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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

March 10, 2010

Spring Break

A week’s respite from the intensity of spring semester; I am getting time for real life.

This morning, as I write, the sun is warm on my back through the glass door to the deck.  Recently, it’s been high enough in the sky to clear the ridgeline behind us, so the corral is in sun till late afternoon, and it’s light enough to work outside till nearly seven and later each day.  This time of year sneaks up on us—but all seasons do in the north; they’re so extreme and transition so quickly.  Now, during this fallow week, I planned to get out every day to work with Mattie and Sam, but it’s Wednesday already, and I’ve only been out with them twice, and I can already feel the week slipping away.

On the shelf by the south-facing window are this year’s seeds, sorted by planting date, and stored in those clear plastic shells that cinnamon rolls from Lulu’s come home in.  Yesterday, I washed the old flats from the greenhouse, and today I will plant the first seeds of the year: Chianti Rose, Pompeii Roma, Sungold, and Camp Joy tomatoes.  Later in the week, I’ll plant the Little Prince eggplant—trying over on an unsuccessful experiment from last year.  Although the ground will be covered with snow till well into April or, if we get a few good March snowstorms, May, my mind is full of the joy of green things to come.

I imagine lettuce—I plant a cutting mix and a red and green romaine mix—the speckled leaves, the russet leaves, the frilled and smooth leaves, glowing as the sun slants through them in the evening. I imagine pulling carrots—I’m trying King Midas this year, a long variety, with the horses in mind.  I miss the taste of them, sweet, with just a hint of garden grit with the crunch of the root.

Mattie and Sam still stand in the sun each morning to warm their coats—it was fifteen below this morning.  In the afternoon, it will warm above zero and I’ll head out to groom them and do some longeing and groundwork.  I imagine I’m working them towards fitness for summer, but know that the weather, the cold, the packed snow melting in April to a dangerous slickness, the work ahead to finish the semester will all compete with my intentions toward them.  We have an ambitious lesson and clinic schedule set up for summer, including a three day Centered Riding clinic.  Between now and May, they need to be fit enough to take hour long lessons and the trail rides I hope to go on.  And so do I.

So, now, I’m on the couch, Jeter the poodle curled on his end, writing this instead of grooming, longeing, planting, dancing.  The sun has moved farther along the window now.  On NPR, there’s a discussion on the role of poetry in our lives in the 21st century.  There’s more coffee to drink.  Spring is still a dream, but a lovely dream.  We gather our energy now for the work ahead.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

February 13, 2010

Warmer days here—up around zero. For those of you reading this in the Lower 48, that may not seem warm, but with the increasing sunlight, dry air, and low snow cover, it feels like spring is on its way. On campus, walking between buildings at lunch or between classes, people seem animated, smiling, holding doors open for each other in order to have a chance to say, ”Isn’t the weather great today? Isn’t the light amazing?”

In the corral, Mattie and Sam position themselves in the sun, dozing. This morning, Mattie stood with her head half lowered, while Sam curled up on the packed snow of his favorite rolling spot. Some birds, perhaps juncos, swooped long arcs in the air above us. The light spread across the snow, up the hill to the trunks of the spruce trees, and tangled in the red-gray twigs at the end of the birch branches, delicate looking, but waiting for the right mix of light and warmth to start sucking sap out to the buds like sugar water through a soda straw. Astonishingly fragile pale green leaves will unfurl from those dry-looking sticks one day in May, and we’ll be into the mad rush of summer.

But I get ahead of myself. Today, I’m heading out with brushes, mane and tail detangler, and a “waterless” shampoo to get their coats ready for shedding season. They look like long-legged bears, their coats are so long and thick. And I’ve been so caught up with work that I come home too tired and the late afternoon is still too dark to spend much time with them daily, except for the usual scratch on the neck and good visual once-over.

Today, too, I’ll go back to the seed catalog on line to look at the gorgeous photos of carrots, lettuce, tomatoes and the difficult things: eggplant, peppers, melons, and try to finalize my seed order so that I can start indoor planting soon. I remember that, last year as I started this blog, I was in the midst of my sabbatical and that my personal goal (as opposed to the professional) was to get a sense of how else I could spend my life other than the way I do at work. Here’s what I’m concluding: fewer meetings, fewer obligations other than ones I can concentrate my energies on to do well, more horse time, more time with my hands in dirt, more writing. The question is how to do this in a self-sustaining way, without fully “retiring.” I watch friends of mine who’ve retired in disgust at the intensity of their work life, but haven’t substituted anything else for it. This works out badly for them.

For now, I’ll juggle both, knowing that the academic calendar gives me freedom when I need it most for my “real” life—the months of May-August. And as the light grows stronger and lingers longer in the evening, I’ll have more time and energy (light equals energy after all) to prepare my semi-feral critters for all that I have planned for them this summer.

If you are on the East Coast—enjoy the snow before it melts. Send us some for our dog races and to shelter the roots of our plants as the frost line works its way down through our soil in the spring. When spring actually comes for you—crocuses and daffodils—we’ll still be basking in the dazzle of light reflecting back off snow. Send photos and poems!

Update:  I spent an hour with Sam, detangling his mane and tail.  The sun gleamed off the long hairs of his coat and he stood dozing while I worked.  After that, we did a little clicker work, training him to touch his red ball to the word “touch”.  We had done this with other objects before, so he picked it up quickly.  I wish I knew how to cue all the tricks he already knows, but I’m guessing the cues are rather confused for him at this point.  Sometimes I’m sure what looks at first like bad behavior is a trick he’s been cued to–but I may never know his history.

One more thing.  When I got out to the corral, I checked the water tank to see if it was low enough to clean out the scuzz that accumulates at the bottom: shavings, hay, a feather or two.  When I looked in the tank, there was a whole bird, a chickadee, perched nervously on the red plastic that joins the heating element to the cord on the outside of the tank.  He was just above the water line and he eyed me suspiciously as I peered over the edge. I could see that his tail feathers were wet and scraggly; he must have tried to drink and gotten wet and was now too heavy to fly up out of the high-sided tank.  I put the grooming tools down on the fence rail and reached in gently with my gloved hand to give him a boost.  He flew up high enough to get over the tank rim then perched on the stall divider on Mattie’s side.  She walked over with her nose down, sniffing him cautiously.  He flew up again, over  tank to Sam’s side, where he perched on the salt block and ruffled his feathers.  As I worked with Sam, I checked back on him from time to time, sitting there on the rust-colored salt in the sun.  The run-in shed faces south, so he was in sun with no breeze–the perfect place to dry out.  From time to time he would call out “Chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee” a hoarse call, perhaps warning other birds away from the treacherous water tank.  Finally, when I went to check again, he was gone, feathers dried, dignity restored.

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The Post of Don Sam Incognito

January 24, 2010

Every day the sun moves a bit higher in its trajectory across the southern sky.  For weeks past solstice and the New Year, it would blip up over the horizon, then slip behind the spine of the ridge that slopes down to Rosie Creek to the southwest of us, so that the newly lingering light of afternoon would be slightly muted and colder than it might otherwise be.  But today, the sun hung high enough above the ridge that it seemed to be climbing an eddy along the ridgeline and light bleached the sky and gleamed off the snow and off Sam’s white coat.

Sam hasn’t had a post here in a while, partly because he and Mattie have been on their long winter break. Since Thanksgiving, it seemed that I never saw them in daylight except for weekends, and then it would be too cold to do much besides clean the corral and chat with them while throwing in an extra flake of hay.  But today the temperatures rose to nearly zero—warm enough that I could take my gloves off to groom or to do some clicker reinforcement with Sam, who really needs it.

The horses get a bit feral during their winter break.  They hesitate when I come out with a halter, thinking it over, even though they know I have beet pellets in my hand.  Once, this fall, when the temperatures were headed to thirty below and I wanted to blanket them while it was warm enough (twenty below) to move my fingers on the metal blanket hooks, Sam took one look at me and walked away, swishing his tail.  Today, though, he came up to me and let me halter him.  He seemed glad for the attention, though he wasn’t entirely cooperative.

We worked on basic stuff—things he’s known how to do his whole life: stand in place, take a treat graciously without tooth-to-hand contact, back up, come to me (I use the command, “step up”), keep his head out of my space (the hardest for him).  With Sam, because he’s so clever and has gotten away with such mischief before, it’s always good to review the basic groundwork before getting him back in shape for summer, oh so long away.

Sam has never been and will never be a sleepy cuddly gelding, like the ones I’ve been riding at a local facility.  A group of us in Horsemasters have rented an indoor arena and lesson horses from a local camp and we’ve started riding every Saturday night.  It’s good to work with Stormy, the reliable Quarter horse gelding I’ve been riding.  He stops if there’s any trouble in the arena; he’s never pushy; he seems resigned to a life where lots of people of varying abilities ride him; and he seems grateful for the attention I give him, grooming, talking to him in my horse voice—a kind of soft banter I learned from my riding instructor when I was a kid—mostly “Good boy, good boy.”  After working with Stormy, I feel ready for Sam.  For one thing, it’s clear that it’s not unreasonable to ask Sam to develop good horse manners, no matter what he thinks.  For another, it’s clear that I do know how to handle a reasonable horse.  Sam just has his own ideas about things.

It was still too cold to use the clicker today, so I did what I’ve read that others do—a soft ticking sound with my tongue, not to be confused with the cluck or “kissy” sound of encouragement.  He got that it was the same deal as the clicker, and after a few review tries, he stood when I said “stand,” with his face straight ahead.  Because he turns his head away when I say “wait,” something we developed early as an alternative gesture to diving at hay at feeding time, I’ve defined “stand” as with his head straight forward.  This also counteracts his tendency to want to mouth or nose-butt me while I’m grooming him.

After we worked on “stand” I had him stand while I moved to the end of the line, and we practiced “step up”—easy—from the front and both sides.  And always, we worked on “gentle” or taking a treat with no teeth, something he’s motivated to learn, since the treat goes away when he applies teeth.  Strangely, though, he doesn’t seem as talented as Mattie is at picking things up with his lips and drops the beet pellets sometimes.

Mattie and I worked some today, too, though not with the clicker.  With Mattie, it’s always a matter of reminding her once again that nothing I do will hurt her, a slow desensitization every spring.  I groomed her, picked the ice balls out of her feet with the ice hammer, and worked on small circles on the longe line.  She doesn’t like to work far from me, though she was doing better by the end of last summer.  After a few circles in both directions a couple of times and some “stand” and “step up,” we were done.   A good first day of preparation for spring.

It’s dark now.  In a few minutes, I’ll make up their dinner dishes: beet pellets, supplements, and a small scoop of flax seeds for their coats.  We’ll haul a few buckets of water out to the water tank while they’re munching the hay.  Jeter, who looks like a café au lait cub with his coat all grown out and flopping as he runs, will come with us, bounding around, picking up frozen horse “balls” and running with them, pulling up in front of me with a sliding sit for treats.

We’ve made it through the darkest time.  All’s well.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

December 31, 2009

A New Year

And I’m ready.  This has been a year of great promise: on the national scene, a new president who represents a true turning point in American politics; on the local scene, a new mayor, a growing interest in gardening and energy efficiency, and a turn toward inventiveness and ingenuity in dealing with living well and close to the earth in our difficult climate.

But on the ground here in the Interior and at Mattie’s Pillow, it was a year that gradually accumulated small disappointments, local disasters, and a bushel of griefs.  On this blog, I’ve focused on the beauty of life in the Interior and on the challenges those of us who live here face.  In general, I’m an optimist—and living with horses, an exuberantly fun-loving dog, a garden, and all the wild and human creatures that surround us here gives me a lift and a bounce back to the optimistic when  things get rough.

But each fall, as we begin the slide into the dark days of winter, we look at those around us and wonder who will be with us in the light of spring.  Already some have slipped away: Roy Bird, Marjorie Cole—and others have taken a more dire route off the planet, something which leaves those of us who knew them still tumbled in their wake.   And, since I mentioned politics in the first paragraph, the politics has been surreal, both nationally and in-state.  But I’ll leave that to other blogs to detail.  Check the Missing Links section for more on this.

Now, on New Year’s Eve, I’m once again in New Jersey assisting my brother.  It feels odd to be far from Fairbanks.  On New Year’s, we usually go to the fireworks on campus, standing out in the cold, bundled, booted, mittened, scarved, and even wrapped in sleeping bags, lying back warm in the snow and below zero air as the fireworks sizz and burst and sparkle above us and shake the ground beneath us.  Then we spend the evening with friends in the Farmer’s Loop valley, sitting around a bonfire and watching the neighbors’ fireworks light up each hour’s passing of the year in some time zone.  I miss it, but we’re planning a red beans and rice dinner with sparkling cranberry juice, some balloons, and some poppers.

Though I miss my usual celebration, it feels right that I start the year doing some good—such as it is—for my oh-so-stoic brother, helping him get his life back after a long healing that’s not quite over yet.  Perhaps this beginning foreshadows a better year ahead.  Perhaps, instead of the euphoric celebration of (and projection onto) the election of Obama we experienced last year, this year we should each do what Obama knew he needed to do all along: roll up our sleeves, wade in, and do the dirty, tiring, sometimes thankless work of making our world, or the part of it in which we live, a better place than we found it.

I’m starting with my brother’s kitchen.  What about you?

Happy New Year to all of you who read this blog.  Thanks for your readership, your comments and poems, your willingness to stop by from time to time.  I’ll be back to Mattie and Sam in the next entry.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

December 22, 2009

The solstice has turned—now, incrementally, we’re heading to brighter days. It has been a tough fall in the Interior. Each of us has experienced it in different ways that have accumulated gradually, but definitely, so that any two of us meeting at Fred Meyers near the mesh bags of tiny oranges, would find ourselves saying, “It’s been a rough fall,” and nodding, saying nothing for a beat, then moving the conversation along to the turning year.

I’m not sure where the run of bad luck started for me. Was it returning from two weeks in New Jersey to find an old friend and ally struck down in his dining room—the true meaning of stroke—and getting there in time to attend his cremation ceremony? Was it the day I knew the whole stack of hay had molded? Was it learning that my dancer son had been sucker punched while doing a good deed? Was it the other deaths and illnesses that seemed to accumulate as we head into the dark time of year?

Living in the Interior makes us survivors. We think nothing of going out and living our lives at twenty, thirty, forty below. We layer up and plug in our cars. We leave no skin exposed. Walking out to feed the horses in the dark of morning at twenty below, I begin to judge temperature by what freezes. Nose hairs: twenty below, eyelashes: thirty below, scarf to face, including nose and eyelashes: forty below. We know how far we can go without danger of hypothermia. We know how long our fingers can manipulate the metal hooks on the horse blanket before we have to run for the warmth of the house to warm hands and gloves, so we can go out and blanket another horse.

It makes a difference to my attitude to spend time outside. Though I rarely see Mattie and Sam in daylight as the fall semester winds down, there are those moments in the morning when I trudge out sleepy-eyed, yawning in the cold air, and watch the light spread on the southern horizon over the fold of the Alaska Range. It’s just past night at 9:30 or 10, on the days I can sleep that late, and the horizon is a deep smoky orange, the sky nearly black.

Today, the last day of grading final papers, I woke even later, still tired from finals week and the near constant reading of student writing. As I walked out, there was a blue-gray light in the sky, just enough to see without turning on the floodlights. Jeter, the still-adolescent poodle, went bounding on ahead as I got Mattie and Sam’s morning armfuls of hay. The air had warmed to nearly zero, and I could feel the returning moisture in the air. Mattie’s back was covered with frost and shavings as she waited for me to toss her hay.

After I threw the hay to each of them, I ducked under the fence, dog in the lead, and walked over to scratch Sam on the neck under his mane. His coat is out to my second knuckle now, dense and warm. I took a flake of hay and divided it into two parts to tuck in two old tires in the corral. They like to eat from the tires, then flip them in the air, looking for scraps of hay. As I walked back into Mattie’s side of the corral, I heard a sharp “Caw” and sensed motion above me. I looked up to see a half dozen ravens circling in the air.

The sky was lightening, the ravens dark against the gray sky. They circled on an eddy of air, catching up to and tumbling around each other. It seemed like one raven led the circling—a choreographer of air—as they glided and flapped and glided again, all in a slow gyre above my head.

Later, I read a poem by Yeats that used that word, “gyre,” his word for the order or was it disorder inherent in the world. These ravens didn’t seem to be playing, though they didn’t seem dreary or even to be hunting. They almost seemed to be circling me and the horses and the dog, as if we were an audience for their art, and all they wanted was to be seen by us. It was as if they were caught in the eddy at the heart of the turning year and were dramatizing it—the essence of solstice—right above my corral.

Or maybe they were waiting for us to leave so they could snack on manure. In any case, a happy solstice to you: the return of light, the slow draining out of darkness from the coming new year.

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Poetry Challenge 33

December 5, 2009

Though we complain about it, there’s a sweetness to the dark time.  It’s as if our adult outer shell, tired of battling with slick roads, doing chores in the dark, numb fingers, and the sluggishness of moving about with layers of down, fleece, wool and whatever else we can use to keep the cold away from our skin, retreats for while in quiet moments and the child within returns.  For me, it’s an excess of Nutcrackers–I see the ballet two or three times a season for the way it brings me into the family the dancers create–or chocolates, or pies.  Sometimes, it’s the moment I take each morning to run my hand under the manes of the horses, lean in to their thick coats and breathe in their rich smell.

So, what  small thing or things do you do to keep the inner self energized during the cold season?  What do you look forward to that’s not part of the revved-up Christmas industry, but comes from the things all around you?

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

November 18, 2009

Twenty-plus below

Deep cold sets in once again.  I am back in Ed’s chair, blanket and laptop on my lap, listening to the hiss of the teakettle on the woodstove.  Outside, it’s twenty-five below under a flat black sky, glittering with stars.  To the south, Orion hangs drunkenly from his belt, leaning precariously over the river and the flats beyond.

When I started this blog, it was January, the heart of winter.  Ever so slightly the days were getting longer, and I had the luxury of a semester’s sabbatical to watch its progress and write it here.  Now, it’s fall, and we are sliding deeper into winter.   Earlier in fall, when we had an unusually long run of warm sunny weather, I kept meaning to dig out my winter boots and mittens.  Somehow, each  time the temperature dropped a bit more, I would run across just the item I needed—my warm fleece mittens from Apocalypse Design, my fleece-lined boots, the down liner for my coat, the flat, circular fleece hat made for me years ago by my friend Kelly, who traced the pattern from a pie plate.   I’m ready.  I plug the car in at night and when I get to the university, and it runs faithfully.   I haul water to the horses to keep the water level in their tank above the heating element in the bottom, so it doesn’t freeze.  I soak their beet pellets and some extra brome pellets in warm water for a warming mash at night.

Last night, around eleven, I decided that the temperature was really going to drop, as predicted, and I went out to blanket the horses.  Mattie and Sam grow thick warm coats in winter.  Sam’s gets nearly four inches long by late spring and grows in dense like a caribou’s.  Mattie’s coat develops longer guard hairs like a dog’s, with a fluff of undercoat.   She glistens in the sun, looks velvety in flat light.   Sam, despite his trickster nature, invites hugs with his teddy-bear coat.

Still, I know their coats will continue to thicken and grow in with the cold and dark, but this is the first deep cold.  I have brought the thick winter blankets inside to stay warm and, last night, spread them out on the kitchen floor and folded them so that the withers end was down and could I could drape them and unfold them from their shoulders back.

But going out in these temperatures is not as graceful as going out to the corral in summer.  I wear my Muck boots—Arctic Sports, lined with the same neoprene that divers use in cold water—my lined Carhartts, a down vest, wool sweater, lined jacket, fleece hat and smoke ring, insulated gloves.  When it gets colder—thirty or forty below—I’ll layer up even more, but this is enough to make walking slow and to increase my dimensions just enough to make me bump into things as I move around in the house with the heavy blanket in my arms.

I had the floodlight on, shining into the corral.  Out above the corral fence, the stars glittered.  Mattie came out of the dark—a darker shadow, nickering for hay.  I let her smell the blanket, then haltered her and draped it over her shoulders.  It had come a bit unfolded in my messing around carrying it out of the house, and parts of it were folded under on her back at first.   I unfolded the blanket, smoothed it back over her rump, then reached under her belly for the straps to fasten it to her.  She moved away a little, suspicious, as if I had lost my mind to be out putting anything on her back at that time of night, but, as usual, she seemed to relax into the warmth of the blanket and let me reach under her belly and run the leg straps around her hind legs to keep the blanket from slipping.  For a moment, I leaned into her flank as I reached under her stifle for the strap.  Her coat is soft, and she was calm.  We had a quiet moment in the cold and dark.

Sam was a different matter.  He snorted when I came into his side of the corral, and walked away from me, even though he had sniffed the blanket.  He walked around the corral and I walked with him, swinging the lead rope in lazy circles as if I were driving him along.  From time to time I flicked him in the rump, just so he shared my illusion.  Finally he got tired of that game—I had beet pellets in my pocket, after all—and he turned to face me.  I draped the rope around his neck and tied on the rope halter.  Sam has been bored since school started—particularly now that I am coming home in the dark—and he teased me, bumping me with his nose or draping his head over me while I was trying to buckle the front of his blanket and keep my hands warm at the same time.  Once it warms up enough, we’ll be back to clicker training on weekends.  Last night, I just wanted to get his blanket on.

Now they look like medieval horses, draped in their royal blue and Black Watch plaid blankets.   They are hungry with cold, and I’m giving them a little extra hay, but not too much.  This is our first cold, but not our last, and they have to toughen for forty below at some point, maybe colder.   We all do, and like blanketing horses, we all will do what we can to help each other through to spring.

 

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

October 25, 2009

Lingering fall.  Yesterday, driving home on a long westward stretch of road, I saw a half moon, burnt orange, resting on the mountains at the horizon, as if too reluctant or too tired to slip down below the rim to what lay beyond.  As I drove the road’s few turns, the moon seemed to duck out of sight then reappear through the spruces, as if it were playing with me as I drove through the deep darkness of a snowless fall night.  This reluctant moon, the lingering fall, all set an odd tone for the end of October here.

It’s global warming, perhaps.  We’ve seen other effects here in the Interior: the million-acre wildfires and the smoke that settles across the valley and flats in summer; the spruce-bark beetle and leaf miners that feed on our native trees; the early planting and late harvest; and on the Arctic Coast, the melting ice pack, stranding seals, walrus, polar bears.  Much of this is in the range of normal.  For every, “This is strange weather,” there’s a sourdough, “I remember when…” to top it all.  Those of us who have lived in Interior Alaska for many years, hesitate to generalize about the weather here, except to say that there’s no predicting one year by the other.

And we’re not complaining, really—even the dog mushers and skiers.  The skies are clear and sunny by day, warming to the high 30s and 40s, which is warm enough to take off gloves and hats to work with horses.  And though we have less light every day, it’s still light enough at 6:30 or 7 to do a few outdoor things, like groom a horse or roll up the hose for the second time this fall.

Today, I went out to work with Mattie, to reinforce the progress we made with longeing this summer.  She went out on the line fine, then stopped and turned towards me, ears back.  She no longer intimidates me with this–perhaps because I’ve learned to read when to back off with her.  We tried a few more starts in that direction, and I turned her to trot to the other direction.  She went a little, but I let us end with walk and whoa and stand and back, things she does automatically.  I haven’t worked with her much in the past two weeks—teaching and all that goes into it fills my days, and the weekends pass so quickly.  But it was good to run a brush and my bare hands over the deepening plush of her coat and to walk alongside her as she walked and trotted, however reluctantly.  Like the moon.

We are reluctant to give up what’s left of good weather, but we know we’re on borrowed time.  There are still green blades of grass, and a few hardy plants on the hillside perk up again at mid day.  The first real snow will be a sharp wake up to winter for us, but perhaps not so bad, because we’ve had so much time to prepare.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

October 12, 2009

Thinking of the Beatles’ song with the words, “marmalade skies”. As I head out mornings to feed the horses, I step out of the house to face the sunrise over the hills beyond the corral. The other day, the clouds were orange, smudged with a smoky purple, and the light in the sky shaded from a deep yellow below the clouds to a watery aqua where the sky met the hills of the Alaska Range. I searched for a word for what I was seeing and thought of marmalade—my favorite on toast—then remembered and understood the words to the song.

We are having an unusually warm October. The last bit of tomato vine abandoned in the greenhouse when we had the hard frost weeks ago is still alive, though a bit pale in its five-gallon planter. The pansies have started blooming again, and even the small white petunias, the bells, are putting out new white flowers. I want to re-plant the garden, but it’s an illusion. Night comes on earlier each day, and with the clear weather we’re having, there’s a splash of Milky Way across the black sky, with occasional meteorites streaking down. The moon’s a thumbnail now, a shaving of its former self. It rises later and spends more time at the horizon, flame colored through the dense air.

We spent the weekend pulling out moldy bales from our hay pile. I did some research on line and found that we had the perfect conjunction of events to make our pile mold—a later cutting with more sugars in the leaf; cut and cured on ground that had had lots of rain previously, taking more time to dry; baled as the weather was getting cooler, which meant not enough hot sun to dry thoroughly; then our hay crew stacking the bales too tightly in our barn; then the unexpectedly long warm spell so that the mold kept on spreading. The mold is already on the grass leaf. One source I found said that the mold counteracts bacteria on the living plant, but grows and spreads on the cut and wilting leaf, which is why the best hay weather is hot and dry so the hay dries before the mold can start growing. We found a cow farmer who could feed the hay to his cows—cows don’t get respiratory diseases from mold, it seems, and they have all those stomachs and tongues long enough to lick their own noses.

It could have been an unpleasant task, and the discovery of the mold and figuring out what to do were no fun. But my son and I and Peter from our horse club (and his mother Marina) and the two sons of our Nepali friend put on dust masks and went at it. The weather was clear and warm, the company pleasant and playful, and we had three trucks to carry the load. Mattie grabbed a few mouthfuls as we maneuvered the trucks past the corral fence, and it was gone. Now there’s a big empty space to fill—another puzzle, as the haying season is over here—and I’m getting plenty of suggestions from horse friends about where to find replacement hay. As for me, I’m mostly relieved not to be risking giving Mattie and Sam hay that’s a noseful of spores. We didn’t lose as many bales as I at first feared.

The weather won’t last, but no one’s complaining except the skiers. Even the dog mushers are enjoying exercising their teams harnessed to four-wheelers, running down the trails. The leaves are nearly all gone, though. It won’t be long.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

September 22, 2009

First snow.

In the morning, when I went to feed the horses, the sky was flat gray and a drop or two of drizzle fell—not enough to wet the hay I threw out to them, but enough to serve as a warning.  The greenhouse was still above 40 degrees and I gambled that the snow that had been predicted would hold off till I came home from school in the afternoon.  But as I was packing my laptop and finishing my coffee and getting ready to leave for my 9:45 class, I noticed the first bit of white fluff among the quickening rain, as if someone were shaking a down jacket with a tear—a few fat flakes mixed among the gray.  So, instead of leisurely swallows of coffee, I went out on the deck and brought in the still-blooming geraniums, the pots of thyme, oregano, parsley, rosemary, cilantro, then took scissors and snipped clusters of still-green sungold tomatoes from the deck tomato plants.

Tonight, I went to dinner with Sam’s former owner, Kathy, and Avrille, who rode Sam two summers ago and who just had a baby. Avrille’s mother was visiting the new, three-week-old grandson—the occasion for the dinner, and we sat in Kathy’s living room in the gray light of gathering dusk mixed with snow and talked about horses, babies, dogs.  Kathy’s elderly appaloosa, Prince, wandered in the yard outside the window, grazing on the last of the summer’s grass, his back gray from the rain.  I held Oscar, the baby, for a long time, feeling his sleepy breathing and letting myself drift on the conversation and the gathering night.

We forget about night in the summers here.  We expect to be outside in the light at all hours, in mild air, and amidst the rampant green of our gardens.  Now, after the fall equinox, we begin to realize the inevitable—night is overtaking us.  We are leaving the realm of the outer, the literal, the sun-edged and settling down to the dream-like state of winter.  Not yet, not quite yet—the leaves are still orange-gold, the grass green and spiky, the sunflower still has buds, the broccoli has new sprouts, and the tomatoes in the greenhouse are just turning from green to yellow to red.

When I got home, I gave the horses an extra layer of spruce shavings and filled a five-gallon jug with hot water and took it to the greenhouse to counteract what temperatures night might bring.  I said a thank-you to the still blooming petunias that may not make tonight.  I contemplated all the chores that need to be done before snow settles in for real for the winter: rolling up the hose, taking up the portable electric fence that let Mattie and Sam graze the lawn, covering the horse trailer with a tarp, plugging in the water tank heater, and, sigh, emptying out the greenhouse.  I’ll bring a few pepper and eggplant plants in to coax a bit more growth, and pick the remaining Black Krim, Chianti Rose, and Pompeii Roma tomatoes to ripen in a drawer for the rest of fall.   Then there are the root crops—and once again, I may be chopping them out from under a frozen top layer of dirt.

So much to do, and, now that there’s night, I just want to curl up under a quilt and sleep till spring.

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