Day 8. Blind Man Mucking.

Fast Tube 2.2 by Casper
An astute reader may have noticed that posting has shuddered to an abrupt halt since the arrival of the equines. An hour+ per day of manual labor seems to have sucked up my blogging time, and I fall into bed completely exhausted every night at 9:30–a change for a night owl/insomniac like me. But all this hard work has done good things for my head and my arms, and mostly, I’m enjoying the tempo of it.

For the H–not so much. Last Tuesday was the first morning when I had a morning appointment that meant I had to leave him home alone to turn out the horses and deal with the morning chores, which are: giving the horses their grain; stocking the paddock with hay and full water buckets; haltering the horses and leading them out to the paddock; mucking out the stalls, removing manure and wet bedding and replacing it with fresh, clean bedding; and finally, putting hay and clean water in the stalls so that the evening chore will be simple: just haltering and leading them in, then turning over the buckets in the paddock and bringing them into the barn, ready for the next morning. Grooms and boy scouts may not have the same motto, but they should: be prepared, because routine is everything with horse care.

I’ve done most of this by myself, with some help in the evenings with stall prep and bringing them in, on days when the mornings didn’t have enough hours to complete the whole routine. But Tuesday was the H’s first time flying solo.

At about 10 a.m. Tuesday, I was sitting at our favorite coffee shop in Lenox, drinking tea and killing time between dropping off the short people and heading off to have my hair cut and my roots erased. It was a moment of blissful solitude–until the phone rang.

It was the H, breathless, and slightly panicked. Turns out–barn chores are hard work. Harder, I learned, if it’s 25 degrees outside, and you wear (strong) glasses, and your glasses fog, blinding you, so you try to take them off, but then you’re really blind, and can’t see the manure or mucking fork to save your life…and the wheelbarrow is heavy! And you have two whole wheelbarrow loads to haul out, just to clean the two stalls!

You can probably guess who pulled stall duty for the rest of the week.

Yesterday, we went down as a family (now a family of five, as my mother moved in with us yesterday, having come from L.A. to join us here) and everyone found a helpful rhythm: Dido and the H worked emptying and filling water buckets; my mom kept an eye on the kids, checked on the chickens and kept me company; the Babe, no surprise, turns out to be a highly-motivated little worker bee, and a mucking whiz. It was also 40 degrees, so it was practically steamy inside the barn, compared to last week’s horrible, frigid temperatures.

“Your glasses won’t fog today,” I said in an aside to the H. He busied himself with cutting the baling twine around some fresh hay. “Uh huh,” he answered, and marched right out of the barn.

Today, I tried again. Everything else was done. I handed him the high-tech muck fork (yes, there is such a thing) and lured him into the stall I had already half-cleaned. “Just try this one.”

“This one’s much easier. It’s lighter. It works better,” he said, referring to the miracle fork (aluminum; deeper basket for shaking the shavings off the manure; ergodynamically bent handle.) When in doubt, give the man a gadget.

We worked together and apart, in adjoining stalls. Dido avoided mucking (like father, like son?), but was eager to spread the fresh shavings in the cleaned stalls. The Babe felt cold, so my mom took her back up the house. “It’s nice working, just the three of us,” said my big boy.

Indeed. It was.

Tagged as: horses