How a Funky Monday Change My Life
By Rita A. Clark
My husband,
Robin, and I retired to Mississippi in 2011. We moved into a 100 year old
farmhouse waiting to sell our house in Memphis in order to finance our
retirement home. Behind the farm house
there is a two car garage and attached to the garage is three horse stalls with
a paddock adjoining a two acre pecan orchard. Realtors would call our abode a transitional
home, I called it a dump. To add insult to injury we were forced to share our
very small house with our three Weimeraners. Note, when you share a small space
with pack animals and there are three of them and two of you, the pecking orders
are constantly changing. Frustration gave way to the funky blues which led me
into my next adventure.
On Monday
July 23, 2012, had culminated in a very bad day. For weeks, I had
tried to entertain myself with projects only to discover that I have no talent nor
patience for crafts. All my endeavors ended in the trash. My husband and I had
started going to yoga classes but on this Monday I was in no mood to stretch my
body or calm my mind. Robin left for yoga fleeing the storm that was brewing
around his wife. At 10:00 AM I was
surfing the web in my pajamas when I remembered an article I had seen in the
Hattiesburg American about an animal rescue in Moselle named Two Ton Ranch.
Since we lived in Moselle, the rescue would be close by. I looked them up and called asking if I could
just come over and muck out their stalls.
The owner,
Rene, gave me directions and said” come on over.”
The
direction were clear, but when I arrived I discovered that what I thought would
be a well-run operation with barns and pasture gave way to a reality that was
quite different. The dirt drive leading
up to the house was littered with trash and there were three serious mud
puddles between the road to the house.
The front porch of the house was weighted down with a jumble of tools,
equipment and a refrigerator of uncertain age. There were neither barns nor
pastures.
As I pulled
up, Rene came out to greet me. She was a short bare footed bleached blonde
woman wearing a peasant blouse and shorts of cutoff jeans As I noticed how the
peasant blouse struggled to cover her
midsection, I wondered if Faulkner’s “pussel gutted” only referred to men. She said “Come on in and meet my husband” “Sure” I said. As opposed to the outside, the inside of the
house was quite neat.
She
introduced me to her husband, who was a very tall, skinny man with a
beard and dreadlocks. He was lounging on a sofa eating a banana.
Rene left the living room saying that she would be back in a minute. No eye
contact from her husband who was watching a dance program on television so
conversation was nil.
Rene came
back and said, “Let’s go see the horses.”
To the side
of the house, there was a two strand barbwire enclosure with about 10 horses
milling around. My mind was working overtime trying to get my head around this
situation. “If the horses had already been fed, where did they store the hay? While I was trying to sort out this puzzle,
Rene said, “Here is the horse whose picture was in the paper. She was tied to
our gate, we call her Bones.”
The horse
was tied to a tree trying to graze on sparse patches of green.
I walked up
to her and she nuzzled me. I only saw her hip bones jutting out like blades,
ribs bones with fist size knots. I turned to Rene and said, “I have to have
this horse and her name is Bonnie Blue.”
When I got
home, Robin was there. I told him about
my excursion and ended with “Robin I have to have this horse. I don’t know if
she can survive but I can’t leave her there to die.”
“Robin
looked at me and said,”You know we have to fence in that orchard.”
Did I say “I love this man?”
I got on
line and researched how to feed a starved horse. We were to give her 2 coffee cans of alpha
every 4 hour.
We took
delivery of Bonnie on Thursday with the vet to come on Friday. Robin asked Rene how old Bonnie was. Rene said, “She is about two years old.”
Robin looked at me in alarm and said, “Who’s going to hold this horse’s reins
when they scatter our ashes?”
Dr. Rogers
came the next morning. We told him what
we were doing and he approved. He floated her teeth and gave her a couple of
shots. Robin asks him how old he thought Bonnie was. He said, “From the looks of her teeth, she is
about nine years old.”I could see Robin breathe a sigh of relief. As Dr. Rogers
got ready to leave he said, “I’ll come back in three months and test for
pregnancy.”
Robin said,”
Pregnant!?”
Dr. Rogers
looked at him and said, “You don’t know where this horse has been.”
Well, that
was a year and a half ago. Bonnie wasn’t
pregnant to Robin’s great relief.
It turns out she is a pure blooded
chestnut Arabian. She has put on two hundred pound. Her coat now
looks like burnished copper. When I go out to the paddock and scratch her ears
I whisper to her “Who loves you? Who
came and got you?” Her response if to pull on my jacket.
2/16/2014
