Burying a Colt

People, especially men, do not understand why so much of the work at my horse lot is done by hand, usually my hand. I am often asked what kind of excavator I will be using for a certain project and when I tell them,"a shovel" people wait for the punch line. What kind of power saw did you use to cut down those mimosa trees? A tool called lopper which is like a hedge trimmer.

Sometimes people tell me that what I am planning to do is impossible to do with a shovel. But I have seen things that they have not seen. In all of these years I have only lost one foal to natural causes. A big strong, healthy weanling developed pneumonia of an undetermined cause and died despite treatment.

I had to go to town and planned to bury him when I got back. Instead, upon my return I could only see a huge hole in the ground that was so deep that the person shoveling out sand at lightning speed was out of my sight.

I walked up to the hole, thanked Lido and told him that the hole was big enough. Lido dug that hole with a shovel, using the left side of his body. Cerebral palsy made the right side of nearly no value to him.

As the plaque says on the bridge dedicated to Lido, "If I can do it then why can't you?'