From Symphony to the Stall

The concert yesterday went well, though the audience was leaner than usual for the Youth Concert. The day was glorious and warm, so we may have been competing with too many good reasons to be outdoors.

The woman sitting next to my husband in the audience said that this event was part of what she loved about living in Vermont. Earlier that afternoon she had been mucking out horse stalls, and by 4pm she had come a short distance to hear a wonderful orchestra concert. She assured him that she had changed clothes. Of course, since I regularly come home in clothes smelling of the barn this might not have been so much of a problem for him.

I went out for my shift at the barn this afternoon, waking up to a first day of spring that is why people move to southern states. It was snowing overnight and changed to a chilly mist by midday. It will be near freezing tonight and the horses are back in their heavier winter blankets after a couple of days in their lighter weight sheets. This is the time of the year that it becomes most difficult to try and figure out how warm a cover they should have.

Put on too heavy a blanket, and you risk the horse getting sweaty which can cause colic if they eat when still hot. Put on too light a sheet, the older horses can get chilled and get colic... the bottom line is that getting a number of equine senior citizens from winter to late spring is an art form. Horse owners and barn operators who do all the right things can and do lose a horse. The more even temperatures of late spring and early fall are welcome times compared to handling the extreme cold of winter, the heat of summer or the days of 30 degree temperature swings on each side of the change.

One of the more recent volunteers at the barn, Jen, is a woman who is great fun and a joy to have for help. She arrived knowing absolutely nothing about horses and really thinks about everything she is told. So if she asks a question it could be a real head scratcher, or some basic thing that many people may want to ask but lack the nerve. Jen doesn't have a problem with risking embarrassment, and will learn faster than most because of this. On the work side, she happily hauls water buckets and wheel barrels full of muck for two hours at a clip.

Jen took her first riding lesson last week, She said today that she now has much more respect for riders. She never realized how hard it was to learn the controls - seat, leg, hands - while sitting on a half ton of animal that had its own ideas about where to go. She also had not expected to be shy on the leg muscles needed to get the horse's attention, a surprise for her since she does manual work for a living and is overall quite strong for her size.

It sounded like they put her on a daisy picker, a horse that is safe for newbies because it won't buck or try to dislodge the rider. But these horses are usually pros at recognizing when they can get away with smaller disobediences. Apparently Jen's lesson included a trip to a feed bucket and a number of other locations that were not on the intended riding loop. And this was on a horse that was mostly blind.

Jen was a good sport about it though - she accepted the trainer's word that as the rider she was responsible for controlling the horse. She is thinking that she may spend a little more time on the ground getting to know them before she gets on a horse's back again.