.......................................Here's lookin' at you, kid...

The Secret Lives of Animals...

This morning I was treated to a wonderful sight. In the corner of our freshly cut meadow, the white of a doe's tail caught my eye, flicking rapidly out of habit or perhaps necessity (although it seemed too early in the morning for the flies to be bothering her).

I went to the back porch for a better look, but the change in angle placed her out of my view, and instead, I spied her fawn in a bouncing game of "Herd the Turkeys!" Acting much like a border collie, this young Bambi was circling two dismayed gobblers, bouncing and dashing with a speed that had them completely befuddled and seemingly scared witless. Compared to their hysterical fits and starts and Keystone Kops collisions, the young deer was poetry in motion. I watched in amazed amusement.

After a minute or so, probably reacting to a call or signal from the doe, the fawn suddenly turned and bounded toward the corner of the meadow and then into the woods. Game over, the turkeys stood still as statues, apparently wondering what on earth they had just experienced.

And then life in the meadow returned to the normally peaceful quiet of an early summer morning.

August



Yesterday I pushed aside weeds grown too tall and pulled the largest of the beets. Sitting on the porch steps, I lopped off their green tops, setting the youngest and most delicate aside for the freezer. Next came lots of washing and then, while I prepared the "pickle", simmering. Once cooked, the skins rub off and the remaining tops fall away, and they're ready to slice and put in jars, top up with the cooked vinegar/sugar/cinnamon, allspice mixture, cover with lids and their screw-on bands, and put into the water-bath canner. As I write this, there are 15 pints of pickled beets waiting to be labeled and put on shelves in the cellar.

Today I pulled the garlic. It sits in the sun, drying, soon to be stored away.

The corn is ripening; there are a couple of red tomatoes, chard and kale are keeping us in fresh greens, new carrots are being enjoyed.

This is August in the North Country.
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Horse Crazy

I can’t remember when there weren’t horses in my life. I loved them always, from the time I could walk, and the evidence is still stuck to a pair of tiny brown and white leather saddle shoes my mother packed away with other souvenirs of my childhood. Most mothers would be loath to save horse manure, but my mother wasn’t like most.

In the evenings and on weekends, we would visit all the local stables, attend all the horse shows and come to know every local horse person - and horse - we encountered. I knew no fear of these big animals and lived for long Sunday afternoons when I’d sit on the hood of our old Chevy with its bumper up tight to some corral fence, watching the Pleasure Horse or Stock Horse classes and the Flag or Pick-up Race. I never tired of what someone once quipped was “a bunch of horses asses riding a bunch of horses asses” go around and around those rings.

When winter ended the outdoor riding season and darkness came early, our small family would eat dinner and then huddle close to the radio for episodes of Straight Arrow and his golden horse, Fury. My father read Red Ryder comics to me and then Will James’ book, Smoky the Cowhorse. We found two indoor riding rings to visit, quenching my thirst until spring.

By the time I was four, I had a “job” riding ponies. There was a circular, double-fenced enclosure about two miles from our house, and above its white painted gate a sign proclaimed PONY RIDES - 25¢. For a quarter (no small fee in those days), a kid could be put up on either Jingles or Trigger and - with the pony on a lead-rope - given three turns around the ring. My father took me there often, and we quickly endeared ourselves to the proprietor. At first I must have been led around, but soon I was off the lead and galloping. Kids passing by saw the commotion and begged their parents to stop their cars and let them ride, and when they did, I would have to relinquish my mount. Of course, the ponies walked sedately (and tiredly) with these “amateur” riders. When the crowds dwindled once again, I was lifted into the saddle, and with a hearty “heeawwww!” I took off with flying hooves and a wake of dust. The details of this activity were unknown to my mother who assumed that my tales of having to rein in “that ornery cayuse” had their root in a galloping imagination. One evening my father suggested that she come and watch me ride, and after nearly dropping the camera in her terrified shock, she documented my cowboy skills in Kodak home movies. The owner of the pony rides place knew good advertising when it galloped past him: my riding was free.

My own first horse was named Lady. She was a handsome bay mare (if you overlooked her stiff legs and slight limp) given to me by my mother’s childhood friend, Marion. Marion had a farm, but she and her husband had recently moved to the city, leaving Lady, but not the daily chore of feeding her. I was the answer: a horse-crazy kid whose parents had recently bought an old house and two acres of land. The amenities of that real estate included a small pasture and a shed containing a box stall, the perfect home for a sedate equine.

Lady was 13 – about twice my age. She had been a riding stable mount - a lousy life for any horse - until her legs gave out, and from there she was sent to a mink farm where she was destined to become sustenance for those poor animals on their way to giving up their hides to grace the shoulders of rich women. Somehow Marion had seen her there, and in exchange for a fin and the horse’s promise to safely entertain Marion’s children, Lady evaded the gun and the food bowl. Several years passed, and those children left the nest. On June 10, 1952, Lady was trucked to her new home at my house. I paid Marion my life’s savings of $6.00 for her, which probably covered the cost of the transportation.

How I loved that horse. She was my steed, my friend and confidant, and the passion of my young life.

The remarkable thing about this story is that my parents knew nothing about horses and had no interest in them. Perhaps on a Sunday drive we passed “El Rancho”, the stable where someone first plunked me on top of a horse, and it was love at first plunk, or maybe it was a picture in a book or a toy animal that first caused me to become horse crazy. Whatever it was, my parents supported my interest with countless hours of their time and with money they really didn’t have. In doing so, they gave me a gift beyond measure: I grew up believing that a passion was to be followed and that dreams could be realized.
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I guess I’ve written enough about this for now, so….. HEEAWWWW! C'mon, you ornery cayuse! Let's git to the ranch!
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One... Singular Sensation...

(Begin with the right foot) BRUSH-BACK-STEP,

(now the left) BRUSH-BACK-STEP,

(right) BRUSH-BACK-STEP-(now step on the left!) STEP,

(now right again!) BRUSH-BACK-STEP.

(REPEAT!)

Thus began my dancing lessons, red-haired Miss Byrne calling out the instructions, and an ancient, stooped woman named Sylvia pounding an old, out of tune upright piano.

....(Up a steep and very narrow stairway,
.....To the voice like a metronome,
.....Up a steep and very narrow stairway,
.....It wasn't paradise...
.....It wasn't paradise...
.....It wasn't paradise...
.....But it was home)

The place was the "Val Mates School of Dance," up a long and very narrow stairway above a storefront on East Avenue. I was a very pigeon-toed, skinny kid, and my parents were hoping that dancing lessons would straighten out my feet.

.....(Dance: ten; Looks: three...)

True, Val Mates wasn't paradise, but neither was it anything like my home. The man Val Mates, though seldom seen, looked like his painted portrait on the sign that hung in the window, albeit a bit older: an oddly (to me at the time) pretty fellow with very curly hair slightly longer than was the masculine style of that day. The rest of the faculty was made up of women unlike any of my friends' mothers. Except for Miss Byrne and the grumpy-looking old pianist, they were bleached blondes, noticeably made up and wearing fishnet stockings, low-cut leotards and very short dance skirts. As young as I was (probably about eight), the prevailing lack of wholesomeness made an impression. This was a fascinating place.

.....(Give me somebody to dance for,
.....Give me somebody to show.
.....Let me wake up in the morning to find
.....I have somewhere exciting to go).

There was a small lobby with a curved black sort of desk/counter where you paid your money. The lights there were dim, and it was where The Blondes hung out when they weren't teaching in one of the two maple floored, mirrored studios. It didn't seem to me that pretty, freckle-faced Miss Byrne fit in there, and I must have been right, because one day she was gone. I arrived for my lessons, and she had been replaced by one of The Blondes.

Sylvia disappeared too. Her piano pounding was replaced by a small record player, one of those old 78 rpm portable models that looked like a small suitcase, the top unlatching and opening to expose the turntable and needle arm. Perhaps in boredom, perhaps for the shock value, The Blonde put a vinyl disk in place, turned it on, and proceeded to play the record using her long, red fingernail instead of the needle!!!

.....(Play me the music!
.....Play me the music!
.....Give me a chance to come through!
.....All I ever needed was the music and the mirror
.....And a chance to dance-- )

Not long after that, Miss Byrne called my mother. She had opened her own dance studio in the basement of her home, or more likely, her parents' home. I left Val Mates and resumed tap, acrobatic and ballet lessons next to a furnace beneath a low ceiling and neon lights, eventually graduating to "toe" (nowadays known as "on point") and modern jazz. I thought I had talent, and maybe that was why I didn't feel I needed to practice. (If I’m honest here, I guess I would have to admit to having more laziness than perceived talent). I'd gradually learn the numbers as new steps were added week after week, eventually suffering through each lesson as poor Miss Byrne must have suffered in teaching a student with little motivation. One day she announced that she was going to get married, and her underground dancing school closed.

My mother sought out other studios, and after a nasty encounter with a teacher who used my ponytail to yank me into a back-bend, I gave up all but the tapping and took dance in the home of a young man who was the nephew of our local town druggist. I’d ride my horse to his house for lessons, transforming from Annie Oakley to Bo Jangles and back in the space of an hour.

And then came hormones, Jr. High, and the realization that even if I wanted to be (which I didn't), I would never be a dancer.
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.....(Hello twelve,
.....Hello thirteen,
.....Hello love! )
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It was time to let my tap and toe shoes gather dust.
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.....(Everything was beautiful at the ballet.
.....Graceful men lift lovely girls in white.
.....Yes, everything was beautiful at the ballet.)

Well, not really everything. I had seen that.

I quit.

There was no reason to continue. My pigeon toes (the reason my parents sent me to dancing lessons) had straightened out, maybe (as hoped) from those many weeks of forcing them into first, second, third, fourth and fifth position. Or maybe it just would have happened anyway as I grew.

The many “routines” I’d learned were soon forgotten, but I can still do the steps – and sometimes do. The beauty of having had all those dancing lessons is that to this day I can still punctuate a wise-crack with a shuffle-ball-change.
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.....(And I can't forget, don't regret, what I did for love pigeon toes).

Go Greased Lightning!

Living in the North Country, we’re more intimately connected to what the sky delivers than city folks are. A rainy day can spoil our picnic, but it can also make our garden lushly abundant; a rainy month can promote hoof rot and turn the basement into a pond. A hot day can be enjoyed at one of the many nearby lakes and rivers; a hot month can wither a crop and dry up a well.

This summer we have dodged quite a few bullets. The weather forecast has warned of thunderstorms with high winds and possible hail many times, but so far the storms have not materialized or they have passed around us.

Friday morning’s humidity and hot sun gave way to a dark mid-afternoon sky, followed in short order by white flashes to the west and the grumbling roll of thunder. Rain started to fall, carried by wind that quickly increased to a multi-directional frenzy, and soon torrents of sky-water and icy bullets were pelting the windows and bouncing off the patio and picnic table. Through it all I could see the corn and asparagus fronds swaying violently.

We were hit. The simultaneous CRACK/SNAP/BOOM told me so, but the power didn’t go out. Glad I had disconnected the computer and modem, I wondered if the horses were okay. They usually stand outside during a storm, maybe avoiding the deafening pounding of rain on the barn’s metal roof, or maybe just enjoying the shower. They weren’t in sight, although it was hard to see through the downpour.

And then, more suddenly than it had begun, the storm passed and the sun appeared: blue sky to the west; blackness moving away to the east. I picked up the telephone to make a call and realized it had been toasted. (How many times this has happened! Cordless phones and lightning just don’t mix well.)

In the barn, I found both horses peacefully munching hay in their stalls… and the electric fencer blown to smithereens.

The fencer is critical not because it keeps the horses in pasture (which it does), but because it keeps woodchucks and raccoons out of the garden. We have already lost this year’s soybean crop to a hungry chuck because the “coon fence” wasn’t electrified, and I certainly do not want the corn crop to meet a similar fate, so I headed to town to buy a new fencer. Upon returning home, I found that a second storm had blown through and knocked down about half of the corn crop I was attempting to protect.

Yesterday as my husband and I righted corn and constructed baling twine supports for it, we quipped that it’s a good thing we aren’t trying to feed Europe. A favorite old joke came to mind: It’s a good life if only we don’t weaken.



"No shoes, no shirt, no service"



The charred remains




Take that, you coons!




Why gardeners cry




After a couple of hours of lifting, straightening, tamping and stringing

Addendum: Today is beautifully sunny and still. The corn has a good chance of digging its roots deeper and standing tall without prolonged help, and - surprise - you can still buy a phone that has a cord!

Re-entry...

Changing realities is a little bit like changing gears the first time you drive a standard: grind... clunk... lurch... and then things are reasonably smooth again. For me, it's easier to up-shift than to down-shift.

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View from the Taconic Parkway west toward the Catskills

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The excitement of a trip to New York builds along with the frenzy of packing and getting the home front in order before blast-off, and it continues to increase along with the traffic after we cross one range of mountains, skirt the edge of a second, and see the first "Sprain Brook Expressway" and "George Washington Bridge" signs in Westchester County. By the time we've sped along with the taxis, cars and delivery trucks on the FDR Drive down the western length of Manhattan, our pulses and attitudes are beginning to fit right in with the natives. Coyote howls and stillness are already unimaginable.

After delivering my husband's mother to the W Hotel downtown, we headed up 3rd Ave. (past the site of the previous day's steam pipe explosion) and found our son's new office. He gave us his apartment key and directions to a great nearby cafe, and after a fabulous salad, we choked on the cost of leaving our car underground for a little more than an hour and headed for the Brooklyn Bridge.

Brooklyn is a borough in transition. It's also huge and comprised of many neighborhoods, some gentrified and some still affordable to those blue-collar workers who keep Manhattan functioning. Our son's place is a co-op apartment in an 1850s church, this in an area of brownstones with small front gardens surrounded by wrought-iron fencing. Lovely trees line the streets and shade the homes; cafes and shops are within easy walking distance, and this weekend there were stoop sales and a nearby Saturday block party. A few blocks south, Spanish is the predominant language.

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Part of a magnificent garden in front of an old graffiti-covered building
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Our trip's purpose was to attend the wedding of a nephew, and that we did on Friday night. It was black-tie in an elegant hotel. It was swank, the food was fabulous, and it was FUN. We danced to a great band (you should have heard them belt out "Respect"), women gradually shedding shoes and men shedding jackets until the early morning hours when even the young among us were flagging.
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The next day we walked around Brooklyn, starting with breakfast on the roof of a Mexican restaurant.

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View of Lower Manhattan from the Mexican restaurant in Brooklyn

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From there we walked to an amazing new grocery market on the waterfront,

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Looking west from the market

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bought some fruit, and then hopped a bus back up toward Prospect Park. More walking, and then onto the grass and pathways winding past one group after another repeating the hundred-year-old summer ritual of a family picnic or barbeque in the wilds of a city park.

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Two of several kites above Prospect Park

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My feet were worn down to nubs by the time we walked back down toward the apartment, and although we had planned to eat at one of the many new restaurants in Brooklyn, we were still so sated from the previous evening's feast that we called a fabulous frozen yogurt (with fresh fruit) "dinner" and went to bed early.

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A small rock beside a trail in Prospect Park
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On Sunday morning, Starbucks and Whole Foods supplied breakfast before we piled into the Prius and headed north. The trip is a pretty one with little traffic after the first thirty miles or so, and we broke it up with a dinner stop in an old Adirondack hotel on Long Lake.

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After dinner beside Long Lake

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For several miles, puffy clouds reflected amazing shades of orange and pink, and then we drove in darkness. It was around 10:30 when my husband dropped me off at the end of our road and then continued on to return his mother to her home-away-from-home in the town about twelve miles north. (She, by the way, was absolutely mortified as I stepped out of the car into the darkness in what she thought to be the absolute middle of nowhere, a place lurking with sharp-fanged wild beasts).

I walked the mile up the road through the woods by the light of a half-moon low in the sky, here and there listening to the scuttling of an animal or the breaking of a twig in the darkness, buttoning my sweater up against the cool of the night air. I do have to admit that about a quarter of a mile from home the nearby and unexpected shrill snort of a deer scared the bejeezus out of me! A note just inside the door greeted me with news that Heidi's eye seems to be healing nicely, and both horses had been fed.

And so today I look at the garden with its new crop of weeds, the barn with its fresh supply of manure, what passes for our lawn at a new high, a house with an empty refrigerator and a pile of dirty laundry; I do as little as possible and plunk myself down here at my keyboard.

(Down-shift! Toe-heel the brake and accelerator! Down-shift! Now, put it in low gear and begin slowly... ) It was a great trip and fun to be a city person for a short time, but very soon I will be back in the happy swing of my peace and quiet and dirt and work. Right now, though, I need just a little while to idle my engine.

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Update:

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The patient is improving, i.e. the eye swelling has gone down considerably. I made a cloth pad and sewed it inside her fly mask to put some space between the mask and the wound, and that is working out well. Her vision is fine and she doesn't seem to be in any discomfort. The big question now is whether the cut will heal together, or, more likely, how much of a gap will be left in the edge of her upper eyelid. You see, a previous (worse) injury has already left this eye susceptible to problems.

How it happened is the million dollar question. There are trees in the pasture, some with sharpish branches; also some pretty thorny boysenberry brambles. I am extremely careful with nails and fence wire, going to great lengths to bend any loose wire ends into non-sharp tiny loops. There is no barbed wire, only smooth electric fence. My suspicion is that she did it on the handle of her grain bucket. It is hung in her stall, and some time ago she whomped into it and bent the handle somewhat. It looks to me that there is a very slight protrusion of the metal handle where it attaches to the bucket, and there was some blood on the stall partition quite near it. ? I'll never know, but I have replaced the bucket.

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This horse needs to wear a helmet. She is very "heady" (can send you flying if you don't watch out for her), often making sudden swings of her head or trying to rub an itchy spot. She doesn't know her own strength and assumes I am a scratching post. If something startles her, she could easily bang her head and possibly cause a tear like the one we're dealing with now.

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One sweet aside: she's loving all the attention. I gently massage her eye before putting the ointment in it. That gets her relaxed and she closes it, which is the only way I can sneak the medicine in. Yesterday when I finished giving one of the doses, she nibbled on my shoulder in an affectionate gesture.

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.......................................Heidi's "good" eye last winter

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Heidi is supposedly half Morgan and half Quarterhorse. I do not see the latter (and in fact think maybe there's a bit of the Budweiser Clydesdale in her family tree), but she does have the Morgan "hot-bloodedness" which can make for excitement. Imagine a 1000 pound fraidy-cat... If anything startles her, you must be ready to jump out of her way in a hurry. She's kind hearted, but a bit of a squirrel.

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Time will tell, but so far she's making reasonably good progress in healing.

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Thanks to all of you who have expressed concern. I appreciate your kind words. Heidi would thank you too if she could. Maybe you could stop by and be nibbled.

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............................A roll in the pasture last month

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"Oh oh... now they'll think I just sit around all day..."

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.............................Heidi relaxing in the pond on a hot day
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Murphy's Law of Trips
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It's the way things go. You plan a trip, or maybe you have to go on a trip because it's a holiday or somebody you're closely related to is getting married, and that trip becomes the "deadline" by which time a great many things have to be accomplished. (There's the reverse of "THE TRIP" which is called "The Date the City Relatives Arrive for a Visit," but that's a different story).
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The pasture fence must be secured. If it was fine last week, you can bet an animal has gone through it or a limb has fallen on it since then. One early morning several years ago, as we rushed to put our suitcases in the car in time to reach an airport three hours away, we discovered a dead deer hopelessly tangled in the pasture fence, and besides the sadness of that tragedy, there was added to the "to-do-before-we-leave" list the physical effort of wire cutting, fence repair, and dragging the animal to the road (where within ten minutes he was mistaken for road-kill and hauled away by someone who would use the meat).

The garden must be pest-proofed, and even if you just strung the electric raccoon fence, on the morning of departure you can be sure to discover that the raccoons have found some way in that must be plugged before you leave if you plan on filling the freezer with corn this year.

Plumbing knows your plans; so do blizzards and thunderstorms. Kids schedule ear infections or bronchitis to coincide with blast-off, and pets... well, pets... is what this story is about.

You can take a dog to the kennel, leave a cat for a couple of days with lots of food and a big litter box, farm out a hampster or other small critter to friends, but you have to have someone come to your barn twice a day to look after a horse. My barn is set up so the horses can each come and go at will from their box stalls. Water is outside in a tank and will last a week between fillings; grain can be put in their buckets and hay can be thrown into the stalls while keeping a stall wall between the horse and the caretaker of the horse (eliminating the risk of being stepped on or kicked). It's a good set-up.

So far so good.

This Thursday we leave to attend a wedding in New York, and so today I went out to the barn to muck out the stalls and throw some bales of hay down from the loft. At my appearance, Dream began her usual pawing and nickering in anticipation of the morning scoop of grain. I quickly obliged and then scooped for Heidi. As I approached the second stall, I saw it: Heidi's eyelid was ripped, swollen and encrusted with dried blood and dirt.

From experience that I will write about some other time, I knew that nothing could be done at this point except prevent infection. I washed Heidi's eye and called the vet, feeling deja vu: deja vu of Passover time and of a horse going lame with an abcess; deja vu of another horse having to be put down the day before Thanksgiving.

The vet came and agreed that antibiotic ointment was all that could be done, and that doing it three or four times a day between now and our departure may be enough. In New York City as the groom and bride raise their glasses in a toast to health and happiness, I will celebrate, but I will also think of Heidi and hope for the best.

Sometimes I wonder if Murphy didn't like animals.