SOLO RIDE

I made my first solo ride today. I had cleaned out two stalls. I put the halter on Beauty and brought her in to the barn to groom and saddle her. I had hooked the left side ties to her halter then she tried to go back outside through her stall. She has never done that before. I scolded her and pushed her back and fastened the right tie. She was restless. Then as I was grooming her, she pooped. I thought well maybe that's why she wanted to go back outside ... to poop. Then as I was brushing her tail, she let out a big whoosh of gas. I said, "Beauty if that was meant for me it didn't work because I can't smell it" (I have a weak sense of smell). I tried to be sure the saddle was on right and that there was a little air pocket by her withers. Then it was time for the bridle. I had to remove the halter which meant that she wouldn't be tied while I put the bridle on. I put the reins over her neck but if she wanted to leave, physically I couldn't stop her. She kept turning her head to the side avoiding the bridle. I told her she was being mean and she wouldn't do it if Bonnie were there. It has taken me a while to get bossy with a 1500 pound animal. It's not like yelling at 30 pound little Miss Lucy dawg. I only feel comfortable doing it now because I'm no longer a wacky stranger who comes to ride. The horses know I'm part of the crew, that I feed them and clean their stalls. Finally I got the bit in her mouth and the bridle on. She pooped again. I made sure my helmet was on tight and my cell phone was in my pocket. We walked out to the ring. I shut the gate. I made sure the saddle was on tight. I stretched her front legs. I brought down the stirrups. I walked her over to the mounting block. Every time I stepped up on the block, she moved. This went on for a while. Once she pushed my with her nose. I yelled at her and swatted her once. I said, "Don't push me away!" I yelled, "If I have to spend an hour getting on you, that's what I'll do because I am not taking you back to the barn because you wouldn't let me on." Finally, I figured I would try mounting from the ground. I prefer this but wasn't sure I could do it if she didn't stay still. She is a tall thoroughbred and if the stirrup were one notch higher I couldn't get up. I turned the stirrup around so that if she took off on me my foot wouldn't get trapped and my body dragged. Strangely, she stayed still while I got my left foot in the stirrup. I grasped her neck with my left hand and had to grab the saddle with my right and hoisted myself on. I sat up straight and she still hadn't moved. I took a deep breath and looked around, " Cool!... I'd done it. I groomed her, saddled her, and managed to get on board." Then we started to walk around the ring. "Awesome, I'm actually riding all by myself." It was a cool day, the wind was blowing and it was really nice just to take my time walking around the ring, practicing keeping Beauty on the outside, not cutting corners. I practiced riding while standing in the stirrups with my bottom out of the saddle. Eventually, I managed to make a complete circuit around the ring standing. Some really loud state construction trucks went by that spooked Beauty and for a moment I thought she might take off so I was prepared to hang on but I talked to her softly and calmly. The trucks went by and she calmed down. I trotted a little but I had been out there 45 minutes or so and was very happy with what we had accomplished so I turned her into the center of the ring, stopped, and carefully dismounted by taking both feet out of the stirrups and then swinging my right leg up over her trying to keep it straight in case she took off. I put the stirrups up and we returned to the barn where she got her second grooming and a carrot.

SOLO FLIGHT

At my last riding lesson, we were working on taking Beauty through four sets of double cones set in a circle at a trot. Every time I went through the third set of cones, Beauty would try to break into a canter and head for the gate instead of curving to the right towards the final set of cones. Whenever she did this, I had to pull hard with my right rein and push with my left leg to get her to turn back while she fought against doing so all the way to the fence.

The fourth time I tried as we went through the third set of cones, she was just as disobedient as ever and I'm not quite sure how it happened, perhaps I was still trying to post while struggling to get her under control, but I made the mistake of leaning forward. Before I could correct myself, I had lost my balance and I was catapulted off the front of Beauty. I flipped 270 degrees and then came down on my back and backside. My head was lifted slightly so it did not hit the ground and my helmet stayed on. I was okay but my right pinkie finger was hurting.

I said to Bonnie, "Well, I guess I have to get back on." I remounted and the final turn through the circle I got her through the third and fourth set of cones. I finished cleaning up the barn but when I got home I noticed my right foot ached. It hadn't bothered me earlier but it really ached when I tried to walk on it after I got home. I applied icepacks through the evening and the next day it was fine. My right hand swelled up and still hurts.

Learning how to live in Maine - the lesson of the well

When we bought our house in Maine, we had not discussed having chidren. I had been told I could not become pregnant and had never given any thought as to whether I wanted chidren if I married. We were both working, even so, we based our mortgage on one salary to be safe and consequenty bought a modest home in a rural area. It was a classic old New England central chimney cape built around 1800 with a large two story barn. The towns surrounding Ellsworth do not have city water or sewer. Each house has its own well and septic system. Our water supply was not a well but a spring fed cistern located in the woods behind the house. I guess the water tested as potable but it was dark and sometimes had sediment if the water level in the cistern was low or if the water was stirred up by a heavy rain. It was not appealing to drink but we used it for washing dishes and clothes. We did not have the cash to have a well drilled so for our drinking water we had a dozen gallon glass jugs that we filled once a week at a nearby spring. We did that year round for five years until we had saved the $5,000 required to drill a well.

We did not go out to dinner. I rarely took the children to fast food places. We had a big garden. We coudn't afford to buy a rototiller so I weeded by hand. Hayley remembers wandering through the rows picking and eating raw beans and peas. When Danny was about 15 months old he figured out how to open the back door. Occasionally, if I left him alone in that room briefly when I returned he woud be gone. I woud rush out the door and run to the street out front. He was never there. Then I woud run to the side woods and look but he was never there. Last, I would go to the backyard and look him behind the raspberry bushes where I always found him chowing down.

We did not go on vacation except to see grandma and grandpa or camping. We lived within our means and did not incur debt. It was often difficult but we did it. One fall we did not have enough money to buy four cord of wood for the woodstove so we bought two and in January when we had enough for two more cord, I was out in the bitter cold and snow bringing in the wood to stack in the shed. I did not buy disposable diapers. They were expensive. I used cloth diapers and hung them on the clothesline to dry to save electricity. We did not pay for cabe tv and without the cable connection, the reception for the three network stations and PBS was fuzzy and poor. I read to the children every evening before bed....Dr. Suess, Little Bear, Little House on the Prairie...later Robinson Crusoe and Animal Farm, among countless others.

More and more frequently over the years I have heard people say, well we have to have this or we have to have that. No, you don't. Some in town wanted to borrow money to enlarge and update the school. They said, well the school is twenty years old it has to be remodeled. No, it doesn't, not until you can pay for it without borrowing. Living beyond one's means has become a sickness in this country. Our government is massively infected with this vice. Young and old see our leader's bad example and emulate their greed. Everybody wants everything now. They don't want to wait a moment and they don't want to work for it. That has brought us to where we are today. This sickness may be fatal.

YouTube - Al Sharpton Claims American Public Voted for Socialism When Electing Obama

YouTube - Al Sharpton Claims American Public Voted for Socialism When Electing Obama

OBAMA EXEMPT FROM OBAMACARE

If the new health care bill is so great, why are Obama, Congress and staffers who wrote the bill EXEMPT from its provisions? That's one of those surprises (on page 158of the legislation) Nancy Pelosi told us we would have to pass the bill to find outSenator Grassley said, "It’s pretty unbelievable that the President and his closest advisors remain untouched by the reforms they pushed for the rest of the country. In other words, President Obama’s health care reform won’t apply to President Obama,” Grassley said. “Last December, the effort to apply any new law to ad...ministration political leaders was rejected by the Senate Majority Leader."See More

OBAMANATION

March 21, 2010 is a day that will live in infamy.
...
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Monday, March 21, 2010

A glooming peace this morning with it brings.
The sun for sorrow will not show his head.
Go hence to have more talk of these sad things.
Some shall be pardoned, and some shall be punished.
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of victory by a freedom foe.

Maine - December, 1982

We had a chimney sweep clean the chimney. The woman from whom we are renting said she would have it done but we had it cleaned just to be safe. He only charged $35 and told us the chimney was safe and tile-lined so even if we ever have a chimney fire it probably wouldn't do any damage. He said we should run the fire hot with the flu and vents wide open 1-2 hours per day to burn off the creosote deposit. We keep the fire going 24 hours per day damped down so there's considerable deposit... Monday morning it was about zero after going down to 5 below the previous night. My car wouldn't start so Dan had to jump start it. Dan installed a new five year battery. Monday night it went down to 10 below and was still 5 below at 7 am and even with the new battery and getting squirted with ether, my car still wouldn't start so Dan drove me to work. When we came home at lunch the temperature was up to 30 and my car started fine. Dan bought block heaters for the cars but hasn't installed them yet. Russ told us that once it starts going below zero, then when it's 20-30 degrees out, it seems real nice and almost warm. He was right! Anything above 20 we consider delightful weather now... My Christmas goose was delicious!

Maine - October, 1982

2nd in a series of posts of excerpts from letters chronicling my move to rural Maine.

"I've almost got all the wood in the basement, should finish today or tomorrow. I did it all myself and really take pride in my stacks. I'm enjoying the project and have even sort of made friends with the spiders, slugs and other assorted bugs that inhabit wood piles."

Maine-September, 1982

This is the first in a series of posts about moving to Maine in August, 1982. These are excerpts from letters I wrote to my parents. I discovered a box full of them after my mother died.
"Hi, Mom and Dad,
Got your letter from WV.
They delivered five cords of wood yesterday. There's about a 1/2 cord in the basement that was left from last winter, but the woman who owns the house had already sold it to someone. I've moved most of that wood out so that I can start stacking our wood inside....I made haddock chowder. One of the trucks from Maine Shellfish passes by a farm on its route and picks up fresh natural milk so we're ordering a gallon per week. I pour off the cream for coffee."

Down in N'Orleans

My daughter has been living and teaching in New Orleans for two years. Now she has her own little shotgun apartment, three rooms in a long rectangle, high ceilings, big windows, on the bayou. She has a fenced in backyard with a banana tree but there have been adjustments for someone who grew up in a town of 1000 in rural Maine.

One morning she came out to her car at 615 AM. One of the tires had been taken off and was stuck under her car. She couldn't figure out who would think that was a funny joke. She later found out the tire under the car was not hers, they were using it to prop the car up while they stole the tires. The police told her they are stealing the tires off Hondas all over the city. They must have been spooked and left before they finished. She is going to get theft proof locking lug nuts.

She called me in a tizzy one night saying "I can't believe this." After school she had gone to a pilates class. While she was there a huge downpour dumped heavy rain on the city. The rain had stopped by the time she drove home but when she got to her street, it was flooded, water was halfway up the doors of the cars parked there. She left her car on high ground and was pondering whether she should wade through the water when her neighbor came by in a kayak and rowed her to her apartment. I asked if her apartment was flooded. She said, no, because it is up on stilts. She never thought to ask why it was on stilts when she rented it this past summer. Now she knows. The water came down in a few hours. The pumps in the central city had failed.

She really likes living in New Orleans and finds the cost of living very reasonable there except for car insurance.

AN AIRPLANE TALE

My son was commuting back to Boston from his current job assignment in Indiana. His 6 pm flight had been cancelled. No problem, he called the Gold customer service number on his way to the airport and they scheduled him on a 6:05 flight. He boarded and, as is his habit, fell asleep through take off. He awoke a few minutes later and immediately felt uneasy without knowing why. Something felt different. A couple minutes later the pilot announced that the plane's instruments were not working and that they would turn around and return to the airport. No one paniced but the atmosphere was tense as he flew at a very low altitude and landed safely back in Indianapolis. They determined that the instruments could not be fixed immediately and passengers had to disembark. My son had called his Gold number before leaving the plane and headed straight for his new connection. This plane boarded and was in the runway queue ready to take off. There was one plane ahead of them when without warning the steering failed. A truck slowly towed the plane back to the gate. This time my son called customer service and asked to be scheduled on the first plane in the morning. When you take sixteen plus flights per month, stuff happens.

My Visions

Snippets and snapshots, that's all we really remember of our lives. As I get older, all the days become blurred together, so crowded with interactions and moments, most of them trivial and meaningless,but some not. But certain moments from many years ago I remember with clarity. I grew up on cowboy shows. There are old black and white pictures of me. I can't be more than two years old, wearing a cowboy hat, holster and gun over my jammies with the gun out and ready for action. At the end of the tv miniseries of Lonesome Dove, the reporter asks Captain Call, “They say you're a man of vision, Captain Call. Are you a man of vision?” It made me pause. Would I have lots of exciting adventures to remember if someone asked me? Then I realized that Captain Call's response was, “Yeah, a hell of a vision.” and the screen reflected his thoughts, the flood of memories of his visions, but they were not visions of great adventures, they were the faces of the people with whom he had shared his life and who he had loved.

“Here lies Wag. She was a good dog. Born May, 1986 Died February , 2003”. That's what I wrote in permanent marker on the pine casket before my son buried our family pet in the backyard of our home under a young pine tree. This was the home where I had brought her from the Southwest Animal shelter when she was only six weeks old. She was just two months shy of seventeen years old when she died, a long and happy life for a black lab mix. The ground was frozen in Maine in February but the local funeral home built her a plain casket and stored her body till spring when my son could dig her grave. A plain granite stone with her name engraved marks the spot which the pine tree has obscured as it has grown in the years since.

My daughter was only one and a half when I brought the puppy home. My husband and I aren't good at coming up with pet names – Marquisa de Rascal was one. But all Hayley called the puppy was “Waggy” so that's what stuck. She had a long life and a good one I hope. When she was still a puppy, she was sniffing an empty plastic food container shaped like a stalk of celery and got her snout stuck in the opening. She couldn't shake it loose. I started to worry about suffocation and was going to cut air holes when we got her free. My Dad came to visit and hid silently behind trees while he took her on a walk up the spring road. She always found him. “She's a good dog, Annie.” Dad said before he left. Hayley and her friends still talk about the time when they were three to five years old and they wandered too far in the woods behind our house until they were hopelessly lost. Hayley and Meghan began to panic then Danny said, “Let's follow Waggy” and Wag led them home. I remember the year I took off from work, every day while the kids were at school, I walked a mile and a half down to the park and back with Wag. She loved to lay down in puddles and rub her belly in the mud. She lived a long and healthy life and was active right to nearly the end. The last few months, she finally succumbed to age but she was over sixteen years old and had pushed her mortality to its limits. At the end, I had to help her finish so she wouldn't suffer. I had prayed she would die quietly in her sleep but it wasn't to be so I stayed with her as she crossed from this life to the next and brought her body home.

She died in February. In the spring I started hearing ads on the radio from the Cherryfield animal shelter. I tried not to listen. I told myself I should wait until I was no longer working so I would have lots of time to spend with a dog and I could get a beautiful pure bred black or yellow lab puppy. But those darn ads kept playing every morning as I drove to work. I thought about those gorgeous pure bred puppies and I thought about all the older dogs in shelters who didn't have homes. I'm a teacher. I don't work in the summer, but am very busy away from home the rest of the year. A new puppy should have lots of exercise and I knew I didn't have enough time for that. But I knew many older dogs had difficulty finding homes. I would give them more time than most owners and if their alternative was finishing their days in a shelter I could give them a better life than that. Those ads kept haunting me. Then they started mentioning an older dog who was a black lab mix. I went onto their website to see a picture of “Zeus.” I mentioned the dog to my daughter who was a senior in high school. She encouraged me to go look at the dog. I called ahead and told them I would like to take Zeus for a walk. He was skinny, only 55 pounds. His fur was thin but soft. The shelter told me his family had owned several pets. They lived in a trailer in the woods in the Cherryfield area. When their trailer was declared unfit to live in the family had to move to the homeless shelter in Ellsworth, forty miles away. Of course, animals were not allowed so the father went back to the trailer every few days to let the dogs and cats out, give them some food and water then close them back up in the trailer. The animals lived like that for some months. When the authorities found out they sent the animals to shelters and Zeus had arrived at the shelter four to five months earlier. He had some issues, a major one being separation anxiety. When he was enclosed, he panicked. His first night at the shelter, they had left him in a cage. Somehow, he gnawed his way out of the cage, then somehow managed to get the door to the cat room open and slept in the room with the cats. One of the reasons he was so skinny was due to diarrhea. The shelter thought it was from stress. They had him on a special diet of canned food that was less abrasive to the intestines. They thought Zeus was two to four years old. They had been told two but they thought he was older based on his teeth, many of which were broken from chewing on rocks. 'One other issue he had I was not aware of until much later. He smelled bad. Baths did not help much. I did not know until later because I have a very poor sense of smell so his odor never affected me. My sixteen year old son had been away the weekend I decided to bring Zeus home. He didn't take the news well. He never liked the dog. He said, “Why did you go to see him? You knew no matter what kind of a mangy beast it was, you would bring it home once you saw it.” My son didn't want the dog in his bedroom so he rigged up a pulley system that automatically closed his bedroom door. One day when we were all at school, somehow Zeus got into Danny's bedroom. The pulley system closed him in and the panic attack began. He chewed up the woodwork, went poop on the carpet and chewed a hole in the door trying to escape. My son was the first one home and found him there. He told me I was lucky he didn't shoot the dog.

Zeus was always difficult but he improved. The intestinal problems apparently were due to the stress of living in a shelter. He wouldn't eat the expensive special diet when I got home so I switched him to Purina and scraps and he dug right in. His intestinal troubles disappeared. When my daughter came home from college at Christmas she exclaimed, “What happened to Zeus?!” He had gained 15 pounds. The vet said 70 was a good weight for him and he didn't gain any more. Ninety five percent of the time he was okay even when left home alone as long as he wasn't shut into one room. He had an elaborate “nesting” ritual that he went through where he slept. Sofas and beds had to be blocked because he would tear apart cushions or mattresses when nesting. Only extra strength LL Bean dog bed covers survived but he insisted on sleeping on a bed preferably with a pillow for his head. Hard floors were not acceptable. On the occasions that he was allowed to sleep on a bed next to me or my daughter, he would snuggle in such a way that his back was securely lodged against you. I took him for runs at the horse track every day after school and swimming in the ocean. He loved to eat seaweed. He loved to ride in the car and was almost an alternate personality there, calm and content. He would patiently wait in the car while I went on errands, never barking, no panic attacks. Sometimes he would refuse to get out when we returned home and would sleep contentedly for another hour or two before he would agree to disembark. He was my buddy. I guess I became more attached to him because no one else liked him. I knew I was all he had.

The spring of 2008, Zeus was nine years old if we assume he was four when he entered our lives. He started to limp. His back right leg was bothering him. AT Zeus' annual checkup a couple months earlier I had mentioned to the vet that his back end was weak. The vet looked at him then and said he should exercise more. This time the vet looked worried. He said he was afraid it was either severe arthritis or bone cancer. His x-ray equipment was out of service so he sent me to another vet for xrays. This vet said the xrays indicated the worst hips he had ever seen on a dog. Both hips would require surgery. He said since Zeus was nine, we would expect him to live at least another four years so hip surgery was a better option than pain pills. He performed the surgery on the right hip but said Zeus still might not regain use of that leg. He may already think of himself as a three legged dog and not feel a need to learn to use it again. All the muscle had withered. I was instructed to encourage him to use the leg and exercise the other leg to try to build more muscle before we had to perform surgery on that hip. Zeus did not regain use of the right rear leg and within a week or so I could see the other leg was weakening but the vet assured me Zeus was doing fine. Soon however, he could not use the left leg either. Then he began to have neurological problems with his penis and became incontinent. I began researching obtaining rear wheels so he could be mobile but held off ordering them until I could see if the incontinence could be addressed. I asked the vet if there was a possibility of a sudden collapse of his life system. The vet said no. I took Zeus home, carried him outside and tried to help him walk by holding up his rear end with a towel while he walked on his front legs but he still sometimes dragged himself across the floor in the house. I had him blocked in the kitchen because of the incontinence but knew how he hated confinement. Just before my daughter left for New Orleans, she said “Zeus watches you all the time. He never takes his eyes off you.” I had told Zeus since the ordeal began that I would never leave him. Hayley's vacation time was over and she was gone. I put a tarp over the carpet in the living room so that Zeus wouldn't have to be confined and put a doggie diaper on him at night. He became upset when he urinated on the floor. He knew that wasn't right but had no control. I brought down a sleeping bag and slept on the floor on the tarp. Zeus snuggled right up against me and stayed calm, sleeping through most of the night. I told him I would never leave him. That was our one last good night together. The next night he was very anxious and kept jerking himself up as if a sharp pain had come upon him. He kept trying to drag himself. I was up all night with him. He was panting and I was feeding him ice chips. Then suddenly at 3 or 4 in the morning, he seemed to suffer another sharp pain and began dragging himself as if in an epileptic fit. I called the emergency vet in Brewer for directions, carried him to the car and made the hour long trip arriving around 5 AM. The vet on call said he had damaged his spine and was certainly in pain. I asked if he could be given pills to stop the pain. She said yes but I knew that was a temporary fix and he would have to be taken and put to sleep as soon as possible regardless. I held my Zeussie while the vet administered the injection and took his body home. From the time of his surgery till his death was only about a month. The only blessing was that it was summer so I could be with him every day.

As I drove home, I thought about the pieces of Zeus' life. I think he must have suffered from those hips from before I ever met him. When he ran, he hopped with his back legs. I have been told that is a sign of bad hips. They run that way to relieve the pain. It explained Zeus' maniacal insistence on having his bed cushion. When I adopted Zeus I had been looking for an older dog and felt a little guilty that he was so young but I didn't realize how little time he would have on this earth. I''m afraid he suffered from those hips all those years and I never knew. Ever since, whenever people annoy me I often think of Zeus and remind myself that we never know what pain others suffer.

I felt depressed for several days after his death. I had forgotten what depression felt like. It is way beyond sad. All the activities that normally appealed to me held no enjoyment. I did not want to do anything at all. I hoped it would pass in time and it did but still I think of Zeus often. There were many times when even I did not like Zeus but I remember that last month when his eyes followed me wherever I went and how he pressed against me on his last good night so that he knew I was there and would not leave him. I couldn't save him. I couldn't make his legs work again but he wasn't alone, he wasn't in a shelter or a cage. He was with his buddy who loved him.

I put a pillow in Zeus' grave and buried him at the edge of the pond that he loved right at the spot where he always jumped in. My friends, Peter and Ruth, planted a weeping willow at the site. His cross reads
Zeus, King of the Dogs
Born Date Unknown Died July 31, 2008
Annie's Best Buddy
God be with you till we meet again