I Miss Belle!

That is what my granddaughter told me over the weekend. Belle is her gaited mule. Lucy is beginning to learn to ride and has been in the woods with me a time or two.

But not lately. The past six weeks or so has been a blur of land clearing and fence building. Deer season ends in a few weeks. I hope to have livestock in the new land that we are clearing in a month.

I hope that my big girls can take over much of the Saturday programing in the coming months. I need some time off.

Ironically, I need the time off so I can ride.

I want to ride alone. I want to ride with my family. I want to ride far. My body and my mind are ready for the satisfaction that only comes from trotting and gaiting at least twenty miles. I miss refining horses the way that I like them to be refined--with the only two things that I care about--that the horse ride with feather-like lightness and that the horse calmly and courageously take on any terrain.

I have been waiting a long time to personally refine Janie's Got A Gun. She came all the way here from Texas. She is going to be everything that I look for in a horse.

Such a peculiar season--the sky seems to always be the color of only two things--gun powder and lead. It is a season in which I am engulfed by the peculiarities of the mind. From the moment that I got the phone call telling me that Lido had died in a hunting accident I remember everything perfectly clearly. But I immediately lost all memory of the week that lead up to it.

So now I am in that peculiar season--the future is just around the corner, but the past is here, always, never breaking for a rest for even a moment.

The past never seems to get tired. It works all the time.

And you just cannot out work it--no matter how many trees you cut down.