Horses in winter

Every year when the weather finally turns cold, I inevitably think about all my years with horses at home. With no barn (at least, no stalls in the barn), my guys lived in the pasture year-round.

This morning I woke up at 3:00, and it was cold! I ran to the bathroom, then back to bed and snuggled under all the layers, and thought about the old days. I’d be up at 4:30, pull on jeans and boots and my canvas barn coat, and go outside for chores: haul hay from the barn, fill grain buckets in the tack room, break ice from the water trough. While my horse munched happily, I'd check legs and blankets by flashlight to make sure both survived the night. Undo leg straps and feel the underside of the blanket to make sure it was dry; if the blanket was wet, I'd replace it with a dry blanket, and hang the wet (and dirty) blanket in the barn. Then back to the house for a shower, dress in work clothes, and head for work. In the horse years, 6:00 was the earliest start time I could manage, which meant doing horse chores in the dark every day.

I actually preferred the cold—blankets would get steadily dirtier, and I’d spend as much time brushing them as I did grooming the horse, but the horse stayed warm. Worse by far were days of steady rain. In the fall and early winter, Fallon wore a mid-weight blanket underneath a waterproofed nylon sheet, which kept the wet from soaking in. When it really turned cold, I’d switch to a heavy multi-layer winter rug, the ideal clothing for a pastured horse. As long as you kept the rug in place, the heat from the horse would keep the layers underneath warm and dry, and any water that soaked in from the outside wouldn’t make it through. But after a couple of weeks of rain, you’d lose the battle. As soon as the wet soaked through, the horse started to shiver with cold. So I always had two winter rugs—when one soaked through, I’d switch it for the other and hang the wet one in the barn to dry.

By this time of year, every year, I would have spent a day cleaning, drying, and waterproofing all the blankets and sheets, and hang them from nails inside the barn to dry. I learned about using Thompson’s Water Seal from Judith—pour it straight into a spray bottle, and do at least three coats on sheets and winter blankets. It would eventually stain the cloth, but it worked better than anything else (even ScotchGuard) and was much cheaper. Once everything was clean and waterproofed, I'd fold and stack them in the tack room, ready to use.

But in spite of the work, I really miss the horses. There’s nothing quite like watching your horse gallop up the hill as soon as she sees you drive in the driveway each day, anxious for a pat… and her dinner!