22. Soggy and groggy

Spring has sprung a screw loose in early March, and for one rainy day the thermometer tops 60 degrees.  The farm entrance is under six or eight inches of standing water, so I leave my car on the road, climb between fence boards, and wend my way over slushy lawns and ponded pastures to get to the barn.  When the ice was treacherous, Sandy had flung shavings and manure and old hay (excellent traction materials) along paths and around paddock gates, and now that’s all soppingly disintegrating, greatly enriching the yuck factor of the squelching, sucking mud.  

Wellies on the job

(Still, the yuck factor is small for me.  I learned to ride when I was 10 and we were living in England, which is pretty much all damp all the time; it's home to the Wellington boot for good reason.  Every weekend I went with a neighbor girl to Umberslade Stables for a one-hour ride, at a cost of 12 shillings, which was my weekly allowance.  Umberslade's ramshackle stableyard was always a mire.  And as our rides took us over hill and dale through farm fields and country lanes, horses and humans usually came home well spattered. That was fine with me, because it meant access to gee-gees ranging from Big Jane the huge chestnut hunter, to Popcorn the piebald school horse of mongrel provenance, to Merrybell the tiny, shaggy Shetland pony with a fondness for fruit-flavored ice lollies.  Mud and horses simply belong together when all’s right with the world.)

Gus and Henry are loafing up on the little knob of hill in their paddock, and although Gus is eager to be delivered, he’s loath to dip his delicate hooflets in the low-lying slough.  Better him than me, so I wait with his halter and make him walk down to the gate.  From there we have to mince and slog to the arena, with Gus sidling onto the remnant snowbank whenever he can.  We find the far end of the arena also floody-muddy, which strikes him as even more hideous than rattly doors; he avoids the area assiduously.  Of course his couth stops at his ankles: he rolls in the dry dirt until he’s well and truly caked.

It’s so warm, and Gus is still so furry, that today he does seem to be operating underwater on Valium.  After a long hiatus, I decide to return to long-lining, and between his low energy and my complete atrophy of any skills built up in the fall, we stink up the joint.  Luckily Sandy is on hand, and (gallantly suppressing any apparent horror at Gus’s mistreatment or my idiocy) she offers me a few tips; plus, the long-suffering Gus cuts me a very deep break, working patiently despite my blundering.  When I remove the surcingle to let him roll again, he grabs a quick snooze with his chin resting on the ground, ears airplaned out to the sides, and eyes sagging closed.  I let him lie for a couple of minutes.

We do some desultory walk-trot and tilt-a-chair and cone-fetch, and then I figure he’s had enough.  But he balks at the arena gate and positions himself by my shoulder:  he wants more walk-trot.  Since I’ve been getting better at matching paces with him, he seems to enjoy it — either it’s just easier without the distraction of syncopated human steps alongside, or he does welcome the pace-matching as a buddying-up activity.  Either way, I’m glad of it, so we jog over the ground poles a few more times.  We do some walking in the “dancer’s arms” frame, at which we’re both improving.  And we play a little I-step-you-step back and forth.  Now he’s content to leave the arena, and he even cooperates, after some delaying tactics, in the gloppy march back to the gloppy paddock.