Situation normal

Except for a couple of traumatic moments this weekend, I'm pleased to say that things are feeling pretty normal this morning. We did nail up extra boards between the box stalls Friday night to ensure that Little Mr. Lefty wouldn't stick his head through the openings to get it kicked off or get it stuck and break his neck.

The barn-board band-aides worked, and we've now had three nights of Little Lefty and Big Lily co-existing side by side in the darkness without incident. Oh, Lily still puts on a show when I walk into the barn each morning, feigning a Lefty assault, either by wheeling at him with that evil eye and threatening to take a chomp out of him or by reversing that big spotted rear end up next to the stall separation and promising to give him a good swift kick. But, so far and thankfully, it seems all fake, just like TV wrestling.

I told Bill this morning that my presence in the barn represents FOOD, and Lily exudes selfish nastiness when it comes to defending her food. So, I'm thinking that once she has her food, there's no need to go after that poor little Lefty. I give her a bite, give him a bite, fill his outside bucket, take Lily to her pasture, take Lefty to his pasture, and then all is well for the day until the FOOD routine repeats itself at night when they return to their stalls.

We did have one rather dramatic trauma with Lily, Lefty, Kiwi, Annie, Fuzzy Wuzzy (the cat) and the bees yesterday. I took Lefty to the hayfield pasture. Lily protested while watching Lefty go by, so Bill put a halter on Lily and brought her along too. Flanked by Kiwi, Annie and Fuzzy Wuzzy, we walked the horses into the woods, figuring they might want to eat the tall grass in one of the openings.

Well, Lily didn't like that grass cuz she knew the hayfield grass was much greener and tastier, so we headed back to that field. It was a beautiful sight watching horses eat at the ends of their lead ropes, while Kiwi, who's decided that Lefty is her animal to herd, watched, with that Border Collie intensity, every move Lefty made. Meanwhile, Annie lounged in the deep, green grass, content that her horses and her people were nearby. Fuzzy Wuzzy, who wishes she had been born a dog, raced and leapt through the field.

Suddenly, in this pastoral serenity, all Hell broke loose. Lefty started kicking upward with both hind legs. When Lefty started kicking upward, Kiwi decided to come in for some hard-core herding. Lefty kept kicking, and I kept yelling at Kiwi to get away. At first, I figured it was just horse fly tormenting the little guy and that it would eventually go away.

The kicking continued as did the upclose-and-personal herding, much too close to those razor-sharp baby-horse hooves. Then, I noticed a bee flying around Lefty's rear end, but it flew away and I moved him away from what must have been a nest in the grass. But he kept kicking and Kiwi insisted on being dangerously close to those hooves. Finally, I noticed why Lefty was so frantic.

A bee had attached itself to his rear end and had just kept on stinging him. I flicked it off with the end of the lead rope but not before he had inwittingly connected with Kiwi. She ran off. Once again, as has happened so many times this summer, my emotions spun out of control. Not another animal disaster, I thought. Kiwi crouched near the fence and then raced to the house, uncharacteristically refusing to come when called.

It seemed like forever before we got the horses back to their regular pastures. All I wanted was see that Kiwi was okay, but calmness was essential, lest something worse happen on our trip back to the barn area. When the horses were safely in their enclosures, Kiwi came running from the house to me, knocking me down and smothering me with intense affection that only a Border collie can offer.

She was fine, but she also knew the potential gravity of the pasture-land situation, and I think she was feeling pretty relieved to have come out of it unscathed. The only one more relieved was me.

Since May, I have become very gun shy about my animals and their well being. I still haven't entirely gotten over those two sudden tragic deaths of my two horse friends earlier this summer along with Miss Lily's near miss with the dump truck when she escaped the Lovestead one day and ventured over to Selle Road.

It's weird how such events can turn you into a paranoic worry wart with little confidence that everything will be okay----most of the time. I'm working on restoring that confidence, and it would be nice to have a few weeks of incident-free life with these animals that we grow to love so much.

For now, on this frosty Monday morning, it's an incident-free day. The situation with the Lovestead animals is normal, and for that, I'm very thankful.