*I’m a full-time horse trainer who has written about horses (here) since 2010. My dogs think it’s their turn now.* Just across the west pasture, Pikes Peak shows an early September snow. Here on the prairie, we hit the low forties overnight. The horses are growing winter coats. The sheep are getting hairier, as hair … Read more
It’s the autumn equinox. The sun rises rusty yellow, low-angle light catching prairie particles floating like fog on the horizon. We have more deer in our pastures than horses these days. A month ago, I mucked at dawn to avoid the heat. We didn’t just have a hot summer. Colorado just had its hottest in … Read more
It’s February on the high prairie at the fringe of the Rocky Mountains. The pond is still frozen so there is an unnatural quiet, no bird chatter, no wings in the sky. After months of feeling that light is somehow a product of ice lighting the ground, the sun feels just a bit warm again. … Read more
No more lingering in the melon-colored dusk, grazing late to the barn. The pasture is finished, even the weeds only skeletons. Overnight, the horses prefer barn-stored hay in the windbreak of a south-facing barn. The light drops fast, blood-splatter leaves in a green hedge. Pried from my hand what I hold dear, instead wrapping … Read more
Stay outside until the sun is low, reluctant to let the day end, tidying halters, raking loose hay into stalls, dragging my feet. Not ready. Just that this sweet ordinary day, this warm season, will soon be carried off in the wind, gone to seed. Loosening my grip from what I know will be … Read more
Nature swats at the pasty insects fussing with watch stems, adjusting mechanical time. Taking one hour, exactly sixty minutes, from one edge of a day and self-importantly tacking it to the other, a legal act lost on horses, who keep time by the feel of the soil, bucking wild at the scent of green … Read more
Lawn chairs got tossed, doors banged and windows rattled. She came back late, maybe even drunk. When I ventured out just before sun up, the ground was damp, small twigs and branches littered the picnic table. A surprising barrage of bird chatter; it’s been so quiet without them the last months but they were … Read more