Top 10 Best Things About Having Horses at Home

10.  It is so fun watching your non-horsey husband try to properly knot a rope halter.

9.  It is so cute watching your horse trying to be super still and helpful while your husband is fumbling with that damn rope halter.

8.  You have beautifully sculpted upper arm and shoulder muscles from building a mountain of manure one forkful at a time.

7.  You don’t freak out at the little shining entrails the cats leave behind after they dine on rodents in the barn aisle.

6.  You expertly store water buckets on their sides so that when you pull them off the overhead shelf your open mouth is not met with an avalanche of mouse turds.

5.  During an afternoon thunderstorm you can climb up onto the hay bales and curl up under your mare’s turnout blanket for a little nap.

4.  You wake up after your nap on the hay to discover all of your horses are dozing, too.

3.  The only drama in your barn is who gets to be turned out first.

2.  The lunge whip/Epsom salts/duct tape/MTG/tool chest/Excalibur/Betadine/Vet wrap/Elastikon is in exactly the same spot where you left it.

1.  When the weather is mild, the only preparation you need before heading out to feed in the morning is to pull your boots on over your jammy bottoms.

Spring Peepers and Other Choral Works

I'll just say it:  I love the sound of spring peepers.  The last few years they've begun their chorus in February and it is magical.  If they kept at it all year long instead of just the spring would I get sick of them?  I doubt it.

I find the sound of spring peepers to be a strong memory device.  Last February, as I drove a little ways south to meet a prospective new horse, the unseasonably warm weather and the spring peepers conspired to make me fall hopelessly in love with this horse.  He is standing in my field this morning, if that tells you anything about the power of spring peepers.

But there are other rural symphonies that are worth mentioning, too.  Jackson, for example, the big brown donkey that used to live with cows on the neighboring farm.  Jackson's job was to keep the coyotes away from the cows, as donkeys are equipped with a natural animosity for coyotes.  I didn't hear too many coyotes while Jackson was around, but I did hear his loud braying.  Jackson had that classic "heeeee-haw, heeeee-haw, hee-haw-hee-haw-hee-haw" bray, complete with a little wheezing sound at the end.  I loved him.  Sometimes, in the middle of a summer night, I'd wake up because he was braying in one of the lower fields, the sound wafting up on the breeze and through the bedroom window.  Always, it made me smile.

I miss old Jackson and never more so than when I hear my neighbor's miniature donkey.  She doesn't bray, she screams bloody murder.   Every time I hear her call I imagine that she is strapped onto a conveyor belt and she is watching in abject horror as her little donkey belly inches closer to a spinning saw blade.  Her "bray" is horror movie soundtrack material.  If she ever woke me at night it would be literally nightmarish.

And of course, there are the coyotes, especially now that Jackson and the cows are gone.  The coyotes love a little group howl and they really love it when they can chime in with a police siren.  This begins an undesirable chain reaction because my beagles chime in too, baying and whining and just making a miserable racket in general.

Occasionally, I'll hear the throaty chuckle of a wild turkey, and I never ever get tired of the whistling calls of the Bobwhite quail, but these sounds are rarer than I would like.  On the quieter side of the rural chorus is the buzzing of the honeybees, a sound I have happily learned to distinguish from other flies and bees.  But by far my most favorite sound is that of one of the horses, nickering at me when he sees me.