The Sad and Lonely Horse

So I occasionally browse a website comprised of people from our neighborhood who post inquiries, complaints and comments on a kind of message board, and someone posted this a few days ago.

The guy who coined the phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions," was not too far off. It turns out the person who wrote this post just moved here from the city, and knows nothing about horses. He admitted as much in the comments section a little further down the page, once people started questioning whether or not he should be urging people to stop and handle/feed someone else's animal, who clearly was not hungry or neglected in any way whatsoever.

For the record, I'm a big fan of kindness, especially towards animals. But ascribing human emotions to animals is not generally a good thing, unless you are an expert in that particular animal or species, enough to know how they emote their moods.

I drive past this horse myself several times a week and can tell you that this big gelding is not sad, but rather....zen. He's chilling in his favorite corner, lazing in the sun, and meditating on nothing in particular. Or who knows, perhaps he's planning final details regarding the destruction of western civilization/mankind in a very slow and methodical way.  We won't know until it's too late.

He's well fed, in great condition, and just doing what horses do in the heat of summer, which is stand in one place for several hours, pondering, studying...zoning out. All horses do this. But I'm guessing he's not sad.

What really gets me is the guy floating the idea that everyone start feeding the "sad and lonely horse" carrots. Can you imagine the amount of carrots this horse would be ingesting if 75 people stopped to feed him every day? It kind of boggles the mind and could actually be damaging to the horse, since carrots are pretty high in sugar and are supposed to be a treat, not a staple. 

Some people move here to our area for the option to keep livestock, and others move here for the wine. And as long as the livestock people don't start trying to tell the wine people what makes a good Cabernet and the wine people don't start trying to cheer up the livestock people's animals who are pastured near common roads, life can be good here. It's all about mutual respect.

What we all need to focus on is the passive aggressive and insecure goats on the next street over, anyway. Now they need some serious help, I'm telling you. Perhaps we can find them a good therapist.

Summer colors

I wish I knew exactly where the "equinox" of summer occurs for us. By that I mean the exact day when we are halfway through the summer and can safely and confidently celebrate that fact. I have a feeling it's somewhere around today, at least for this area, although we can stay hot all the way from May through September. (and 100 degree October days are not unheard of, either.)

Summers are brutal here, but at least we are not without an escape hatch, which is our extremely close proximity to the beach. The strangest thing about our area is that you can drive a mere 30 minutes west or so to the shore and be in a completely different climate -- 30 to 40 degrees cooler, often foggy, sometimes downright chilly. When the heat begins to get to us here on the homestead, we generally head to the beach town of Cambria, uncrowded and quiet on Sunday evenings, since most of the tourists have returned home by then. We have dinner at an outdoor cafe (sometimes wearing jackets) and spend some "toes in the sand time" while we cool off for a few hours. It helps, no question, psychologically as much as anything else. See the cool, be the cool.

But as a more permanent solution I hope someday, maybe someday soon, to live in a climate with a more gentle summer. As I grow older, my heat tolerance diminishes (as it seems to with almost every other middle-aged woman I know) and so it would make sense to spend the last third of my hopefully long life in a climate more suited for me. Of course it will probably not be close to the ocean, but a mountain vista can surely heal your soul as much as an ocean vista can. At least that's what I'm hoping.

It's ironic, but most of the people I meet here who claim to "love" our summers are  transplants from places with snow. Evidently for them, they are happy making the trade of winter snow for summer heat. 

But for some of us, "Winter is coming" is not a veiled threat or foreshadowing of disaster, torn from a television show script. It's a promise to look forward to...a time when you are free to go outside again and not burn up -- to enjoy and to savor the afternoon breeze, even if you do need a jacket sometimes. A time when it's temperate right outside your back door. It's coming. We just have to be patient. And while I'd take snow in a heartbeat if it showed up on my doorstep, I may have to chase it down since it's not likely to come here. "Winter is coming?" Indeed. And maybe I'm coming for winter.

But in the meantime, I am here, as are you, at the height of summer. And so I bring you a couple of shots of seasonal color. 

Our new hens are laying and one is producing the most gorgeous copper-colored eggs!

Pink potatoes, fresh out of the ground, on an old vintage Welsh dish towel the neighbors bought me while on vacation there.

This and That

It's been a couple of months since the last post, and in that time we've had abundant harvests of carrots, potatoes, olallieberries and apricots, the lettuce has gone away with the heat, and we've faced smoke from several close-but-not-too-close brush fires.

So why the void in communication? Nothing earth-shattering. I noticed the comments dwindling on each blog post and so more and more it felt like I was shouting into the void, the same issue I had when writing my weekly newspaper column. People rarely write in to tell you when they enjoy a newspaper column or have a thought about it. Letters to the editor pretty much come in after you've said something that's gotten readers riled up, and so it's probably the same thing with blogging. 

Spring is also the busiest time of year around here. It's not only around the homestead, it's socially, financially, and work-wise as well. And so writing about living tends to take a back seat to just living. Someday I will find a way to manage the period from about April 15 to May 31 but this year, it once again became a time of trying to find time for things.

In the meantime, here are some pics of what we've been up to.

It was an abundant spring.

Mother Nature graced us with her beauty.

Planting, harvesting and preserving.

As usual, too many one one crop. Luckily my friends like carrots.

The row covers worked out nicely, kept a lot of insect and wind problems at bay.

Now we have smoky sunrises.....

and sunsets.