New record - 2.5 years between posts! No wonder I have no followers.
I've been meaning to post for a while, it's just that I haven't ridden enough lately to have anything worthwhile to say about dressage. I still work it into lessons at B's every week, so the interest is alive, and I learn something new every time. So scratch that - I do have things to say, I just have not made time to think about them.
Since that last post, my honey proposed, we started hunting for a farm, we got married in my brother's yard, and about six months ago bought this wee farmette in Galloway, and brought the horses home. My dressage teachers have moved to Germany, but that's OK, because my horses are old enough now that I probably would not bring them to clinics anymore anyway :/
Jojo is 25 and kind of creaky all over; Royal is probably 23, and distinctly creaky in the right hock. We work a little in hand now and then, and occasionally ride, but we don't do anything you could call training. I'm deeply ambivalent about this. On the one hand, more work might help them retain what soundness they have; on the other, for god's sake they survived race careers and then under-saddle careers, have they not earned the right to spend these last years standing around in the sun, eating their heads off?
Their farrier quite sensibly suggested pulling their shoes a couple weeks ago, and so we did. It was the right thing to do, but it broke my heart, a little bit.
I think, "Oh yes. When the weather cools, we'll get back into real work, and put the shoes back on," but I'm pretty sure that won't happen. I just cling to it to feel like ... like what? I'm not even sure. Like they're not old, and like we could do something again someday. When your horse is at home you're supposed to ride every day. And I if I stop thinking that soon we will ride every day, then I have to let go of a lot of things. And that will hurt. Vicki Hearne once noted something to the effect that we are immortal, until we're not. My poor, graceful beasts have been immortal the whole time I've known them, and it hurts like hell to see them get old, and know that soon, in three or five or maybe 10 years, they will not be immortal any more.
The other day, J, A and I were out at B's. J, who boards there, asked whether it wasn't a lot of work to keep the horses at home. A, whose horses are at home, and I both said, Nah, it's not the work. It's the anxiety. Then we LOLed.
But it's true. It's not the getting up early to feed every day, it's not the shoveling and pitchforking, it's not the time spent, it's not the interesting new back muscles you feel when you spread a few months' worth of manure in your giant new garden.
It's the not-sleeping-through-the-night-ever-again. It's the looking out the window at the paddock dozens of times a day. It's the awakening to cracking thunder at 4:45 a.m. from a storm that wasn't predicted, and dashing across the yard and paddock in your underwear to get the horses into the barn Now. It's putting them in their stalls for the hottest part of the day, setting up the fans, and checking every 10 minutes to make sure nothing is on fire.
There are hundreds of these small, consuming anxieties, because my horses are old. So many small disasters every day, where a younger horse would bounce back, but an elderly one would cascade into crisis. And I am, in some ways, grateful for the small, consuming anxieties, because they distract from the knowledge of the larger one: that they are immortal, until they are not.
