Looking out the window; seeing my soul

It is just before noon here on a sunny and beautiful Friday...and I am already tired. If you live on a farm you will understand. Keep in mind that I don't do that much of the work around here. My wife is the heavy lifter, mostly because of my travel schedule. In fact, I leave tomorrow morning for Winnipeg and posts north of there for a whole week. BRRRRRRRRRR.

But, this morning I took it upon myself to pitch in. It began with putting out hay for our 20 or so horses; going to the feed store for 1,000 pounds of grain and unloading it in the barn; and moving a 17 month old filly and 7 month old colt to a bigger pasture where they can play together for a while. The filly was pretty easy. The colt was another story all together. So much strength and power for something so very young. By the time we made it to the pasture, my 63 year old arms were very tired and there was a new and distinct pain in my back. No question we must get Spirit, that is the colt's name, into some ground work pretty quickly.

Spirit's mom is Whiskey. She is the very first gaited horse I ever rode and the first one that I purchased after spending my horse life on quarter horses and paints. It was instant love. Now she is one of the horses my wife rides while I maintain my steadfast loyalty to Rebel, a wonderful black and white gelding. We bred sweet Whiskey to a black and white stud named Cocoa, and she presented us with a beautiful black and white colt, Spirit.

This is one of the great joys of moving from life on a golf course to life on a farm. Whiskey was in her 11th month of pregnancy and doing fine. We knew that she was getting close to giving birth and on a Sunday night in March, just before we went to bed around 11 p.m., I checked her once more. It did not appear to me that she had dropped enough so there would be no baby on the ground that night.

I was wrong.

We kept her isolated from the other horses in a paddock just behind our house. And, about dawn on Monday morning, when I stepped out of bed to go to the rest room, I happened to look out the window on my side of the bed. Oh my God. There stood Whiskey, so close I felt I could almost touch her. And by her side nursing was this new born. It was the kind of moment that you never, ever forget. When we rushed outside, we quickly noticed that Whiskey had dropped the colt in another part of the paddock, out of sight from my window. It was to us as if she had walked that baby over and planted herself and him there at my window so that I would be sure to see him at the first opportunity.

Before we bought this farm and moved here, Annette and I went to dinner one evening at a restaurant in an old farm house in Pine Mountain, Ga. Off the back dining room was a large window that gave wide open views to the pasture right behind the house; a pasture with several horses all grazing right up close for us to see.

Wouldn't it be great, we thought, if someday we lived in a place where you can look out of your window and see your horses. Guess what. Now we can. In fact, we can look out most every window in our house and see a horse, partly because we have too many horses.

Right now, sitting here at my desk and writing this, I can see the filly and colt grazing together where I just moved them. I can also see a gorgeous Spotted mare named Fancy in the round pen where my wife is about to work with her. And, off to the right, I am able to see one of our two TWH brood mares, a slick, black beauty who is the mother of a 5 month old black and white weanling filly we call Sugah. Put all of that with a day like we are having here in west central Florida and you can understand why concentrating is difficult sometimes.

There are times I feel that when I am looking out my window like this, I have a special view of my own soul.