A good view.

Robin created this post for Amateur Vaquero. She also writes novels about horses under the pen name Stefani Wilder.

It’s been a big summer where we keep our horses. We went from having an adequate dry lot and one small pasture that doubled as somewhere to ride to having a much larger dry lot and a few new acres of grass to play with. The extra space has enabled us to put in some very helpful improvements. Chiefly, these are a hitching post, a round pen, and an arena.

The round pen and arena have been a huge help with Roland. In his defense, he has never yet done anything under saddle that would have made my younger self think I needed either of these spaces. But I turned 40 last year. I will admit I am much more reluctant to fall off horses than I used to be. When I was younger,  I didn’t have the faintest idea that old injuries didn’t just heal and go away. I’ve come off a lot of horses a lot of times. Sometimes hard. On top of that, I am extremely hypermobile. That means my joints are really bendy and my tendons are super loose. There is scale for measuring the degree of hypermobility in people. I score 9 out of 9. I have never met a person as hypermobile as myself and every medical professional I’ve consulted on the topic has been shocked by my degree of flexibility. This might not seem like a bad thing. But hypermobility is strongly linked to tendon issues and chronic pain. It’s very easy for hypermobile people to injure themselves and very hard for them to fully recover. As I’ve aged, many old injuries I thought I’d recovered from have come back to haunt me.

Since this is a blog about horses and not pain, I will not delve too deeply into this topic. But starting when I came off Nevada very badly in 2016 until the start 2022, I was in some degree of pain very close to 100% of the time. I hurt my back in that fall and I have never fully recovered. However, I started daily yoga in 2021 and also picked up some pain-centric meditation techniques. Together, those two things have helped tremendously. I am now not in pain most of the time. It’s a very good change.

So … Roland. My feeling that I do not want to acquire any new injuries has turned me into a much more cautious person than I used to be as far as horses are concerned. I’m not sure I totally realized that until we got Roland back to the farm and found he was a lot more sensitive, responsive, forward, and intelligent than we’d perceived during our test ride. He was so sensitive, in fact, that just about any contact at all seemed to overstimulate him and produce stress. Even grooming was difficult. And though we rode him a few times last year, I always felt like our time under saddle was winding him up rather than teaching him anything.

We stopped riding and worked on groundwork. That helped some but it was a lot more dramatic than would be ideal. Roland has a very narrow window of stimulation between “don’t react” and “react an awful lot.” So he’ll get stuck on something and you’ll apply a little more pressure to help him through and suddenly something explosive happens.

We did make headway though. Then the winter hit and we had a lot of months doing very little with the horses. This spring we pulled Roland out again and he seemed to have matured. He could stand still when touched. Our groundwork was a lot less dramatic as well. Although he’s an extremely different horse than Piper, I remembered some of the things I learned from her about giving a horse time and space to think. But unlike Piper, Roland is a dominant horse. And many times in our work together he has started to interpret space I am giving him to learn as a concession of some kind. He will rapidly learn to use that kind of gap to his advantage. I had to be on the watch for this constantly.

Taken together with the fact that it’s actually been a very long time since I worked with a green horse, this was a tricky package to work with. So yeah. The round pen helped. We did a lot of liberty work in there at first, which was very clarifying. Then I climbed on. We had a few good rides in the round pen. Today I rode him in the the arena for the first time.

Roland and I had a lovely time together. I think we are starting to feel some mutual trust. Today he was a teeny bit antsy before the ride. For the first time ever, I felt like I was able to steady him and comfort him through physical contact while I got him ready to ride.

Under saddle, things were good. He’s very green in some ways but much less so in others. Most of our issues today came from me feeling anxious and not giving him enough room to make the mistakes he needs to make. But we both relaxed throughout our ride. We walked. We trotted. He offered a canter but I didn’t take it. Maybe next time.

Robin created this post for Amateur Vaquero. She also writes novels about horses under the pen name Stefani Wilder.

When my friend K picked up her horse Roland about a year ago, he was a super skinny four-year-old who was taking his time to mature. The times I rode him last summer, I used the itty bitty cinch I used when I was starting Piper.

When I started to prepare for riding Roland again this year, I realized that old cinch was no longer going to work. This guy has grown. He’s closing in on 16 hands and has put on some serious girth. But naturally he’s still not quite thick enough that the cinch I use on Steen will work for Roland too. (Steen’s cinch is very old and quite stretched out and a bit long for him anyway.)

We have some spares but nothing that was right. So I needed a new cinch. I started looking around at options and mentioned it to K, who then realized the cinch she bought last year for Roland is also now too small. Beyond that, K’s husband M is starting to get interested in riding. He’s been shopping for a saddle. Chances were good he’d also need a cinch in the near future.  I started poking around the internet looking for some place to order from and gradually came to the realization that it would make a lot more sense to learn to make my own cinches.

My first hurdle was making a cinch loom. But this ended up being super easy because we happened to have the leftover edges of some shelving we’d installed in the study closet of our old house. We didn’t need these shelf ends in the new house but I’d held onto them anyway. It didn’t take me long to modify one into a functional approximation of some looms I saw online. I just cut out the middle supports and put in a new one at the length I wanted the cinch to be, added some spare hooks I had lying around, and was ready to go.

Meanwhile … colors. You can make cinches in so many colors! I knew it would make the most sense to start with a basic design but I was nevertheless overwhelmed with options. I decided to order my mohair from ubraidit.com. And then I lost my mind for a while. I was like a bad joke version of a graphic designer for a few days. I may have actually created a cinch template in Photoshop just so I could mock up many dozens of color combinations. I colored it in by hand first and then switched to rendering over 100 designs digitally.

Once I got the mohair ordered, the hard part was over. I settled in with Caroline Spurgeon’s Youtube videos and watched them all. And then my materials arrived. They were beautiful.

So I got going. Of course the first cinch was a bit painful. There were lots of starts and stops and I definitely made a large number of errors. I didn’t line the knots of the warping up quite right and I wove the detailing too tight. That first cinch is a bit … organic-looking as a result.

But it works! I rode Steen in it a few times and tested all three gaits to make sure my novice-level cinch wasn’t pinching or causing any discomfort. Then I tried it out on Roland and that went fine too.

So I moved on to the next phase. K and M chose colors for their cinches. I placed a second order. Materials arrived right around the same time as M’s new (to him) saddle. I got to work. Their cinches came together far more easily than the first.

Then I made a fourth from leftover 8-ply from K’s cinch and some natural mohair from an old cinch that I took apart. I started playing with some different techniques and had a lot of fun with that one. I did a lot of taking it apart and putting it back together and testing different things. My technique improves with each effort, which is always gratifying.

I have also been working on a design for a cinch loom that I plan to make out of nicer wood. My starter loom is a little beat up since I have experimented with a few different ways to attach the cross-piece and moved it several times to make different sized cinches. It’s now  adjustable, which is good. But one side is splitting because I’ve drilled into it so many times. At some point I’ll make a new one. Happily, the one I have will work in the meantime.

So now I’ve got four cinches under my belt and a start on a fifth. I plan to make a few spares cinches of various sizes. I might even list a few for sale. They are quite fun to make and design possibilities are endless. At this point, I could make a functional cinch in any size in a couple of hours. I imagine that ability will come in handy in the future. It was definitely well worth the effort of learning to do this myself.

My Cinch Gallery

Robin created this post for Amateur Vaquero. She also writes novels about horses under the pen name Stefani Wilder.

It’s been a good summer of riding so far. Since the weather finally turned, I’ve been managing very consistent light rides. One fabulous change is that our friends K and M were able to purchase the field next to their existing house and pasture. It was a soybean field last year and corn the year before that but they’ve started the process of converting it to grass. This will quadruple the amount of space we have to work with as far as the horses are concerned.

This deal has been in the works since before we ever even moved the horses. I’m not going to lie; the two years it took to get things over the finish line were painful.  We knew getting this land would change everything — from the layout of the dry lot to our tack-up area to how we use the pastures. Not knowing if it would go through or not had us hanging in a protracted limbo. But that stage is finally behind us and that means it’s going to be a summer of really good changes.

We’ve been riding in the former bean field for a few weeks now. The footing is pretty good already and it will only get better. After being confined to fairly small riding areas for so long, having a big space to work in again feels sooooo nice. Steen adores the wide open view. And although I was a bit worried about how long he had off over the winter, he’s coming back into shape with enthusiasm and feeling really good. We even have our canter back. Last year, he was generally stiff and troubled even if I let him canter as naturally as possible. I had him on and off Equioxx but even that didn’t do enough to make me feel like I could ride him without worry.

This year, though, he hasn’t needed the drugs yet. So far, Steen almost feels like his old self. The stiffness and anxiety have all but vanished. We are still doing our very long walking warmups every ride and limiting how long we’re out on hot days. I’m careful to listen to his signals and err on the side of doing less. But we’ve also been doing big trots and canters around the perimeter of the new field. It is glorious. I’m hopeful that continued light but consistent work will keep my main man sound and happy for many years to come.

This weekend, with any luck, we’ll be building some new fences. And when those are done, we will use our old corral panels to make a round pen. We’ve been doing consistent groundwork with Roland lately as well and have seen some remarkable progress in comparison to last year. I’m looking forward to getting him going under saddle again too.

Robin created this post for Amateur Vaquero. She also writes novels about horses under the pen name Stefani Wilder.

The weather has mostly cooperated the last couple of weeks. That has meant we’ve been able to manage consist light rides. I have ridden every single day in June so far. (Three days! ) And even though conditions didn’t allow riding for the first half of May, I managed nine rides in the latter half of the month. It is almost is starting to feel like riding horses is something I do again.

But Steen is definitely not a youngster anymore. I’ve been keeping our rides light and easy with at least ten minutes of walking before progressing to anything faster. We haven’t cantered at all this year because last year he was hit and miss in that gear. I figure we’ll test it out after his fitness has improved to stack the deck in our favor.

But even with how careful I’ve been, Steen seemed dull and low energy when we rode on Wednesday. I thought he might have tired himself out stamping at flies so I put his fly boots on after that ride. Then we rode on Thursday and he seemed better but still just not inclined to move any faster than I was asking. While that is a good quality in a horse, it is really not Steen’s MO when he’s this rusty.

Today (Friday), Brian couldn’t sneak out of work in time to make fitting in a ride possible. It was a beautiful day, though. While work is as busy as ever for me these days, I have realized that one perk of being my own boss is I can work whenever the heck I feel like it. I’d rather ride during the day and work late than not ride.

So I wanted to get out there. But while I’ve been doing consistent light groundwork with Roland again, I have no plans to actually get on his back again until we have the round pen. I felt like Steen could really use a day off. So I asked Brian if I could borrow his horse.

I haven’t written much about Fitz. This is partly because I have not been blogging but also because I’ve honestly had very little to do with him. He just turned seven and we’ve had him for two and a half years. He came into our lives mere months before everything started to shift. He arrived, Nevada left, and for the first time since we had Steen and Bear, Brian and I each just had our own horse and that was it. We had thought we’d probably pick up another project before long but then we moved the horses and COVID happened and our house got destroyed and we moved twice. In the time we’ve had Fitz, we’ve been riding a lot less than the years before. So when we do ride, Brian rides Fitz and I ride Steen.

That’s not to say I haven’t ridden Fitz ever. I was the first one on him when we test rode him. And a couple times at the old place he was having some weird behavior and I hopped on to see if I could help narrow down the source of the problem. (Rain rot, turned out.) But I don’t think before today I had ever just gone out with the intention of riding Fitz as my primary objective for the day.

So I was kind of excited. Fitz is a lovely horse. He’s sort of the holy grail as far as stock horses go. He’s friendly. He’s easy to handle. He’s mellow but not dull, athletic but not feisty. He’s also really good looking. He’s a super rich buckskin color right now and he was literally glowing while I brushed him down. I groomed him and threw my saddle on and led him out into the pasture to ride. We did a little bit of groundwork and then I climbed on.

My first realization was that I have gotten a lot less used to riding horses who aren’t Steen. I rode Roland a few times last year. But Roland is almost as green as green gets. He does not yet have the faintest grasp of the idea that legs can mean something other than “go faster.” He sort of yields to the bit sometimes … ish. He’s pretty okay about going forward with a rider on his back but that’s about the extent of what he knows about being ridden.

Fitz was decently well broke when we got him and Brian has spent the last couple of years bringing him along. Still, though, my first few minutes aboard did not feel graceful. I was sending signals that Fitz wasn’t picking up on at all while he (perhaps understandably) gently but persistently angled for a line that would lead him back to his buddies. I felt like we were yelling at each other in languages that share a common root, like French and Spanish, and sort of getting a few things right but mostly just talking past each other.

One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about with Steen lately (since he’s really out of shape and rusty and that is not his fault at all) goes back to an idea I’ve encountered usually with regards to starting colts. Which is that the first thing you want to do when a horse knows nothing is get him moving forward with confidence (rather than bucking or balking). And once you’re doing that, you want to start influencing the feet. And while you can do that in many different ways, the graceful choice isn’t to try to stop the horse and turn it around. It’s to go with the horse as he moves and work to influence the feet without picking a fight.

Fitz isn’t a colt and he’s not green. But he’s not used to a lot of different riders these days either. Instead of just yelling at him louder in French, I wanted to find a way to start speaking Spanish.

So we worked on the basics. Fitz stops on a dime every time you stop your seat (something Steen only does when he’s at his most dialed in). So that’s very different. He’s a lot less sensitive than Steen but he’s not dull. Once I got with him a little, I was able to start figuring out how he moves. Then I started riding better. That led to less noise in our communication. I focused extra hard on feeling his feet and using my body to influence where they were going. Soon, he started understanding me better.

We went on to have a really nice, relaxing ride. We walked and trotted around the pasture until my right knee started to  hurt. (It has bothered me while riding horses since I was a kid and some horses aggravate it more than others.) I thought about a canter but decided there was nothing to be gained. So we wrapped things up.

As I led Fitz back up to unsaddle and brush him down, I couldn’t help but think about how differently my younger self would have approached this ride. When I was in my teens and early twenties, mostly the only way I knew to handle horses was to manhandle them. Certainly I never would have missed the opportunity to canter, regardless of how well I was communicating (or, more likely, wasn’t) with the horse I was on.

I guess everything changes. I’m older now. I like to think I’m wiser. I put Fitz up, did some groundwork with Roland, gave Steen his supplements, turned the herd out, and mucked the dry lot. And then I drove home happy.

Robin created this post for Amateur Vaquero. She also writes novels about horses under the pen name Stefani Wilder.

It has been well over a  year since my last post. And part of the reason I haven’t written anything here is because things with the horses have been a bit tough. I knew leaving behind amenities like an indoor arena would mean we would ride less in the cold. What I didn’t fully foresee was how having only grass footing available would mean a lot of days when the weather would permit riding but the ground would not. Between the winter, the wet, and the logistics of helping to care for and manage horses for the first time since I moved to Iowa (instead of just boarding them), you could say last year did not go quite as planned. To sum up: I haven’t spent so little time in the saddle since before I got Steen.

Mounting off random objects because why not?

The unpredictable and intermittent nature of when we can actually ride has also made progress with Roland extremely difficult. Of course I’ve seen for myself in the past that horses can really only learn when you work with them consistently. But I have never before been in a situation when there was a horse I needed to work with and conditions that literally made consistent work impossible. We made some headway last summer. But then fall rolled in and our work ground to a halt.

To make matters worse, we had an extremely wet spring. It wasn’t until this week that the ground finally dried out enough to allow riding. Last week I manage to ride Saturday and Sunday. Which felt like a triumph. This week so far I’ve ridden Monday and today (Friday). But we’ve got rain in the forecast so we’ll have to see what the weekend brings.

By the time I swung my leg over Steen’s back this spring, it had been the longest I’d gone without riding him since I’ve owned him. By a lot. He’s just days away from his 22nd birthday and he had those soundness issues last summer. So my primary goal with getting going again has been feeling him out without physically taxing him in any way.  After four very light rides, I’m really happy with how things are going. He feels sound so far. And while we’re both rusty and our communication has lost a good deal of its refinement, he seems really happy to get back to work.

Steen still likes standing around watching other people work.

So that’s good news. My primary goal for the first part of the summer is going to be getting back to regular riding and easing him very carefully back into fitness.

We also have plans. I don’t want to say too much here because parts of this are not entirely final. But we’re making some changes to the way our setup is laid out. With any luck, we’ll have a nice-sized round pen with sand footing within the next few months. I think that will make all the difference with Roland.

Me helping Roland remember how to stand still for grooming.

I’m also hoping to blog more! But I’ve said that before so we’ll just have to see how it goes.

Robin created this post for Amateur Vaquero. She also writes novels about horses under the pen name Stefani Wilder.

When we first moved the horses last year, I was very pleased to find that Steen was bombproof at the new place. He was happy to truck around the unfamiliar spaces and up for anything I threw at him. This was after I’d scarcely even seen him for six weeks due to COVID. He had good energy and was happy to listen. We had some really great riding for quite some time.

But something started to shift as the year progressed. By the end of the summer I realized Steen was experiencing some intermittent pain. On my vet’s recommendation, I started him on meds to help with mild arthritis. But around this time he suddenly became spooky and jumpy. I would swing into the saddle and it would feel like he was ready to explode from the first step. He never did anything huge. But he had a handful of big spooks and he ran off with me one time. He hadn’t felt so unpredictable in years.

I couldn’t figure out if the pain was making him jumpy or if the drugs were making him feel so frisky he had become explosive. I still don’t honestly know. I’m sure it wasn’t helping that I was less stable emotionally last fall than I’ve ever been at any other point in my adult life. Between riding a lot less in general and consistently struggling to feel like we were on solid footing when we did ride, I had moments of frustration with the horse a few months before I’d had felt confident doing just about anything with.

Four happy horses on early grass

Going back to green

Then Roland arrived. And part of the plan with him is that we’re going to be helping K with his training. The first day I did groundwork with Roland, I remembered how different it is working with a horse you know nothing about. I brought no expectations to my work with him that day. All I knew about Roland was that we didn’t know anything about how to talk to each other. When I asked for things, he waffled between not responding at all, responding with too much energy, and responding with not enough energy.

That’s a green horse for you. Of course, I did not get frustrated or even vaguely annoyed. I did what you do when you’re training. I worked on meeting him at a point where he could understand me and encouraged every try.

Steen confirms, Roland is green

A few days later, I tacked Steen up for the second time in 2021. The first time was the day before we drove up to get Roland and I knew I would be riding a young, green, unfamiliar horse the next day. But I hadn’t ridden any horse at all since the year before. I wanted to at least sit in a saddle for a few minutes.

So I got on Steen even though the weather was cold and the footing was iffy. After a few minutes walking around, I got off again. He felt antsy and distracted and just not good. I again found myself uncertain whether the problem was emotional or physical. We then had loads of rain and riding was impossible for a while.

But as I got Steen ready for our next ride, I found myself thinking of how I’d approached Roland and how different that was from how I was even then approaching Steen. To say I know my horse pretty well is an understatement. We’ve been together for 13 years now.  I know where and how he likes to be rubbed by which grooming implements and exactly the way to touch his ankles to get him to lift his feet. He swings his head over when I take his halter off so I can put his bridle on and squares himself up before I mount so he’s nice a stable when I step on. As far as riding goes, we can sometimes be like an old married couple. Which is to say we’re great partners a lot of the time but can sometimes get on each others nerves.

Familiar can get lazy

The moments of harmony with Steen are all the more noticeable now that I have Roland for contrast. But I noticed something else as I got Steen ready too. Expectations are a double-edged sword. As I walked Steen over to where we would ride, I realized I expected him to be ready for me to get on. Over the years, I’ve done progressively less groundwork with him because he had so thoroughly demonstrated for so long that he didn’t need it. Last fall I got back to doing more in hopes of getting to the bottom of some of our struggles. But I was doing it with the idea that I was trying to solve a problem. It didn’t do much good.

That day, it occurred to me that I could choose to approach Steen the same way I had approached Roland. I could offer him something, see how he responded, and meet him wherever he proved to be that day.

As it turned out, that day I moved through all the basic groundwork exercises I would with a green horse and Steen just totally checked out. He did everything perfectly. I got on. And we had a light and short but highly positive ride. He didn’t feel edgy or antsy or spooky. He felt sound if a teeny bit stiff.

The next ride, though, we started with groundwork the same way. And he was in a really different state of mind that day. When I asked him to walk off in a circle, he went charging off with way more energy than I’d asked for. His attention was on the outside world, not on me.

Instead of getting annoyed and correcting him like I might have done in the old days (because seriously Steen, how many times have we done this?), I treated him the way I’d treated Roland when he did the same thing. I lowered my energy and practicing sending him softly, working until I had him focused and attentive enough to just take one step without throwing in a bunch of sloppy movement besides.

It took a while. Which surprised to me. And working on the ways he was over or under responding helped me and Steen get on the same page again. By the time I got on, he’d steadied. We had another really nice ride.

Very fancy bridle rack

Find our new groove

Since then, I’ve ridden Steen four more times. Each time, we’ve had moments where he started to feel stiff and nervous. And instead of shutting him down with a bend or a block (which seems to wind him up lately) I’ve been working on getting him vertically soft and asking him to yield something. Maybe a hip, maybe a shoulder. It depends on what position we’re in when he starts to stiffen.

So far, this is working well. Multiple times each ride, we’ve approached the beginning of the downward spiral we couldn’t seem to avoid ending up on last fall. Every time, we’ve found constructive ways to come back together.

I still worry I will ride him too hard. But our vet has told me repeatedly that Steen will stay healthier longer if I keep him in work, that he’s really pretty darn sound, and no one has ever seen an off step except when he’s carrying a rider. Even then it’s intermittent and only when he’s doing a few specific things.

Gossiping with Fitz

In reality, it’s more my problem than his. I need to find a way to adjust my expectations of our work together. I need to hold myself accountable and not let my imagination run away with me with worrying I’m causing him pain when he’s not showing any signs of discomfort.

But mostly I need to let go of all my expectations. 2021 is a new era in a lot of ways. I need to figure out ways Steen and I can still fit together going forward.

Robin created this post for Amateur Vaquero. She also writes novels about horses under the pen name Stefani Wilder.

In 2020, just about every major aspect of our lives changed in some dramatic way. And that made the year feel weirdly static. Forward wasn’t really on the table. We were just trying to get back to a place of stability.

Moving our small herd to a piece of land that had never previous housed horses was a lot of work. It was good work, but it was both physically demanding and logistically complex. We wanted to make the best use of the space. This meant striking a balance between the impact horses have on their surroundings and making sure the horses themselves had what they would need to stay healthy and happy. There were adventures in buying hay, designing and building feeders, and learning how much turnout our  little pasture could support. Mistakes were made. But we were actually feeling quite prepared by the time winter rolled in. The cold months were a little more quiet in terms of the horses. This was nice because we had a chance to focus on moving.

Looking forward again

But now spring has made it to Iowa. We’ve already been in our new house for as long as we lived in the basement apartment that was our temporary home for a portion of 2020. That seems crazy because those months in transition felt so slow. But we’re definitely settled in and feeling at home here now. The future on the whole also feels a little brighter than it has in a while. Which means we actually have some energy to spare for non-essentials .

The land we moved our horses to is owned by our friend K. She began as a riding student for Brian way back in 2013. After riding our various horses once a week for a year or so, she upgraded to leasing Aiden until we sold him, then bought her own horse in 2015. Her gelding is getting older now, though. She’s in situation similar to the one I’m in with Steen but even trickier as her horse has more persistent soundness issues. In one of our chats about the needs of older horses, I mentioned she might enjoy a younger project. And then an interesting horse popped up on Craigslist and what started as an idle comment turned into a serious discussion.

K does not have as much training experience as we do but she wants to learn more. So we came around to a plan that she would pick up a green horse with a good temperament and we would support her as she worked to solidify his training. But the first horse we picked came up lame during a vet check. So that was a setback.

An expedition to Minnesota

Turns out the horse market is a crazy right now and nice geldings are thin on the ground. But I found a text-only ad on Dreamhorse that caught my eye. Pretty soon we had photos and videos and were planning a road trip. It was a long day. Buying a horse is always a big decision. But early evening found us back at the farm with an occupied horse trailer.

We turned the new horse out with our three geldings (the mare who came with us in the beginning has moved on) and were happy when no drama ensued. We settled in to watch for a while and start to process the idea that the transition was complete.

That was a few weeks ago now. The weather is just barely starting to allow us to ride a little, so the new guy has had some time to settle in.

K named the new horse Roland. He’s coming four with about 100 rides on him, mostly out and about doing light work on the ranch where he was raised. So far he seems very sweet and willing. He and Fitz are already fast friends.

This weekend we had some milestones. The herd got some time out on the grass for the first time this year. And K rode her new horse.

They did really well. I’m excited to see how they get along from here.

Robin created this post for Amateur Vaquero. She also writes novels about horses under the pen name Stefani Wilder.

Well, we’re 2.5 months into 2021. Last year when I set the very modest goal of enjoying our horses, I did not realize how big a challenge that would end up being. The derecho meant we were moving (twice) and house-shopping in the midst of a pandemic. It was hard to make the horses a priority most of the time.

The apartment we lived in for fours months while we were trying to get our life back in order was less than ten minutes away from the farm where our horses now live.  It was also a basement unit with almost no view of the outside. It had an apartment overhead that housed four college students. To say it was not a totally relaxing environment will suffice. As a result, we found ourselves escaping to the outdoors every chance we got. And we were lucky that we had a long, mild fall.

Nobody’s Getting Any Younger

There were other challenges, though. Steen will be 21 this year. Mid-summer I started to notice he was reluctant to pick up his leads sometimes and was also sometimes stiff in the canter, particularly on bends. Then a few weeks later he started to feel off at the trot. It only happened if he was carrying a rider. And it was subtle. But our vet confirmed what I was feeling, which is that he’s got some arthritis in his hocks. Stamping at flies made it much worse. And he also had his usual phase of being vulnerable to sunburn. So we had some rough weeks.

Steen in all his high-maintenance glory.

The move has also been more of a challenge for Steen than the others. He might be getting older, but he’s no less emotional and no less full of energy than he’s ever been. He was more stressed by the changes and it took him longer to settle. Work helped. But we don’t have an indoor arena at the new place and the footing where we ride is sometimes iffy. I didn’t entirely realize how I often I would canter some circles to warm up before we got to slower work until I couldn’t do it anymore.

My vet suggested doing fewer circles with Steen and more straight lines, and also prescribed some meds. The first time I rode him after the drugs had a chance to act, he charged up the whole length of the pasture, bucking the entire way. Steen hasn’t run off with me or bucked in over a decade. He wasn’t trying to throw me that day. He was just happy to be feeling good again. But after that I was constantly facing the challenge of trying to find productive, light, not-circle-shaped ways to use up his exuberant energy. Drugs are not magical. They can mask his stiffness and discomfort. But if I ride him too hard, I’ll only hurt him more in the long run.

Steen expecting fresh hay please.

We hadn’t really figured it out by the time the winter hit.  And as we had heavy snow on the ground from mid-December until things thawed about a week ago, I didn’t trust the footing enough to do any cold weather riding. Now we’ve got the snow melted, but the ground is too wet to ride on without damage. So we’re waiting for things to start growing in earnest before we can get on horseback again.

One Step at a Time

So it’s going to be another year of adapting to changes. I am hopeful I can learn Steen’s new limits and potentially distribute my riding to other horses when possible. We also (finally!) bought a horse trailer last year. But then our house got smashed by an enormous tree and it wasn’t a good time to acquire anything to pull it with. However, I sold my car the same day we signed on our new house. It was simpler to get through the winter and the move with only one vehicle. But a few weeks ago we bought a truck at last.

The trailer

The truck

Which means we are now equipped to ride places other than where our horses live. This is exciting but also intimidating. Despite all my years owning horses, I have never hauled them. So I am going to have to learn to get comfortable and the horses are going to have to get good at going places. There are multiple indoor arenas near where our horses live. But there is still a pandemic going and it’s not the easiest time to just ask to stop in and use people’s facilities.

Still, I’m hoping I can find a way to keep working with Steen this year. My vet thinks he will only benefit from continued light work and I’m not ready to retire him anyway. If 2020 taught me anything, it’s that adaptation is always possible. So here’s hoping we still have many saddle hours to look forward to.

Robin created this post for Amateur Vaquero. She also writes novels about horses under the pen name Stefani Wilder.

2020. What else is there to say? It’s been a year of change for everyone. In our case, we adjusted decently well to the new restrictions put in place by the pandemic and threw ourselves head first into the work of building a new space for the horses on our friends’ land. As of early August, we had four happy horses and an optimistic outlook for the rest of the year.

Then August 10 happened.

Hello, Derecho

Personally, I’ve had enough of learning about new extreme weather events via the expedient yet traumatic experience of living through them. In the case of the day in question, a derecho hit Iowa. I had never heard of a derecho. I certainly didn’t know one was coming. I happened to break out of my usual routine and spend the morning with the horses. Then I drove home, stopped at a fruit stand to buy a melon in response to a random impulse, and got back to the house we’d lived in for 14 years just in time to be present for one of the most list-changing events I’ve ever lived through.

A derecho, turns out, is basically an inland hurricane. Our area clocked gusts of wind up to 110 mph. The storm came out of a clear blue sky. It rolled in as an enormous wall of clouds and wind to hit our neighborhood. More specifically, it hit our walnut tree. This was a tree we now know weighed upwards of 55,000 pounds and had lived for well over a century.

The tree didn’t break. It’s  subterranean roots cracked in half, splitting horizontally in some cases, simply pulling the earth around them skywards in others. And then when it had nothing left to anchor it in place, the tree fell onto our house.

This new level of proximity did not end well for either party. The tree didn’t survive the experience. We hope the house will, but it’s still an open question. We’re currently missing most of our roof. What used to be the ceiling in my office is now on the floor. We’ve moved into an apartment while we navigate the question of repairs and whether or not we’ll ever move back or not.

In many ways, we were lucky. I was not in my office, for one thing. I would have been on a normal day. For another, although we could have lost many of our personal possessions to not having a roof during a storm that raged for well over an hour after the tree fell, we managed to save nearly everything we own. Even the closet we couldn’t get into at first because it was blocked by broken rafters we were able to excavate our way into after a couple of weeks.

Another thing I feel lucky about is that the horses pulled through fine. In fact, for three days we lived on the same property with them while we searched for a new place to stay. This wasn’t easy as power lines were down throughout the region and internet and cell communications were also largely out. There was no power at the farm either. But our friends there took us and Esti in anyway. Without electricity, the horses didn’t have water but it wasn’t that hard to haul it in.

The New Normal

I don’t know where we’ll be living at the end of this year, but I know for sure it won’t where we were living at the beginning. Between that, moving our horses, and both of us working from home now because of the pandemic, just about every aspect of our lives changed in 2020.

The good news, though, is the core features haven’t shifted. We’ve still got each other, our fabulous pup, two good horses, and friends we could fall back on when we didn’t have a roof over our heads. Mostly, I can look back on all this with a feeling of gratitude.

But also, I feel like I’ve had enough in terms of abrupt and unforeseen changes. I’d like to slow down and enjoy the scenery for a while.

Robin created this post for Amateur Vaquero. She also writes novels about horses under the pen name Stefani Wilder.