Iron Horseman, and Women

Although I am still very far from home at prosecutor training, I am only 86 miles from Boys Home. Yesterday Wendy picked me up and we made the trek out there to help out with the training of Sunka Wasicun, a handsome colt that I gave Boys Home for part of their natural horsemanship program that Bonnie Wheatly is developing for the boys. The other colts that we gave them are doing great and Sunka Wasicun just needed to be regrounded in many of the basics that dealt with confidence and control.

As we approached the gate a young hand went up to wave and Jimmy came running over. Jimmy is one Lido-looking little rascal that I would love to have in my program. Jimmy is doing a good job with his colt, Rain in the Face. Jimmy is solid and has his mind on the horse. In the corral he has focus. Focus is difficult for a lot of kids to develop, but I firmly believe that focus must come before a kid can develop what Dorrence called "feel."

Yesterday was a long day. I was awake for 21 hours. It was cool and windy at Boys Home and darkness fell quickly as we worked the colt from shyness into wearing a saddle in perfect comfort. I did not plan it that way, but it was a good day to be at Boys Home.

My mother adopted 12 kids, some with a range of disabilities. She was president of the Virginia Foster Parent Association and active in the national foster parent movement. Momma and Daddy had over 125 foster kids over the years. In the early fall of 2004 Governor Mark Warner named a day in September to honor my parents as "Nelson and Aileen Edwards Day." She was one of the first women in our volunteer rescue squad and worked hard in the Red Cross and the Christian Outreach Program. She was a rural mail carrier who was her own private social services for families on her mail route in crisis. Most importantly, she was tough.

I see that same combination of compassion and toughness in Donnie Wheatly, Director of Boys Home, and his wife Bonnie. Boys Home is in Covington, Virginia. Look at their website. Look at the solid work that they do. Consider the fact that they are taking on the bold and important step of teaching natural horsemanship to students who want to learn. After you do all of that send them your financial support and encouragement.

As Momma would have gently put it,"Just send them a damn check now before you forget to do it." Momma died six years ago yesterday. Momma was made of iron. She had to be. She would not have had to explain herself to the Wheatly's nor they to her. They would have understood each other with out explanations.

(This is Jimmy, a student at Boys Home sitting bareback on Red Feather. Red Feather is made of iron. If Jimmy keeps working the horses one day so will he.)

Exile

I am far from home, attending a very useful and important training session for prosecutors. This is highly out of character for me. My white ancestors came to my part of Tidewater in 1674. We have been there ever since. I do not come from some rich, plantation owning Southern aristocratic family. It is just that we are not an adventurous lot. When the west was being settled by immigrants from all over the east my ancestors were right there--waiving goodbye to the soon to be frontiersman and then going back in to get supper and finish feeding up.

The genes that kept my ancestors in isle of Wight and Surry county seem to have thrived in my chromosomes. This trip will be the longest time that I have been away from my horses since the late nineties. This trip marks the first time in my life that I was going to be gone so long that I had to pack more than one bag of clothes. When I left the recent rains had brought green back to some of the pastures. I hope it will still be that way when I make it back home. I hope that the drought does not return in my absence.

This training session is well put together and very important, but I wonder if Sunka will still recognize me when I get home. I cannot help but wonder if I will have aged too much to mount a rough horse when I next see Persa.

Five days away from my horses! I will not get home until Friday night! Bet I will understand how Rip Van Winkle felt when he got home.

A Bafflement

The recent deluge has reminded me of the continuing need to protect the soil against erosion. Last year I stumbled upon a great ally in that fight--hay twine.

Left over hay twine can serve as more than simple pasture decoration. It can hold your pasture in place.

Large handfuls of hay twine radically reduce erosion and increase deposition of soil. When simply dropped into eroded soil cuts the twisted strands create a series of baffles that slow the water speed enough to cause grains of earth to sink to the bottom. I find it more effective than traditional forms of debris used to fight erosion such as broken brick and cinder block.

( No Swimmer had not thrown me in the picture above. I was simply taking a break and discussing a matter of mutual concern with her.)

Brave in a New World

Jessica has ridden before in a conventional riding lesson program. She knew a bit about horses but nothing in her background prepared her for her second ride with us. On her first session with us she rode Comet, and to my surprise, found him to be "slow." Yesterday was her first ride on a formerly wild horse. She rode Samson on an afternoon long ride with about a half dozen other riders.

On a whim we turned into a stretch of woods that I had not walked into for about 30 years. I thought that there was a trail through it but, if so, only a fragment of that trail still existed.

Ice storms over the past decade have killed many pines in my area. The woods floor is a maze of twenty foot tall trunks scattered like tooth picks. Green brier and fox grape vines lace among the standing trees. A week of torrential rain has softened the deep stump holes hidden on the forest floor.

Of course, none of our horses panicked or showed the least bit of concern. The Corollas seemed to feel at home in the tangles and mire. Jessica did not let fear get in the way of solid horsemanship. She and Samson came through it all with only a few scrapes and scratches. Samson is a first rate horse and Jessica is going to be a first rate rider.

Speaking of New Worlds, the horse in the picture above lives (and works) in the Dominican Republic, which was the site of many of the earliest horse breeding operations in the New World. That is a riding saddle on his back, not a pack saddle. A lot of Dominican country people ride on these homemade saddles which are essentially a huge set of saddle bags.

Good Moooooooorning Vietnam!

My blog now has some statistical analysis to which I have access. Of course, I still have utterly no understanding of either the technology behind such things or of the lingo used by cool young people to discuss computer issues. The possibility has been raised to me that my numbers may be a bit inflated because of bots. This greatly concerns me because I have always had great success treating bots with a tube of Ivermectin just after the first frost.

Unfortunately, I can not find the correct hole in this computer to insert the Ivermectin. I fear another calamity as serious as my first efforts at cutting and pasting.( Luckily the white Elmer's Glue washed off of the screen without too much of a problem).

But, as they say, I digress. The statistics are interesting particularly in regard to how many readers there are from other nations.

But with all good there comes concerns of problems. I do not know why, but it appears that I am loosing my base in Estonia. (Hope that it wasn't something that I said.)