Busy day not over yet

No... I'm home from office hours and it's 8:10 pm but Dante needs grain and he needs his feet soaked in hot salt water for 20 minutes.

Those 20 minutes are good, usually. I carry the steaming, salty water in a bucket from the house and I always stop to look up at the sky. We may not have a lot of sky here at Chiron's Grove, but what we do have is very pure and lively. I have seen so many shooting stars since moving here that I have begun to make categories for them in my mind: the quick and fleeting, the large and slow-burning, the vertical, and the arcing ones that go from end to end of the sky... like mushroom hunters, I look for the star-watcher's delicacy, a long, arcing, slow burning, ball of a shooting star that goes from one end of our enclave to the next. Every shooting star is a blessing on our place; one like that would be a magnetic wish-catcher, in my mind proof that my children will be showered with happiness all their lives.

Then I pick up the steaming bucket and trudge to the barn where almost certainly a light is burning, left by yours truly in the early morning hours because I hate to leave Dante in a dark stall. I set down my bucket and plunge my hand in to test the heat. If I can hold my hand in it, then Dante will leave his feet in it. Lately our new furnace makes slightly less hot water so usually by the time I get to the barn the water is the perfect temperature. I hear Dante's slow munch munch munch on the hay. He doesn't stick his head out of the stall because he is happy with his hay. If he were not happy, he would put his head out and turn it sideways and stretch it as far outward as he could and yawn over and over to express his frustration with the fact that he, Dante, has not had his grain yet. If I scratch his ears instead of giving him his grain he will press his forehead against my front (and his forehead is as wide as I am), pretend to enjoy the scratch, then nudge me right off my feet and halfway across the aisle. I try to convince these horses that I am as big as they are, and usually I succeed, but occasionally they remember themselves and take advantage of certain... inequalities of stature.

But he is quietly munching at foot-soaking time. I open the stall door and lug the big bucket in with two smaller buckets. I say "Hey, baby," like we are both caught in the 70s, scratch his withers and then lean against him to shift his weight, lean over, and ask for a foot.

If he feels okay, he will adjust his footing to compensate for having only three to bear his weight and then lift the foot. If his other front foot is very sore, he will offer me the sore one first. Then I go around to the sore side, accept the offering and put it in the bucket, setting foot and bucket carefully on the ground. I walk back around him, lug the steaming hot water bucket around his rear legs (he would only kick me if he was delirious), and pour the water carefully around his sore hoof, waiting to see if he finds the water okay. Usually he does.

Then it is the waiting time. I sit on his hay pile (he tolerates this with the equanimity befitting the well born, and sometimes nudges me wholesale off a particularly delectable wisp of hay). I have taken care to dress warmly enough that I will not fidget, and I settle down in company with all the other times I have waited by animals, sitting on their hay piles, from the earliest days at our farm when I was a child and snuck by the sheep into the hay rack to the times when, an older child, I sat and watched the sheep and ponies to learn about them, to the times when, as a young adult, I found peace and comfort in the munch munch munch--to now, sitting by Secretariat's great-grandson's wise, well meaning, enormous brown head and looking at his peaceful, trusting eyes.

And that is the best time of all, sitting there with no reason to move, thinking about... nothing. Really. I watch and I absorb, and I cease to think. The great animal's consciousness absorbs me in a peaceful, all-knowing state of harmony with all about, so that any slight thrum of change jars me from this state of completeness and comfort.

Some nights no such jarring events occur. Even if they do, from within our sense of comfort with the universe, anything jarring just bestirs me (us) a bit and we expand our consciousness to enfold the change--usually a child's voice--and let it pull us on to our next new awareness.

But now, of course, it is time to go out and do it.