Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Top Ten Signs That You Suddenly Own a Horse

1. The back of your car is filled with large sacks of grain-based products, out of which trickle multitudes of compressed pellets that find their way into every nook and cranny. (Here the Bags of Unusual Size lounge next to the old toy barn, which harks back to the days when small plastic horses were enough to satisfy the Resident Child's equine dreams; it was en route to another young horse-crazy girl and so the Subaru's cargo bay unwittingly became a symbol of Past, Present, and Future.)

2. Your stock pot periodically disappears, then reappears with a lining of bran mash cemented to its interior. Fortunately, at a critical moment you were able to prevent its being employed as a bucket to soak a bruised hoof.

3. Half of the refrigerator is occupied by massive bags of carrots.

4. The size of your bank account is inversely proportional to the size of the bags of carrots.


5. When you do have the temerity to buy food for the humans in the household, there is nowhere to place said food on the table because the table is full of bits and bobs of horse tack.

6. Laundry does not get done, but by golly halters and bridles are buffed and shined and hung on the hooks where laundry should go.

7. You find the legs of tables, chairs, and the piano bound with fleecy cloth because Somebody is practicing how to do polo wraps on a horse's legs.


8. As a result of parking near the stable on hot days with the windows open, so many flies frolic inside your car that one day you find a spider making a web on the interior rear-view mirror.

9. Horse-crazy girls other than the Resident Teen leave various and sundry bizarre horse-related items in the car, such as a pink rake used for scratching the back of a horse and a faux-jaguar-furred fly mask.

10. You discover that a pair of shoes for a horse cost more than you spend on a pair of shoes for yourself. And he needs two pairs at a time. Every six weeks or so.