Horse Adventures

I’ve mentioned before that one of my horses likes to lean against the top fence rail to get the grass on the other side. Unfortunately, it’s the largest horse that does this, and his weight frequently breaks the rail, which ends up in a lot of fence repair every spring. It’s among my least favorite things to do. Fixing each rail takes about 45 minutes. So far this year he’d already busted about five of them. But wait…

This Saturday my wife and I were walking around the barn to get to some yardwork only to discover that one of our horses was calmly standing outside the fence, doing what horses are usually doing, eating grass. A little further downslope was the big horse, also munching grass. Nearby we saw how they’d gotten out — Trigger, the large horse, must have leaned against the top rail to get to some juicy grass on the other side, and then leaned against the middle rail, and then stepped over the bottom rail once both were destroyed. The other horse had followed.

Now Trigger’s a pretty docile animal and comes when called, but the mare, well, she’s kind of bossy and not very interested in people, and as soon as she saw us coming to retrieve them she galloped off and chased Trigger before her. Fortunately they ran into the neighbor’s big empty yard. My son, recently back from college, and my wife and I spent the next 45 minutes rounding the animals up. Then we spent 45 minutes searching for my wife’s Iphone, which she thought she’d dropped in the pasture (it turned out she’d left it upstairs).

Following on all THAT, my wife and I began our much delayed yardwork, with her climbing onto the riding mower and me heading off for the trimmer, only to discover that the riding mower wouldn’t turn over. The battery was in fine shape, so it’s something else beyond my paltry mechanical skill. My wife declared that she thought the universe was trying to tell us something, but we still managed a little planting.

As I write this, it’s Sunday morning. I see some fence repair in my future, and some lawn mower repair, and all the other yardwork I’d planned to do yesterday to start with…