Horsin' Around
Don Coldsmith, Special to the Gazette
Monday, March 2, 2009
Quite a few years ago, a lady I know made a statement about March. When her time comes, she said, she hoped it would be in February, so she wouldn’t have to go through the month of March again.
March is pretty unpleasant in our part of the country. Unpredictable, changeable, different things to different folks and in different parts of the United States. In some areas, it’s somewhat pleasant, I understand. Some individual days might be pleasant in the plains, but they can’t be trusted.
Baxter Black once suggested changing the name of this month to “Mud” — (”Doesn’t sound much different, does it?” he asked in a column dated “Mud 7, 1985”).
In the deep south, Black reported, they actually enjoy March. But here, he went on, “The March rain — is not a gentle, life-giving shower from Heaven to be savored and sniffed. It’s more like the angels hosing out their confinement hog shed.”
Well, I can relate to that and to the mud theory. This is one of the easiest months to get a tractor stuck. You can’t do any planning, because there’s no way to tell whether it will be sunny, windy, pouring rain, blowing snow or breaking up trees and power lines with ice by the ton covering everything. You have to take it a day at a time because it will be different tomorrow anyway, and at best it will probably be whang-leather tough and freeze up solid on most nights. You can’t do much but look forward to April.
When we were raising horses it was often the beginning of the competition season for a horse show or two. I’d wonder sometimes why we’d subject ourselves to something like that. I still don’t know, except that people with animals DO that kind of thing. Subject themselves to misery, that is. I recall one year when we pulled the big horse trailer out of the mud with a “come-along” hand winch, just to get it to where we could hitch it to the pickup. Then we were ready to haul hairy horses to a competition where we’d surely get beaten. I could never figure how our halter horses were the last in the Great Plains to shed winter hair and look sleek and ready. This was in spite of keeping them blanketed, inside, well-fed and doing a lot of “spring horse cleaning” with a curry comb. They’d still have the “hairy side out.”
Now, we worry more about new calves, in rain and cold and snow and wind-chill indices at about zero. Sometimes you can’t do much except hope for the best, which may be none too good.
“If March was a person,” to quote one more Baxterism, “it would be an old man — the kind that won’t turn up his hearing aid or zip his fly.” (What a way with words! Wish I’d said that).
Despite all this, there have been several cultures that saw March as the beginning of the new year. The Awakening, resurrection, new growth, new birth and so on. Well, yes. March is somewhat like having a new baby in the house. As I recall, there WERE sleepless nights and diapers and all. There’s an analogy here. Fortunately babies grow out of some of that. Usually, anyway.
And, I guess, so does March. Things do get better.
Now about the lady I mentioned at the beginning. She hasn’t mentioned the advantages of dying in February for a number of years. One February she did nearly die and logged some time in the intensive care unit. That sort of put things in a different light. I have an idea that when she woke up, she was thinking something like, “Hey, I was only kidding! Sorry, I won’t say it again.” Anyway, she hasn’t.
See you down the road.
Author and columnist Don Coldsmith lives in Emporia.