Barn Chores

I am participating in #SOL22. This is Day 22.

Thanks to twowritingteachers for providing this space to write, share, and grow.

I often start my writing pieces in my writer’s notebook, not on a laptop or other device.

I never thought I would be writing a post about barn chores, but yesterday I started to think about the jobs I loved doing at the stable and the ones that were not much fun – just hard work! I started working as a camp counselor for Mick Warmington when I was about fourteen years old. That job morphed into working weekends for riding lessons. Later, I worked at All Around Farm with Sue Scales and Richard Fennelly. I ran a summer riding camp and taught lessons during the school year on weekends and after school. Sometimes, we went to horse shows on one or both days of the weekends.

My favorite job was mucking a straw stall. I loved to pile up the straw that was remaining, pick up droppings and urine-stained straw with a good pitchfork, sprinkle a bit of lime on the ground, and let the stall air out until I did another one or two stalls. Then I would return to the stall with some new sections of straw, shake it all out, and add a lap or two of hay in the corner. Sometimes, the water bucket was emptied, scrubbed, and refilled with fresh water. Often, water buckets were a separate task, and not one of my favorites.

I loved to rake the courtyard once the stalls were all finished. I often used a herringbone pattern which was quite lovely until horses and people walked over the thinly spread stone. The aisles inside the stable sections were much harder to sweep, but I still enjoyed straightening up. Cleaning the barn was much more fun than cleaning my house!

I loved giving baths to horses and even clipping them – a very messy and fairly dangerous job. Braiding tails was my specialty. I could braid a tail in about 18 minutes and do either an English braid where the braid came out on top, running all the way down the tail bone and ending it in a “jellyroll” or I could easily do a French braid. At horse shows, owners or trainers would often ask me to zip up a tail for a confirmation class or a hunter division. I could earn $20 per tail, often $80 at an “A” rated show.

I think the hardest job was stacking hay and straw in the loft. It was dusty and hot in the summer and early fall, and if the bales were bound in wire, your hands would be very sore at the end of the job with all the lifting, throwing, and stacking. Equally hard was throwing the bales up into a moving pickup truck when we actually brought bales in from the farmer’s fields. Or trying to locate Farmer Rush at Normandy Farms to buy some hay or straw to tide us over until our shipment arrived. I remember having to walk across a field of manure and soggy straw – a pen for the cows – to get Farmer Rush’s attention. Yuck!

I loved setting up new courses in the riding ring, but it took several people to move the stonewall and the rolltop. We had a very heavy gate, a brush jump, and lots of post and rails. Our ring was a mixture of sand and dirt. Every so often, we added new sand into the ring and Richard would drag it so the sand would mix in. I loved to feel a gentle breeze and the sun on my face while I was teaching lessons. Unfortunately, we did not have an indoor ring or lights so people could continue to ride after dusk.

Grooming a horse is an art – you always hold the brush in the hand closest to the horse’s head. Start on the neck and work your way down to the rump. There are hard and soft dandy brushes, a curry comb, a body brush, hoof pick, damp and dry rags, and hoof polish with a tiny paintbrush. At horse shows, we would sometimes use a short piece of comb, wet the horse’s rump, and make a checkerboard pattern. It was really cool! Sometimes, just a little bit of baby oil around the horse’s eyes and on his muzzle.

I loved getting up before the sun and heading to the barn on a weekend during the school year. Both teaching elementary school children and teaching riding to kids from four to seventy-four were full-time jobs. When I was about 45, I finally gave up the horses – reluctantly and sadly – but I could not straddle the fence anymore. I still miss them – the horses, the events, the people, and the chores.