old Barn, new life
Decades before I endeavored into farming life, my father had retrofitted the lower section of his barn into two horse stalls for housing my stepmother Cynthia’s various horses and ponies. She probably had close to five different pairs that came and went over the course of several years. I remember Telstar, her grey Connemara who was an old guy that came with the marital package. New stepmother, pony included. Having dabbled in horseback riding during my tween and teen years, I loved having her horses living at the house. In the springtime, I practiced mane pulling. Horses don’t have their manes trimmed with scissors. Rather, proper grooming involves grabbing a small section of mane, sliding a comb upwards to create a tuft of teased hairs at the base of the mane, then pinching the remaining hairs below the comb between the thumb and forefinger and yanking the small handful out. It took forever and left my “pulling fingers” bloody and callused, but the mane looked so neat and tidy afterwards, especially once their winter coats were brushed loose leaving their necks shiny and sleek. I also took some of them out for rides. One of Cynthia’s last horses to live in our barn was Molly, a lovely dark bay Connemara/Thoroughbred cross. She wasn’t a particularly big horse, only just above the pony classification threshold, but she had a jumpy personality, and getting on her was typically a challenge. She would rarely stand to be mounted, so getting in the saddle involved a running launch, hopping on my left foot while swinging my right leg over the saddle to board the moving target. Sometimes a ride on Molly would be uneventful, but not on windy days. The slightest creak of a branch would send her into a spooked-out dance, her back legs jumping from one side to the other and her head bobbing up and down in a frenetic nervous rhythm. I did not love those rides. Ultimately, I became the spooked one. Being a mother shut down my horseback riding days for good. The risk of possible injury to myself wasn’t worth it anymore. My kids needed me to be in top form all day, every day.
By the time I moved to the Farm full time, Cynthia’s horse days were over too. Molly lived well into her thirties, but finally succumbed to a fatal case of colic. One fall afternoon, she developed a twist somewhere in her intestinal tract that resulted in an agonizing buildup of gas in her gut. Barely able to walk, Molly’s only relief from her condition was a vet visit and a needle in a vein to quiet her misery. I was home with my middle son Alistair when it happened, and we comforted Cynthia as Molly surrendered to the poison and crumpled to her final rest.
A handful of years went by with the barn quiet and empty before Pip moved in. Her original home provided allocated stanchion space with a chain clipped to her collar limiting her movement to a step or two left or right. Needless to say, she had nary a complaint about her new digs in a 12’ X 12” horse stall, even when she had to share the space with Bob.
Soon after Bob moved in, the second stall became home for Meg’s Nubian goats, Paisley, Ginger, Dottie and Francine. Like AJ, Meg had a penchant for acquiring farm animals that someone else was trying to unload. Through AJ’s mother, Meg had befriended an older woman who seemed to have a perpetual void to fill – in this case that void was dairy goats. After a few months of caring for her animals, she would repeatedly come to the realization that her arthritic hands complicated her passion for hand milking, and she would unload some of her girls, only to start the cycle all over again when the pain in her hands subsided and that urge returned.
Of Meg’s four goats, only Paisley was in milk. Francine and Dottie were babies, and the stall next to Pip and Bob was their first home outside of the dog crate that Meg had set up for them in her kitchen. Ginger was a freebie that came along with the Paisley acquisition. Like dairy cows, dairy goats must be milked every day to keep their milk coming in. Since I was already doing cow chores, and Meg had a full-time job off the farm, I also took on the morning task of milking Paisley. Goats only have two teats (cows have four). Since Paisley’s dairy yield was far less than Pip’s, we simply hand milked her. In addition, for some reason, one of the pair in Paisley’s udder had dried up leaving just the one bulbous half to milk out. Like her udder, everything about Paisley seemed lopsided. She had gangly long legs making her freakishly taller than her stall mates. Moreover, it seemed that her brain was equally off kilter. Her mannerisms were somewhat erratic and twitchy, and milking her involved a mad dash of squeezing to empty her udder before she finished her grain. Once the last kernel was vacuumed up, she started to dance about, frequently landing a hoof smack dab in the middle of the milk bucket.
The stories this old barn could tell. Originally built over 100 years ago to sustain a homestead farmer, I’m sure there were a few dairy cows being milked in the same spot where I milk Pip and Paisley every morning. Cynthia’s horses, especially Molly, left ample evidence of what happens to a bored horse passing time during long winter days. She had a terrible vice called cribbing where she would bite on the wood from her stall surround while simultaneously sucking a gulp of air down her windpipe. Her bite marks in some places created half-moon shaped voids in the wooden boards documenting years of her dreadful habit. When I ultimately move on I will also leave something behind, for better or for worse, mementos of early days as a middle-aged farmer.
