Long before I was a horse trainer, I was a period house restoration contractor.

There’s a saying among contractors: “You can have it good, quick and cheap.  Pick two out of the three.”

I’ve always said that if you love to ride and to garden and to work (and you don’t have staff), you can also pick two out of the three.

Last week, we were gifted by a surprise visit from dear old friends who create and care for some of Long Island’s most beautiful gardens.  The wife comes from a polo-playing family and loves horses.   We walked around the farm together and she told me how much she misses having horses in her life.  Her two out of the three is gardening and work. 

If you were to visit my farm, you’d know immediately which two out of the three I picked.  

I still miss gardening, as my friend misses horses.  I think of gardening, at its best, as an art, like riding.  Although I’ve never asked her, I suspect my friend feels the same.

So this, along with winter coming, got me thinking about horses and horse people and flowers.

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Yesterday, in my discussion of stoics, I mentioned that my Yankee-Irish horsewhispering boyfriend (YIHB) had gotten bad news about his knee.  As Christmas decorations are already at the grocery store, I can share with you that visions of pins and overnight stays in the hospital and long, painful recoveries danced in my head:

Good news.  It turns out that knees — even with the assemblage of problems that my YIHB’s knees have — can be relatively easy to fix, and take considerably less time to recover, with less pain, than rotator cuffs (which was last spring’s injury).

My YIHB’s orthopedic surgeon told him he can look forward to 45 minutes of surgery, a day or two of pain meds, a few weeks of physical therapy, and a return to normal American daily life, in a few more weeks.  Then he added, “but that’s not if you work on a farm.”

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I don’t make New Year’s resolutions.  Maybe it’s the fact that I live in New England, but despite Christmas and the changing of the year, the middle of winter (there’s a reason why they call it the dead of winter) just doesn’t feel like a time to make changes.

Living as I do, microwave-free, with horses in shedrows on the hill, two stoves that keep us largely off the grid (but busy tending the fires), and garages that store everything but cars, winter’s everyday obligations fill the hours and keep us fit.  It’s the worst time to cross things off my “to do” list, that personal perpetual calendar that most of us keep.

So I tend to make my annual resolutions after Labor Day.  Perhaps it’s a misnomer to refer to them as resolutions at all, since they’re less about changing me than they are about deciding what can get done before it gets too cold to do it.  I have more in common with a fat-cheeked squirrel right now than the tipsy and contemplative singing Auld Land Syne.

When I was young, my mother often told me to  “gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” quoting Robert Herrick’s poem “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time.”  Of course, at the time she was giving those orders, the very last thing I was supposed to do was gather rosebuds as Herrick suggested, so I interpreted the phrase as a more romantic version of what squirrels are supposed to do with nuts.

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Hello my new friends, and hello again my old friends.  While I’ve been away, thousands of people have visited my blog but I’ve missed writing about riding and horses and discussing the same with my internet friends.

The stated reason for my absence was my Yankee-Irish horsewhispering boyfriend’s torn rotator cuff, which made our lives, as my GPS says to me on occasion, “Make a sharp right turn” (it says so in an Australian accent, since I can’t stand the American one).

Sharp turns, in traffic or in life, often involve a change of direction, and that’s what happened this summer.  Of course, as every rider knows, when we change one thing, we change a lot more than one thing.

Projects were abandoned midstream.  Necessities became options.  The line of the undone stretched on like a depression breadline.  My YIHB tried to speed up his recovery and I tried to fill his boots.  The timing couldn’t have been worse, as we simultaneously increased the number of horses we care for.  A promise is a promise, though, and we’d made a promise to a dear friend and client, whose horse is now a happy member of the little herd.

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From the folks that brought you duct tape and Saran Wrap as a solution to biochemical warfare — The Department of Homeland Security — we have another inspiredly idiotic idea.  It really is time for Dr. Strangelove Returns.

The plan is to move the National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) from Plum Island, a barrier island off the coast of Long Island, NY — its home for the last 60 years — to Manhattan, Kansas.

The mission statement of the Plum Island Disease Center reads:  “We work to protect farm animals, farmers and ranchers, the nation’s farm economy and export markets…and your food supply.”

Plum Island was managed by the US Army and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) until its management was taken over by Homeland Security in 2003.  It operates under very close cover.  The only access on and off Plum Island is via government ferry supervised by armed guards.  The USDA proudly claims Plum Island as “America’s first line of defense against foreign animal diseases.”

No one really knows what goes on at Plum Island (except maybe the people who work there).  We do know that it’s the place where the connection between West Nile Virus and dead horses was made.  It’s designated as a biosafety level 5 facility.  The Island has no wildlife.  But the freezers have polio and Rift Valley Fever.  The deer that swim onto the island are killed.

When the facility moves to Kansas, it will be a biosafety level 4 (BSL4) laboratory.  That’s even more dangerous, but there are no plans to kill the million and a half cows that live in Kansas.

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To paraphrase Anita Bryant, a day without blogging is like a day without sunshine.  Not that there’s been much sunshine here.  Every day, we’ve been treated to a sudden and sometimes severe shower, with high winds and thunder (and associated circus tricks from the horses).  And that’s in between the rain.

Do you know the song “It’s Raining Men” by the Weather Girls?  I think I must have danced with some of those guys at the Paradise Garage (the same guys that had Anita Bryant so worked up)…

I feel like it’s been raining tasks here at the farm.  Yesterday, I was too busy to post.  And that doesn’t happen very often.

We’ve been working like mad in preparation for the surgical repair of my Yankee-Irish horsewhispering boyfriend’s rotator cuff today.   Actually, none of the work had to do with preparing for surgery…it all had to do with preparing me to be without my YIHB after surgery.

In the last few days, he finished putting a roof on the barn extension, installed kiwi-latches on gates, set up new fencing and did everything he could think of to make my life easier while he’s recuperating.  He’ll be here…he just won’t be able to do much…and that will be unusual.

Did I mention that we have a new boarder?  I couldn’t be more delighted…but the timing couldn’t be worse.  We had lots of advance notice, we just didn’t know that the horse’s arrival would coincide with the surgery.  In fact, we didn’t know there would be surgery.

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My faithful readers (and students and clients) know that I’ve been girl-without-tractor for far too long now. Ever since the disturbing ka-clunk that led to our abandoning the last half of the last mow last fall…that led to the visit from our local-farmer-the-tractor-repair-wizard who took the tractor apart to take a look…which led to a smile and a shrug and a promise to return.

When I got a tractor named Long, I had no idea that the name referred to the time it would take to repair it…or the time it would take for whoever tried to repair it to return a phone call.  Finally, a month ago, our local-farmer-the-tractor-repair-wizard actually returned a phone call.  I can only think that he must have repaired all the other tractors in Connecticut, the Berkshires and beyond.

Not only did he return the phone call, he actually came over to pick up where he left off last fall.  He was here for an hour and then recommended that we take the Long to the tractor repair center in the next town over.  Why he couldn’t have said this last fall is beyond me, but that’s the way it is in the country, and why occasionally (very occasionally) I wish I were back in Manhattan.  Or as the farmer in overalls at the Goshenette says, “MAN-hattin!”

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This spring, we found a bird’s nest in a tree made completely from horse farm materials:  strips from a blue tarp, horse hair and a few tiny twigs and leaves (which you can’t see) at the bottom, to give it structure.

I’ve done my best with my poor photography skills (why can my friend the photographer take amazing pictures with my Canon Elph and this is the best I can do?) but I wanted to show it to you.   It’s about a 3″ cube.

Any idea what species might have built it?

Here at the farm, we have a vernal pond that fills each spring and which we nurture, as it nurtures its own inhabitants.

It’s a small pond — no more than 60 or 70 square feet.  It’s filled not just by melting snow but also from one of the natural springs that are scattered over the low-lying lands of the property.  The pond sits in front of the old pony barn, which was built by our Norwegian neighbor during the first winter he lived here, over 40 years ago.  Come spring, he discovered that the barn he had built during that hard New England winter was sited in soft, wet earth.  As he says, “I built it in the wrong place.”  And he laughs because he knows what’s important in life.

Although the pony barn has a perfect set of stalls for six Fjords or Welshes or Morgans or Arabians, it doesn’t house any ponies or horses.  As far as I know, it never has.  It doesn’t sit empty though (thanks to pallets, planks and plywood).  It houses things that old house restorers like us collect, along with an assortment of treasures that could easily lead crisp suburbanites to accuse of us of being hoarders.

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