Advice for Aspiring Horse Owners

My list of notes – written in real time – throughout my journey in horse care.

-The first day I brought Nobu home when everything was going wrong, the one thing that went right was finding his missing shoe in the pasture.

-Some things I’ve learned day 2:
   -Spit makes perfect lube for a horse butt thermometer.
   -You will always be sweaty. The whole day.
   -White socks will always turn brown.

-Alfalfa is in my bellybutton.

-Mice ate my boot laces.

-You’ll always have to step away from the party to clean the barn.

-Never underestimate the power of white vinegar.

-Mounting blocks cost $160.

-Keep your fingernails short.

-Hay will be everywhere. Your hair. Your underwear. All over your house.

-Ice gets easier to punch through the more desperate you are.

-Keeping the barn doors shut in an ice storm is smart but you won’t be able to open them when they freeze shut.

-All the fence chains and latches will also freeze shut.

-Little birds will cover your yard in the snowfall, adding to the magic.

-When things go wrong, it will always be before you’re trying to leave for dinner.

-Walking to the barn in flip flops will always be liberating.

-When in doubt, duct tape.

-There are few things dawn soap and a scrub brush won’t clean.

-Something about the Texas heat makes me feel alive. Surrounded by the heat is sensory input to my skin, my senses, my pores. I’m connected to Florida. To those mornings riding horses before work. Hosing the horses off and letting the mist hit my face and arms. It’s familiar. It’s home.

-You’ll need more water buckets in the winter than summer, ironically.

-When buying a rescue:
   -You have to be prepared for a long break from riding.
   -Diagnoses are expensive and not always conclusive.
   -You have to let go of all outcome goals.

-Buy fewer gadgets. You need less than you think. Guiding principle should be: How can I make my life easier? The answer is usually with less.

-Never underestimate the power of a good broom.

-You’ll forgot what random objects you stash into your pockets and it will always surprise you later.

-A wet fall season can really affect your mood. Nothing is ever dry. Or without mud. Wet mud. Or dry mud. It sticks to everything and sucks everything in it. It can make or break you in the moment.

-Hours worked, bonuses earned, corporate parties attended used to be of such value, now it’s small cuts on my fingers from picking hooves in the winter, flinging a hay bale that’s as heavy as I am, draining puddles, and dumping wheelbarrows that means everything. 

-Wait until you’re in the right space to dive into a bigger project. Don’t hold yourself accountable to show up in that same space every day. Sometimes you have to say “not today.”

-Take advantage of any change in weather to do your laundry for whatever weather is coming next.

-You can wear your oldest, most comfortable underwear with your riding tights when you have your own barn. Those underwear lines don’t matter anymore.

-Two things I practice telling myself: I am not in an emergency right now, and if I am, I will know at least the first step of what to do.

-And: No matter my biggest and most intentional efforts, I truly cannot control keeping them alive.

-A third thing is: I’m no use to my horses if I lose my own health and well-being to stress trying to fix everything.

-Your tolerance for bug size will increase substantially.

-Being greeted by nickering every morning before breakfast never gets old. And morning face pats are good for the soul.

-Some tasks will become your least favorite, surprisingly. Like opening a new hay bale. It’s the worst.

-The fence will break right as you’re leaving for out of town.

-Every season brings a new challenge. A new learning curve. Drought. Freeze. Dead grass one year. Excessive weeds the next.

-Cleaning stalls in a nightgown in the middle of summer is a form of social activism.

-Your horse’s mane length, style, and cut will be determined by what kind of fencing you have. Room to stick their head through? Always a mohawk.

-Fences fall down. Fences break apart. And when they don’t, the horses will push them down and pull them apart.

-It’s really hard to be somewhere by 4pm

-Get a good headlamp.

-You’ll start to get really sick of the smell of your own body odor.

-Some days nature will really bite you in the butt. Like when the wasp stung me. On my butt.

-Your fingers will crack in the same spots every winter. Especially the thumb corner.

-Hose nozzles last 6 to 9 months if you’re lucky. 

-Some medical tests or new methods to try may not seem possible or accessible for a long time. It may take over a year to finally order that new test, or take that advice, or cycle in that new herb or mixture of something. The right time will feel right.

-When you inevitably lose your battle with the dust, just hose it. All of it. Preferably even before you move into a barn, hose it all.

-It may take three years to figure out that the barn doors do close completely but there was too much mud in the way before.

-One morning you may go out for morning feeding to find that your mare somehow peed all over the stall door which soaked both the front half of the stall and the outside of the stall and it will add an additional 20 minutes to your routine to clean it all up.

-Seeing your gelding wake up from a nap so soundly that the shavings are still covering half his face will never not make your day.

-You’ll be the only one with a true assessment of weather. People will assume they know better. But being out in the elements every day makes you a master unquestionably.

-Extreme hot, extreme cold. The worst weather is mud.

-Your gelding may conveniently pee outside the stall in the sand of the paddocks, but then if it rains several days in a row and it’s too cold to dry out, the whole place will start smelling like the men’s bathroom in a dive bar.

-If and when you’re feeling paralyzed by decision making, go ahead and put in the hay order. It feels safer to have more when bad weather is coming.

-Your observation that every livestock electric appliance says DO NOT USE EXTENSION CORD is real, but those are the messages we just ignore.

-Some winter days you will change your pants six times because your barn pants are too dirty to wear inside the house but they are the warmest pair you own.

-There isn’t quite the right vocabulary to describe the smell of wet winter gloves.

-Opening up the barn once the sun and warmth return after multiple days of a deep freeze is pure glory.

- 57 degrees won’t melt ice is there is too much ice.

-As soon as one prong on the pitchfork breaks, buy a new one. Some suffering is a choice.

-If any random item breaks and you think it’s not that big of deal so you just leave it, don’t do that. That broken hose that still works without a nozzle will be what breaks you when you really need a functioning hose.

-When your socks are as wet on the inside as your boots on the outside, it’s time for a change.

-When the blankets get put away, it’s officially spring…for at least one day then it is summer.

-Things to consider on horse properties:

   -What’s happening when it’s pouring rain?
   -How easy is it to get a truck through the entire property?
   -Where is the water hook up?
   -How long is the hose?

-Most things in an old barn just need sweat equity

-Attachment to a specific kind of dust pan is a real thing. It’s really annoying if you go to three different stores to realize they don’t make them anymore.

-Using a new broom is a lot like working with horses: it works better with less force.

-Peeling the sticker residue off new buckets will never not be infuriating.

-It helps to not have a fear of ladders.

-Cleaning dust off anything in the barn feels a little like rearranging furniture on the Titanic.

-It’s the running into the barn in pajamas while the sky is shocked with electricity and the wind is erratic but you need to know the hay tubs aren’t blocking the stalls so that they can run in if they need to. You also see a poo pile in the stall so you grab that quickly while you’re out there. Then race back inside and pray it will all be where you left it by the morning.

-When it’s pouring rain but both horses are resting in their stalls, they just finished their breakfast hay, you were able to get the mud out of their feet and a layer of Durasole before everything got drenched again, that is was peace feels like.

…until it’s 2:30PM on the same day and it hasn’t stopped pouring rain and your pasture is looking more like a lake and you wonder where all this water will go and will the ground ever by dry again and are the horses hungry now but you’re glad you refilled the water buckets in their stalls but they probably need to pee and don’t like peeing in their stalls and will the ground ever be dry again?

-There is strategy involved with planning your day and how long you can go before getting back into sweaty horse clothes.

-Dragging the overflowing wheel barrow through the muck after days and days of downpours can feel so hard it brings me to tears.

-You may look in your tack room some day and realize your old saddle is as moldy as old cheese.

…vinegar and water remove mold from leather

-No amount of leaking hose is acceptable.
…or broken spray bottle.

-It was twenty seven years before I learned there is actually a correct way to stack hay.

-New information will present itself that might evoke the “I guess I haven’t read that book yet” or “I’m just not good enough at this” feeling, and that is when it becomes more important than ever to assess what is happening in reality right now. Following the instinct that says something is really wrong or something really needs to change is all the information you’ll need. The rest is practical research to get tucked away on a shelf somewhere.

-In today’s modern information sharing and hyper research focused environment, horse ownership can quickly become martyrdom. Be careful not to let it. The joy needs to outweigh the struggle.

-It’s that “bent over, sweat dripping, grip of a pair of work gloves” kind of satisfaction. All the time.

-Some days, you don’t need music, you don’t need podcasts. You just need the sound of your own breathing. The occasional grunt when that bag was heavier than you thought. The “hmmm” when you can’t quite figure out how to solve that problem. The thunk of your boots through the grass when you make another trip to the house, or garage, or shed. The “phew” or “oooopph” or “holy freaking cow” when you can’t quite fathom how your body can sweat this much. Some days, that’s all you need.

-Some days you’ll wake up to a fallen fence board, a leaking propane tank, and a suspected leach field leak. You’ll nail in the fence board, cut the creeping vine off the propane tank, bag it, schedule a service, walk the leach field, confirm when the tank was last pumped, also schedule that service, hose the mud off your boots, and wonder if you can handle this by yourself forever, all before breakfast.

-Did I mention how easily horses will bust through a wood fence?

-No view can replace that of the horses grazing outside the kitchen window.

-It’s inconvenient and uncomfortable and messy. It’s wet and cold and scorching hot and below freezing and a mix of all of it. It will break you. Some days the lightning will be close enough to make you wonder if it’s safe to walk into the paddock to scoop, but you’ll do it anyway. This is it. This is the grit the men and our whole society praise so valiantly. You’ve got it. You’ve always had it. This is the shoveling poo in the pouring rain before you’re going out to dinner. Never mind doing your hair, rain-soaked hair has no resolutions. This is the soaking socks because those all-weather boots never hold up as long as you need them to. This is the relentless call to those who depend on you. Because it’s YOU who keeps their bellies full and their beds dry. It’s YOU who rakes the shavings into the middle of their stalls because you know they won’t lie down in the mud so they’ll need the extra cushion tonight. It’s YOU who picks the black gumbo mud out of hooves morning and night. It’s YOU who keeps it going, day in and day out, again and again. With the seasons and the torrents. This is the thing. You have it. That’s why it can break you time and time again and you’re still back out there filling the waters as the rain pours from the gutters above your head onto your nose. You’ll look at the flooded pasture that is beneath so much rain it could be mistaken for a lake and you’ll think: It will be weeks before we’re back to normal. But there is no normal. It’s only a point in time on the ideal continuum. No matter what, you’ll be back out again tomorrow morning.