Horseless in Wisconsin

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Added: Tue. Oct 13, 2009 6:39pm
Posted in: Living

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There's a chill in the air these days, as we edge into the middle of October.  This was always the time of year that I'd be counting down the days and the dark-as-night mornings when the first thing on my agenda was to pull on a warm jacket and haul buckets of grain out from the garage to my two elderly horses in the pasture.  Sometimes by flashlight, depending on how early I had to get started.  By mid-October there was always the chance that I'd be breaking a skin of ice on the water tank after a hard freeze, and I'd start to line up the weekend that the gal who boarded the horses for me over the winter could bring her trailer out and pick them up.

It's been three years now since the last time I shipped my last horse off to the stable for the winter, and then had to put her down just a month later.  At the age of thirty three (which was also the age of the other horse who went to that great pasture in the sky the year before), she'd been living on borrowed time for a very very long time!  I'd had one or both horses since I was a teenager, and sometimes it still feels funny not to have a couple of sets of perky ears follow my progress as I motor down the driveway.  Living in the country, I pass a lot of horses in fields and corrals every day, and let my mind wander back to the glory days when both the horses and I were a whole lot younger and we both moved a lot easier.

People ask me sometimes if I'll ever get another one, and I answer ruefully, "no."  Now that I know that I can keep them alive for more than three decades, I can't imagine getting up some day at the crack of dawn and hauling those feed buckets out with the aid of a walker!  But I still miss their deep brown eyes, and their soft grey muzzles, and the swish of a tail.  And for more on the story, turn to End of the Trail.

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