okay.  It was going to be okay.  And then the first building fell.  I remember exactly where I was.  I was driving down the most beautiful part of my trip to work.  Along both sides of the street were these beautiful towering oak trees whose upper canopies met to form an amazing arch of dappled shade and tranquility.  There I was surrounded by beauty as the radio broadcast the tower falling.

In that moment I knew that it was not going to be okay.  As quickly as I could I went home listening to the radio divulge the horror of that morning.  My husband met me at the door.  He had watched it all on the TV.  I sat with him and we watched it happen together.  We grieved together for the loss of life - as distant and detached from it as we were, we still grieved as if we had lost members of our own family.

That was one of the first things that was hard to reconcile.  I felt tremendous grief and loss.  This quickly became something I kept to myself because it was as if I did not have a right to this grief.  I personally did not know anyone in the Towers.  I did not know any of the firefighters or police officers who died.  Yet, I was struck down with it as if I did know these people.  Every account I read about or heard brought me to a point of empathy that had me experiencing the loss of the loved one.  Although I am sure I am not alone in this and others who were not personally involved felt this way, I learned to conceal it.  It quickly became apparent that there was a litmus test as to who was allowed to visibly grieve.  If you did not know someone who was there, then you were just 'show-boating' and your sadness was just an attention ploy.  So I kept my sadness to myself.

That day and the weeks after were spent in a fruitless effort of trying to find out enough information to make sense of it all.  The local paper did not have the answers so I purchased copies of foreign newspapers hoping they could tell us more.  Nothing we read, nothing we watched, nothing we listened to on the radio did anything to lift the veil but rather it surrounded us with information about the world that we had been blissfully ignorant of before.

It is almost as if I had been living my life asleep at the wheel and this event woke me up.  This awakening was not friendly because at first it seemed that I was awakened to a house on fire.  Everything decision seemed crucial and every event seemed magnified.  I had not been paying attention and now my world was changed. 

I won't bore you with all the details of me becoming aware of the world in which I lived, but suffice it to say I developed an interest in news feeds that have not been watered down by the opinions of those reporting.  I found out where my local news gets their information from and I drink from that unsullied well.  I learned to search back to the source for almost every bit of information in order to evaluate its validity.  I learned to create my own opinions based on those facts and resist heartily following anyone else's point of view.  I also, thankfully, have learned to keep my mouth shut about what I think because it very often differs from what other people think.  I value what other people think, even when I disagree with them.  I appreciate the freedom we all have to think these different things.

Before this devolved any further into how 9/11 was my personal catalyst.  Let me end with a remembrance of those who sacrificed the most that day 10 years ago.  This political cartoon touched me then and it still does today.  So I leave you with this: