In honor of the Preakness, my wife and I spent Saturday taking care of one of our horses. Actually it was not in honor of anything but it needed to be done.
I can't do anything with a horse without thinking of Eldon, our first farrier.
When we moved to Missouri in the early 90s and knew less than nothing about animals and the country and all that, he came and trimmed hooves, put on horseshoes, gave us valuable lessons about horses and country life and occasionally would sit down and play guitar.
He was a small wiry sort of man who looked older that he should have. He died much younger than he needed to.
Eldon traveled around in a beat up old pick-up with all his farrier tools and would spend hours sometimes at our place and when time came to write up a bill, it often seemed like it wouldn’t even cover his gas (and this back when $1.50 seemed high!) My wife got in the habit of paying him more than he charged. Bet you never say that about your mechanic or hair-stylist!
Working on horses is similar to shearing sheep: you spend a great deal of time bent over in unnatural positions hoping an animal won’t step on you, kick you or take a crap in your face!
We managed to avoid two out of the three Saturday.
After spending only a couple of hours on this; on the next day and the day after that, my quads (those muscles on the front of your thighs) are still sore. I guess I overcompensated to protect my back (a good thing) and ended up bending my legs a lot more. I will definitely take sore legs over a sore back any day. My back only hurt Saturday evening and a little on Sunday.
At one point my wife complimented my work (which was OK, nothing to write home about) and I said ‘Eldon is up there laughing at us,’ as we gamely tried to get it done.
So Eldon, if you are reading blogs up there, thanks for the memories.
2 comments:
i miss eldon.... those were good times. remember when he came and sat around playing guitar and when he left all his horseshoe nails were stuck in the carpet??
Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!
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