"Love What You Love"

I finally threw my leg over a horse again. As I nestled into the saddle and stretched my legs down long, and then asked the horse to move forward, my back instinctively flexed with the forward and back motion. It was like I had just gotten off yesterday instead of 17 years ago. A line from Mary Oliver's poem, "Wild Geese," kept repeating itself in my mind: "....You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves...."
I ended up going to a different barn than Fox Ridge Farm, which seems to be having communication or scheduling issues, or both. But within a few hours of contacting Elite Equine Group, which is actually closer to my home, I was booked for a Saturday lesson within 24 hours of my initial email.
The instructor, Sarah, was great. She was encouraging, positive and intuitive: a perfect combination for someone returning to an old haunt with some trepidation. Turns out there are quite a few riders at this barn that are older and wiser, very understanding and downright welcoming. Bonnie is one of them. After retiring, she returned to riding and boards her horse Puzzle here. She offered to take a few pictures of my first day back in the saddle. A little blurry, but that is still me, trying out a Western saddle and feeling just fine.
"How does it feel to be back? Sarah asked. "You sure don't look like you haven't been riding for that long. And you can tell you were a dressage rider...."
Music to my ears, salve to my soul; my new, old happy place.
Only...well... I told Ken (my husband), who has been asking me what I want for Christmas; it looks like my old hardhat no longer meets current safety requirements. I think I'll need a new one....

The Thanksgiving Pages

Thanksgiving 2008

I'm still standing. And grateful...
For my husband, my parents, three sisters and brother. Home, pets, food three times a day (more during the holidays) my town, two cars, clothes on my back, hair on my head, my family of friends in various stages of coming and going. And okay—yes, my job, even though sometimes it feels like I am being eaten alive; health, laughter, books, insight, notebooks, shoes, shampoo, kind co-workers, dark chocolate, enough money (would like more, thank you), watches, soft socks, smooth-writing pens, brakes, air conditioning in the summer, heat in the winter. Potential. Hope.
An Ipod Nano with 4,000 songs, buttercream, the sharp scent of ozone before a storm, geese calling from their “V”, friends who tell you the truth.
Electricity, otters, automatic coffee pots, lace tablecloths, airplanes, rain, Xanax, trees, raccoons, bears and flying squirrels. Coming home at the end of the day, newspapers in my driveway, pancakes with real Vermont fancy maple syrup.
Mauvey-morning skies, moonlight stroking my sleeping husband, heated birdbaths, warblers, intuition, prayer, shoes to walk miles in. Telephones. Dirt. Suet you can buy in the store for chilly Chickadees. The flashing wings of Blue Jays picking peanuts off the deck railing in a January snowstorm, deck chairs, music, the warm clove aroma of mulled wine.
Earthworms, quiet afternoons, scented candles, hard boiled eggs, pizza with extra cheese, solitude, naps, friends who understand pain, birds, the Grand Canyon, wild horses, bubble baths, sparkly rings, blank pages, poetry, Mary Oliver. Dishwashers, growing up a girl, roses, periwinkle.
Kind veterinarians, long quiet walks in the woods, recipes, corduroy, fingernails, medicine, cat food, chants, indoor plumbing, Willie Nelson, clothes dryers, cross stitch patterns, green, restaurant dinners, lemons, hummingbirds, Elk lake, blogs.
Loons.
Water, duct tape, wireless routers, flush toilets, soap, icicles, forsythia. Swingline staplers, batteries, fingers, calendars, keyboards, love, switches, picture frames, flashlights, bookends, E. B. White. Answering machines, gas stations, orange juice, chocolate chips, apricots. Angels. Stories with happy endings, Belize, Dr. Cappitelli, flour, antivirus software, highlighters, harmony. Calligraphy, combs, toothpaste, wild bunnies in the yard. The back yard. Wolves.
Pencils, bees, pansies, polka dots, pillows, zebras, salad, well-behaved children, convertibles, magazines. Sleeping kittens, fireflies, peanut butter, good clergy, email, drumming woodpeckers in March, red, American flags, dragons, acorns, light bulbs, soap, jewelry boxes, ponies, walking sticks, Elizabeth, dragonflies, guitars, tomorrow, cat litter, mirrors, blueberries, blinking Christmas reindeer, sequins, dictionaries, windy days, fleece blankets, wet tree bark, Fridays.
Purple, unicorns, rakes, beginnings, grace, bats, stars, computers, bookends, hosta, garbage cans, skin, new tires, sunglasses, computer glasses, BINOCULARS, Suzanne’s birding scope, Baltimore Orioles, birding days, screech owl nights, duplicate car keys, paved roads, caller ID, friends who don’t let you go.
The list never ends. AMEN.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Horse Interrupted Part 2

(Archive photo)

While I started out as a hunt seat rider (jumping horses) in my early riding years, the grace and technological skills of dressage drew me into longer stirrups and the beauty of balance. But now my body is older and wiser. Competition has lost its glamor, and all I want now is connection with a kind animal and the grace of moving with one. So, after purchasing an economy-sized bottle of ibuprofen, I am going to try my hand at Western riding, also known as “stock seat.”
In horse language, English riding is the one with the “little” saddle, the kind non-riders shrink from because there is “nothing to hold on to!” Western riding is what you see in the cowboy movies and rodeos and is generally the accepted mode of riding in more rural areas because; well, it’s more practical for what they do. The differences don’t stop in the saddle either. Those who ride English and those who ride Western view each other with a jaundiced eye. They are almost their own political parties, with separate beliefs, ways of doing things, personal missions and goals for themselves and their horses. And while you may find bi-partisan barns, they generally do not mix well together. People will sidle off to either English barns or Western ones.
After searching the internet for a barn that might welcome a 50-something wannabe returning rider, I found Fox Ridge Farm in Vernon, NJ, and then chose one of the coldest days of the year (so far) to drive over and check it out. I was greeted by Joe, husband of Danielle, who runs the farm and teaches the lessons, cares for the 20+ horses, some of which are owned by boarders and some are lesson or leased horses, as well as three rescued animals in various stages of being nurtured back to life. Joe showed me around and introduced me to some of the horses, including Bunny, a rescued pony from Pennsylvania with a kind but wary eye. Mostly English riders were here, he said, and a few Western, but everyone was encouraged to enjoy their horses in whatever way that fit for them. Bad language was not tolerated, nor was abuse of an animal or a fellow human being.
This might be my new place. We’ll see.
Next weekend: Go watch the lessons. What the heck, I’ll just sign up for one, if space is available. If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll have a chance to brush a horse or two. And when I get home, I’ll pop the ibuprofen and brush the horsehair off my coat with a smile.

Horse Interrupted

(From the archives)

I finally followed up with an old heart’s desire before becoming a birder, a business woman, a wife, a homemaker, and a responsible, over-tax-paying NJ citizen. The same world I aspired to when I was only months old and a perpetual car screamer unless my frustrated parents and siblings could find and point out one of the old Texaco gasoline station signs of the flying red horse. As long as I could see that scarlet horse with outspread wings soaring over the limits of its little white world, I was transfixed into silence, as if I had accidentally arrived on this planet as a half horse/half human soul, and only being at home on my own two legs if I was near the other four.
During my younger years, I rode many horses and owned two, briefly, finally giving it up when I had to take on three jobs to make ends meet. Barn politics were also ruining the simple reasons horses gave me for getting up in the morning. I needed a break. Little did I know it would become almost permanent.
But while the physical connections were interrupted, the spiritual remained. A single animal grazing quietly in a field turns my head. A casual rider clopping by as I stroll through a county fair catches my breath. So, inspired by such blogs as Grey Horse Matters and Teachings of the Horse, and after a long, on-going period of self reflection involving some desperate personal circumstances, I decided to return in whatever measure I can to what I have never stopped loving~that flying red horse in my soul. I want to return to riding, not for shows anymore with all the expense and tension and internal struggles, but to the spicey scent of pine shavings and clean leather, the sound of a stall door rumbling open, the click of a cross tie being snapped into place, the soft nickering of an honest animal acknowledging my arrival, swirling horsehair all over my barn jacket and dirt under my fingernails. It’s not just the riding; it’s the entire World of Horse and horse people, the language, the camaraderie of a warm barn, the simple satisfaction that you are a fellow animal and have a place in this old world, that you belong to a higher power destined to be in your heart long before you were ever born.
You know what they say: Do what you love.

Oak Trees and Vulnerability

The oak tree in our back yard is now naked against the the glare of the November sun. You would think it would want its shawl of leaves to protect its rough hide from the coming snow and ice. During the summer, leaves collect the sun’s energy for the oak to grow and thrive and toss acorns; doesn’t it need a little golden blankie to stay warm during those long January nights? It’s odd that the harsher the weather becomes, the more the oak strips itself until by the time of the first snows, only a tuft of brittle brown leaves remains to flutter from a twig.

I suppose there is something to be learned about vulnerability here. The more you stand naked, the less you have to defend. If I remove my clothes, there is nothing left to take.

But who wants to stand around naked? This is what trees do to survive. They draw their life energy into their core and plunge it into safety until the signal comes in spring that it is safe to flow once again. Perhaps that is part of the paradox of vulnerability too~that you are not really standing naked at all but hunkered down around the fires of your own essence to wait through the storms of winter and, hopefully, bloom again next spring.

"T'is the Last Rose of...November...?"

The roses have no idea they are not supposed to be here in November, yet here they stand, swaying in the fall breezes and enjoying what sunlight is left to them. Note to self....

Guest Blogger-Mom!

Mom and Dad have been living in South Florida for over 20 years but miles have only brought our relationship closer. The other day, we were ruminating on the awesomeness of Mr. Obama's election, and I suggested she share some of her unique perspective as my guest blogger. Enjoy!

Today is Friday, November 8, 2008, three days after the election of Barach Obama, the first African American to be elected to the office of President of the United States. The morning after the election I was reading an article in the newspaper, and I wish I had paid more attention to the name of the author. She (I think it was she but I’m not sure) said that babies born in the past year and from this point on will not have a clue of the tremendous affect this election has had on the America electorate and, in fact, the world in general. Those citizens who are babies now will grow up thinking it’s quite ordinary to have a black president, and inevitably, a woman president.
This set me to thinking because I have a new great granddaughter, Ava Andreoletti, born just this past summer. She lives in the town of Northfield in Vermont with her parents and stepbrother. Ava’s mother is my granddaughter, and her maternal grandmother is my daughter. It is possible that President Obama will serve in office until Ava is eight years old, so her earliest presidential memories will be of this man and his family. His daughters will continue to grow toward adulthood in the White House and Ava will probably read about them from time to time. She may know where they go to school and what subjects they are interested in. If another black person follows Obama in the presidency, Ava won’t think that is a marvelous thing. She will think it’s ordinary.
I began to think of what life was like when I was born in 1923, a few short years after women were given the right to vote. I have never known what it is like to be unable to vote or even to run for office. Voting was a big thing in my family when I was young. My father’s mother, Mary Ann McGilvery, worked on campaigns for women to gain the right to vote. After that actually happened, she ran for the office of County Committeewoman in the town of East Paterson, New Jersey (now Elmwood Park) and she won. As long as she lived, she never missed voting in an election and neither did any of her children. The day after I turned twenty-one, my parents took me to the town hall where we lived to make sure I registered to vote as soon as I was legally able to do so. That year my birthday came a week after election day so I had to wait a whole year to vote in a general election. I really didn’t know how hard a road it had been for women to get to vote – I just took it for granted that it had always been that way.
Over the length of my eighty-five years, I have seen change after change after change in our country. I have lived through the depression, serving in WWII, a hurricane, the fun and games of raising five children and now retirement. When I was very young, not all homes had bathrooms and we never heard of a shower. Our home had a bathroom that had been added on to the original house. There was no heat in the room and insulation in walls was still a long way off so that bathroom was frigid in the winter. None of us lingered there. We didn’t complain though – we didn’t have to use an outhouse so we were really happy to have a house with the most important modern addition. Interestingly, Ava lives in a home heated by a wood stove. It has something also unknown when I was a child – it has two bathrooms.
There were no machines for washing clothes or dishes when I was small. We thought if food froze it was ruined and it would be thrown away. Food was kept cold in iceboxes and the ice melted quickly especially in the summer and constantly had to be replaced. The big squares of ice were placed in the top of the icebox and as it melted the cold water ran down pipes at the sides of the box into a pan that was underneath the whole thing. That pan had to be emptied every day. That was my Dad’s job and once in a while, not very often for sure, he would forget and when he would come downstairs to the dark kitchen the next morning he would step into the ice water now spreading over the floor. His shouts would wake everyone up but only my mother would get up to settle things down.
Although Vermont has more than its share of ice and snow in the winter, Ava will only know an electric refrigerator. One with a good size freezer. Her parents can keep ice cream there all the time if they want, and none of them will know what a special treat it is when you can only have it once in a while if you happen to be in a place where they sell it and your parents happen to have enough money with them to buy every family member an ice cream cone.
One of these days, Ava may even come to visit us in Florida. Her trip will be through the air and no one will think that is unusual. She will arrive in Florida the same day she leaves Vermont, a distance of about sixteen hundred miles. A miracle! So ordinary in the times in which we now live.
How will times and lives change in the days coming as Ava grows up? No way to know – impossible even to make a guess. Will she reach a day at the age of eighty-five and write about a brand new great grandchild? Compare the days of the beginning of her life to the days of that new person? How many presidents will she have seen come and go, and what kind of effect will they have in her life? Come to think of it, how does
President Ava Andreoletti sound?

What Bird Is This?

photo by Ida Ng

A friend sent me her photo of a bird feeding outside near her mother's home in Singapore. ID, anyone?

Cat Cricket

(Little Bear in foreground with Scooter looking on).

The other day, I found our youngest cat, Little Bear, pouncing on something and then covering it up in his mitten paws. The thing would slip away from between his toes. Ears pricked, green eyes glowing, Bear reared up on his hind legs and pounced again and again, like a miniature black horse.
He was trying to capture a small cricket, one of several that crawl their way into our house when the weather turns cold. The insect hopped across the linoleum floor and was still until Little Bear attacked again. It was the most fun I ever had standing still.
You can tell when a cat has not had to fend for itself. As much as the young cat reared and romped, the cricket kept getting away. The few times Bear caught it, he would sit there and peer into his paws, as if to say, “Now what do I do with it?
Scooter, our in-house feral cat, hails from different stock. He was born in the woods and spent his early life in a crowded shelter. Despite the care from the volunteers, he was (and still is) skittish but vulnerable to kindness. He was on the opposite the side of the room where Little Bear played with the cricket.
“Enough,” Scooter seemed to say. He skulked forward in a straight line to where the cricket had once again escaped Bear’s grip. Scooter stretched out a front paw and splatted the cricket on the floor, then drew it in to himself and crunch, crunch, ate it right down; as if to say to the younger cat:
Don’t play with your food. Eat it already.

Fall Back Spring Ahead

It’s turn back the clock day, “fall ahead” where we gain an hour of daylight by fiddling with the clock. Now it will be lighter when we leave for work in the morning and darker while driving home in the evening. My husband claims this all started during the war so farmers could have an extra hour of daylight in which to do their chores, but I don’t know a farmer anywhere who waits for permission from a clock before heading to the barn.

Frankly, I wish they would leave it alone so we don’t have to figure out the mechanics of the eight or so timepieces we have in the house, not to mention the two cars. Only Ken doesn’t bother with the clock in the Subaru, and unless I drive it somewhere and push the buttons for him to reflect the correct hour, he just makes the adjustment in his head. “It’s right for six months of the year,” he claims, and that’s good enough for him.

When it comes time to fall back and we gain that hour, I don’t change the clocks right away on Sunday morning, preferring to look at what time it is and know there is yet a bonus hour in the bank for the day. Of course, when we spring ahead in April, when we have to pay it back and lose an hour, there is the opposite stress of getting the day’s chores done with one less hour of daylight. I figure if we can just gain an hour every year instead of the requisite loss of one, in 24 years we will be closer to a circadian rhythm that all of nature seems to enjoy without even thinking about it. Yet another thing to be learned from our natural world: Stop tinkering with the light and use it at will. There is little enough in a lifetime.

A Halloween Treat

As usual, we had a fun-filled evening filling the bags of miniature Snow Whites, two-legged Ducks, Ladybugs, a host of fairies, a few goblins. There was even a Dachshund wearing a skunk costume (where is the camera when you need it?) I had just filled a plastic pumpkin with Nestle’s crunch bars (after the child politely corrected me that she could not eat the Almond Joy because she was not allowed to have nuts), and turned to go back into the house when I noticed a round brown “something” among the dark green needles of a neglected juniper shrub near our front door. At first, I thought it was a clot of wet leaves, but stepped over to get a better look.

A bird’s nest; specifically, a Ruby-throated Hummingbird’s nest, probably blown down from the nearby trees during Tuesday’s blustery storm. It was perfect, made of soft grasses on the inside, with stiffer stalks on the outside, mostly (I expect) from our pesticide-free lawn. We host a collection of these dynamic little birds at our feeders every summer and have always wondered if they were nesting nearby. They have been gone over a month now; and hopefully are safe and warm in their winter gardens in Central America.

I called my husband over to see it. You would have thought we had just discovered Christmas for the way we carried on. Wow! How neat! Right in our yard! Great find! Ken cupped his hands to receive it, like a communion wafer at church. “Take a picture of it!” he said

So I did: