My Favorite Horse and Spaghetti

The wind is whipping like a mother today; otherwise I was going to ride. That’s why I left Oklahoma. Because of the wind. It makes me feel uneasy. It makes me feel like a storm is coming, even when it’s not. Every time I feel sorry for myself for getting rid of my hundred-and-ten acres out there, a windy day happens and I feel better.

You’d think the horses wouldn’t mind the wind because they’re used to it, having spent time in Oklahoma. But they don’t like it either. I’m sure they feel uneasy as well, and perhaps they expect a storm. Or at least some branches to fall down and clonk them on the heads. The last time we had real bad wind, a storm did come and it knocked down three trees. They fell on the roof that goes around the tobacco shed, where I’d just thrown down some hay and where Bullet and Minnie had hurried over to get out of the rain and start eating. I walked into the barn and as quick as it took me to walk out the other side, the trees were down and the horses were all up by the barn looking in the same direction. They were staring at the tobacco shed, huddled together like crowds huddle on curbs and stare at accident scenes. The three trees were down, and the tobacco shed roof, two minutes ago above my head, was sprawled out beneath them like a bug beneath a shoe.

I could ride those horses out there if I really wanted to but it’s no fun in the wind. I’m a fair weather girl. I don’t like rain either. Or cold. Or snow after the first day. Any sort of precipitation or conditions that require me to put on anything more than a sweatshirt jacket. But it turns out I’m going to be riding in the cold this year whether I like it or not. Normally I take a break from riding from Thanksgiving until March and concentrate on family stuff. Do all the extras. Cook using actual recipes, play Scrabble, put up new curtains, go ice skating. Well, not really the ice skating since I tried that once when I was a kid and I’m not willing to try it again. I fell a hundred and twenty-three times. Of course I fell a hundred and twenty-three times when I was learning to ride too but that’s different. Anyway, you get the picture. In the winter, I do all those things that are fun or good to do but can’t shine riding’s shoes.

Not many things can. Kurt wants to get a boat someday and I agreed I would go out on it with him and in fact it sounds like a good time driving it across the lake and getting some lunch on the other side. But I’d really rather ride one of the horses up the mountain, even if I’d just done it yesterday, and look at the lake from up there. Because horses are like spaghetti. I can never get enough. I could eat it every day. I live for my spaghetti. I mean my horses.

One of my horses I can only ride in the winter. He has headshaking syndrome. Harley jerks his head up and down uncontrollably during exercise like he just got stung by a bee. It’s impossible to ride him. The first time he did it, while we were riding out in the field in Oklahoma, I thought bugs or seeds popping up from the grass were bothering him. I urged him on. He was so irritated that he tried to wipe his nose with his forefoot and he fell down with me on top of him! Luckily, he’s very athletic and he scrambled right back up before I even knew what happened. But it could have been bad.

Right away I knew what it was because I read a lot. I have a vast supply of bits and pieces of knowledge in my head, a little about everything, especially horse stuff. Though I never went to college. I’m a big reader. I like books about as much as horses and spaghetti. When I was a kid, I took out every single book in the library that they had about horses. Even if it was about English riding. I mean real English riding, from the actual England, where their horses wore rugs instead of blankets and I had to decipher the jargon before I could even understand the discipline. If there was a horse in it, I took it out.

They only let you take out a certain number of books on the same subject and I thought that was terribly unfair especially since nobody else was reading them. Back in those days, they stamped the card in the back of the book so I could tell that The Fundamentals of Horsemanship hadn’t been taken out in eight months. So I borrowed a couple of extras without checking them out and snuck them back in when I returned the others.

Some of this reading must have stuck because whenever there is something going on with a horse, nine times out of ten, I know what it is, and know what to do, though I usually call the vet because I don’t trust myself. Sometimes I get the vet out so I can diagnose it for him. But it makes me feel better to have someone out who actually went to school for this.

So right away I knew Harley had headshaking syndrome. And I called the vet anyway. He suggested a few different things. Nah, that doesn’t work. Yep, I did that. Nope, they tried that and studies show no improvement. No, I won’t give that drug because some horses colic on it. Etc.

Nothing works consistently or regularly with these horses. There is no cure and they don’t know what it’s from. It seems like all they know for sure is the trigeminal nerve in the nose gets triggered and your horse is basically shot. Not literally. Well, I guess sometimes, some mean owner would shoot his horse if he couldn’t ride him. But I was talking figuratively.

Some of these horses are seasonal and so I’ve been waiting for the right time, hoping and praying that Harley wouldn’t do it when summer was over and I could at least get some use out of him in the winter. Even though I am a fair weather girl, I would put on my ski mask, the kind that burglars wear, my thermal gloves and goose-down coat that you can’t move in and be happy that at least I can ride this horse sometime. I love to ride Harley. He’s my favorite. He thinks I’m his mommy and will jump off a bridge if I ask him to. He’s light and fast and he loves to run. It’s like flying, when you’re riding Harley. I would do anything to ride Harley. I would even ride him in the wind.

Bad Weather

I’m a weather wimp. I know you’re supposed to be used to it when you live on a farm. You’d think I would be since I am out in it all the time. It doesn’t matter what it’s doing out there. If it’s raining or snowing or so cold the hairs in your nose feel like fiberglass, I’m still out there carrying flakes of hay and buckets of grain. There are certain jobs I can get away with not doing when the weather’s bad, but at the least, the horses still have to be fed.

I think I have it bad but my friend in Iowa says it is so cold up there that when the temperature drops below zero, it stops being cold. Everything gets still and farmers are tempted to unzip their coats and take off their hats. Some of them let their guard down and they plant seeds too early or jump in the pool. These are the ones who are found days later encased in blocks of ice. Whole families chip away at them using ice picks and hammers and then they thaw them out by the woodstove and make them promise to never be so gullible again.

The wind is the worst. I just got done chasing a piece of vinyl siding down the road. Then I couldn’t get the garage door to stay closed. Even two cinder blocks and the iron head of a sledge hammer wedged against it didn’t keep it shut. I found a boulder and pushed it because it was too heavy to carry. Luckily it was right behind the garage so I didn’t have to go far. When I got everything jammed up against the door, I realized the Big Stupid, aka Motley, the dog, was inside.

The wind was one of the reasons we left Oklahoma. I didn’t know about the wind when we moved out there. That’s supposed to be Kansas where the Wizard of Oz happened. But in Oklahoma, the wind blew all the topsoil away and tumbleweeds the size of small ponies, all the patio furniture and half the roof bounced across the hard red dirt that was left behind on a daily basis. If I had any inclination of moving back there, where there are rodeos galore and all the men wear cowboy hats even when they’re just going to Wal-Mart, wind whipping nips that idea right in the bud.

When the weather is bad in the country, the electric is iffy. Most people have a generator. And we do too but it’s in the shop even though it’s brand new because it’s probably made in China like the rest of the junk we are forced to buy nowadays. The last time I was in Wal-Mart, buying Kurt a belt, I was determined not to buy anything made in China. Usually I am in a big rush and I don’t have time to get out my glasses and turn the thing over, trying to find out where it’s made. Just finding the price is hard enough. But this time I pawed through every single belt on the shelves, throwing them over my shoulder where they landed behind me in a big pile on the floor. I could not find a single belt in his size that was American-made. I said to myself, “What am I in, Hong Kong?”

Up north, it’s not the end of the world when the electric goes off even though they think it is because they can’t use their hair dryers or their high definition TVs. They scream their heads off and threaten to sue. But they don’t have it as bad as they think because they still have water. Most people up there have city water. But in the country, we have wells and since the pump works by electric, we lose the water. You can’t flush the toilet, you can’t finish rinsing out your hair if it was all full of shampoo when the electric went off and you can’t do the dishes. Which is a big problem since the dishwasher is always full when this happens and there are no more clean forks.

After I got back from chasing the siding down the street and getting the garage door to stay shut, the electric went off. I had nothing on in the house. No radio, no TV, I wasn’t running the vacuum. But all of a sudden, it was dead quiet. Still, like Iowa gets when the temperature goes below zero.

You don’t realize the sounds a house makes even when it’s quiet until there is no more juice. It skids to a halt. You don’t hear the humming of the refrigerator which you never noticed until it stopped or the drone of the digital clock. You don’t hear the heat pump kick on. It gets cold fast. Luckily, in the country, most people also have a woodstove. For some people, even though this is 2008, it is their only source of heat. We use our woodstove to save money on the electric bill and also because I like the way it smells and the way the smoke looks coming out of the chimney. It looks like the cover of a country music CD. And whenever the electric goes off, at least we can stay warm.

I ran right outside and gathered up some sticks for kindling. It seems appropriate that the wind knocks the electric off and also makes all the dead branches fall into the yard for starting a fire. I got the fire going and then sat at the dining room table reading a book in front of it. Even though it was still day time, it was hard to read. I thought about how people didn’t have any electric in the old days, and how some still don’t, here in the country. No wonder why they went to bed early. Not only can’t you see, but there’s nothing to do. When Kurt and Kelly come home from doing errands, I would suggest we play a game of checkers. Or talk. That would be funny. We talk all the time. But we talk while we do things. While Idol is on. While we’re reading our e-mail. While we’re carrying our pajamas to the bathroom to take a shower. Would we suddenly feel pressured because that was all we had to do? Maybe we’d go to sleep. But if we went to bed too early, the fire wouldn’t make it through the night and we’d wake up at two in the morning with frostbite. Maybe I’d make an egg on the top of the woodstove. By all rights you should be able to cook on top of it. That should be right up my alley. Very country-like. But forget it. No water. I’m a clean freak. How would I clean it?

After I got out the candles, the house roared to life. The refrigerator came on, the DVR on top of the TV powered up, everything started beeping. Kurt and Kelly came home with Dairy Queen because I had called them on the cell phone to say don’t think I’m cooking any eggs on the woodstove. And then it started raining. It was an icy rain, hitting the windows hard and bouncing off the deck like a broken strand of beads. I jumped up and started the dishwasher real quick. If the electric went out again, at least we would have clean cups.