The Rural Life

by Christina Lowell Brazelton

The mud is back again. This year, as every year, it's worse than ever. Underneath a few inches of greasy slime, as thick as a ganache, is ice. Warming the dark mud, the spring sun melts through the ice in places, leaving invisible craters, sinkholes to slip into. Like a trap, one caught my leg this morning. My foot and half of my calf went under the ledge of ice, got caught in the soft mud below, and stopped as hard as if I had fallen off a horse. On my way through morning chores, I nearly snapped a tibia by taking a simple step forward. Other times I've slid into a small, quick-mud hole and landed sitting, with my feet stuck between six inches of ice and the greasy mud below it.

My charges, paying guests whose owners live in other states, have a circular day. It is their job to go out of their stalls each morning to paddocks or fields of grass and to come home to those stalls, cleaned, bedded, with full buckets of water hanging from screw eyes and double-ended snaps. it is part of this job to drink from these buckets as soon as they come in and to urinate on the fresh bedding. (A cardinal rule in my barn is that no horses should come home to empty water buckets, so important is water to their guts' function and so habitual is their propensity to drink upon coming in from turnout. This is likewise a time that one might hope to get a urine sample without resorting to Lasix.)




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