Anyone who knows me, knows I have been a horse person since birth.  I started trying to get on any horse that would hold still since about the time I could walk.  When I was little, my mother took care of a handicapped woman who had a mule and a donkey.  I had to climb up on the fence to get on, bareback, and hang on to their scruffy manes with both hands.  They had no bridles, and did not wear halters. 

If I got on the donkey he wouldn’t move unless I had a stick.  He wouldn’t let me get on with a stick.  So, I usually rode the mule.  He didn’t move whether I had a stick or not.  I used to put a halter on him and lead him out into the back pasture where I could climb a stone wall to get on and he would trot back to the barn.  If I was lucky, I could turn him a little and make the ride last longer, but really, he was in charge.

When I was nine, my mother decided I might as well have riding lessons.  One of the things I have learned in the decades of horses since, is that people who say they know “all about horses”, don’t.

This is me on King, my lesson horse, when I was nine.

To the casual observer dressage may seem boring and difficult to understand.  Unless you know what the horse and rider are trying to achieve, it is hard to see why one horse scores well while the pretty one you liked, did poorly.

Those people who “do dressage” are constantly learning as they are also training their horses.  It is a slow process, and the best horse and rider combinations are generally older, very experienced teams.  And they are still learning.

Today, I heard it said that the television coverage of the olympic equestrian events was limited because people found it boring.  For those who agree, I invite you to watch this video of a beautiful grey dressage horse.  I don’t know anyone who has seen this who found it “boring”.  If you think this horse is boring maybe you’d rather watch a 12 inning baseball game…

Sort of???  How do you sort of have a dog?

Well.

.......the little doggie in my bushes

Somewhere about the begining of December 2006, I was pulling out of my driveway on the way to work.  There once was a garden at the end of the driveway, with daylilies and wild roses.  Now it is overgrown with hickory trees and a tangle of rose vines.  I had to creep out to the edge of the road so I wouldn’t get creamed by an unseen motorist, and as I paused, I noticed a little doggie in the briars.

I got out of my truck and went over to the briars for a better look.  The little dog got up and snuck through the briars and off into the woods.  She was holding a back leg up at a weird angle and seemed pretty skinny.  And young.

When I got home from work it was dark, so it wasn’t until the next day that I saw the little dog was back in the briars again.  It made good protection.  I sure wasn’t going to try and push through those gigantic thorns!  I tried calling her to me but she was very frightened and cold.  She stayed put.   I brought a dish of food out and left it at the edge of the briars.

By the next day she had eaten the food.  I left her some more.  I called my friend Linda and told her about the little doggie in my bushes.  She’s a little black dog with short hair and looks something like an Italian Greyhound (but not quite).  This is a small town, we know everyone’s dogs.  I had to wonder whether this one had wandered off and gotten hit by a car, or whether some miserable person had dumped her out of a moving vehicle and she was hurt in the landing.  It was cold.  It was December in New England.  I wanted to bring her in the house and take care of her.  She wanted to stay in the briars.

Dana asked me, “What are you getting me for Christmas?”  I said, “I got you a puppy!  She’s out in the bushes by the mailbox.”  It was a joke, of course, but we started calling her Dana’s dog anyway.  We kept feeding her, on into the spring, but she still would not get near us.  Her leg seemed better but she still limped on it.

My friend, who drives a propane truck, would stop by and try to get the dog to come to him.  She’d act like she wanted to, but at the last minute she’d turn and run off.  Linda knows a woman who is an animal control officer, and she wanted me to get some tranquilizer and put it in the dog’s food so I could catch her.  I was afraid the dog would get wobbly and totter out into the road and be run over.

It got to be summer and I started putting the dog’s food in a dish inside my empty dog pen.  (My German Shepherd was long gone.)  Eventually, I was able to pull the gate shut with a rope when she went in for her food.  There!  Now I could get her used to being handled.  She could finally be taken care of.  Dog license.  Rabies shots.  Vaccinations.  Worming.  So I thought.

The poor little doggie was so depressed that she wouldn’t eat or drink.  At all.  It is a nice big 12X24 pen with a comfy dog house and some nice shade trees overhanging it.  I went in the pen with her and would sit next to her stroking her head and talking to her.  She tolerated it because she knew there was no escape.

After three days she still would not even drink and she was starting to lose her hair on her thigh from just lying there.  I opened the gate and walked away.  As she ran off, I thought she wouldn’t come back.

She did.  I still feed her.  She comes running, all excited, when I pull in the driveway.  Almost wants to jump up on me.  But not quite.  If I turn to walk in the house, she’ll bump the back of my legs with her nose.  And sometimes, when I call her, she’ll come and put her nose in my hand.  She still won’t let me pet her.

She brings things from all over the neighborhood.  Milk jugs, paper bags, little tiny work boots, mittens, (the neighbors have little kids), dog bones, balls, etc.  She plays with them in my front yard, flinging them in the air and barking and racing great circles around them before flinging them in the air again.  She leaves all her toys under a Douglas Fir.  Once in a while I go out and fill a trash bag with her collection but it isn’t long before she’s brought home new stuff.

Sometimes, when I’m out driving, I pass the little dog more than a mile away from my house, trotting happily along.  She always comes back though.  She sleeps in my garage.

It’s been over a year and a half now.  Maybe I should give her a name.

The other night while baking some garlic bread for supper, the smoke alarm went off.  It is a really annoying one, in the hallway, not even near the stove and it goes off for no apparent reason at all.  Frequently!

There was no smoke.  I grabbed a kitchen towel and waved at the smoke detector with it.  It stopped beeping.  About the time I got to the stove the alarm started up again.  Damn!  Waved again.  Stopped again.

Half a minute later, the alarm again!  Derek finally pried himself away from his Lord of the Rings game long enough to quip “You’re supposed to take the stuff out of the oven before the smoke detector goes off!”  Ha, ha!  Very funny.

This time I decided to just take the bread out of the oven.  It wasn’t really even crispy on the edges yet.  Where were the potholders?  Who knows?  I grabbed a couple of dish cloths and folded them in my hand to grab the cookie sheet with.  As I was taking the pan out (the alarm didn’t bother going off again with the oven door open) it twisted just enough so that my fingers slid onto the single layer of dish cloth.  I immediately felt the excessive heat and knew I should just drop it back on the rack, but NO, I put it up onto the top of the stove anyway.  Yep!  Burned my fingers.  On my right hand, too.  Derek said, “Ma!  They make potholders for that!”  No kidding.

I ran cold water over my fingertips for quite a while.  They still hurt.  Great.  I didn’t have any ice because I threw out the ice cube trays recently since they smelled like old freezer.  Of course.  I was eyeing the bags of frozen food and trying to decide which one I wanted to sacrifice for my fingers.  I decided my fingers would have to make do with a cold can of soda. 

I got the rest of the supper done and sat down to eat with Derek.  It wasn’t too bad eating mashed potatoes and garlic bread (not quite crispy) with my left hand but taking the fingers off the can of soda for 15 seconds to cut my steak cause them to feel like they were going to explode  I had to cut quickly and get the fingers right back on the can.

I must have burned them really badly for the amount of pain I was experiencing.  On the can, fine.  Off the can, flames of hell.  They were really red, but I couldn’t see any blistering.  Yet.

I finished up supper and sat down to my computer with a fresh, cold soda can.  There was Dana, online.  I told him about my poor, decimated fingers.  He said I should sue the makers of the oven for not having a warning label.  CAUTION! CONTENTS OF OVEN MAY BE HOT!  Another comedian.  I’ve always been a believer that we should take the warning labels off everything and let the problem rectify itself!

Typing the messages to Dana was slow.  My fingers were killing me!  I had to type for a few seconds and get the fingers back on the can.  I’ve tried hunt and peck.  I can’t find the letters that way.  I need all my fingers.  Finally, I decided to put an end to this silly burned finger stuff.  I took my fingers off the can, I looked at my fingertips and said to my fingers, “You can stop hurting me now.  I know that you are burned, but I have done everthing I can do for now.  There is no need to remind me that my fingers need attention.”  Yep!  I gave my fingers a lecture.  The pain stopped.  No more soda can.

I told Dana I had fixed my fingers.  I told him how.  He said, “MA! You’re a NUT!!!!”  Yes, I know.  But it worked.  That was two days ago.  Today my fingers show no sign that they had been burned and they did not cause me any more pain after I told them to stop.

I am a firm believer that your mind has an enormous amount of power over your health.  If you believe you are “catching something” you search within yourself for signs that you are correct and your mind obliges you by producing an illness.  The opposite is also true.  Picture yourself well.  Believe it, and it will be so.

You can think me a nut if you wish.  But I am a healthy one!