I met Ed the first time at a dressage show in El Paso. Baleno was tense, sour, almost lame but not quite. As he has been most of our time together, Baleno has a very hard time picking up and using his right hind leg. He’s been having regular hock and stifle injections along with supplements with MSM, Glucosamine and Hylauronic Acid. None of this improves Bee in any particularly stunning way. At the dressage show, I noticed Ed’s card and called. He came to the stabling area and worked on Baleno for about 45 minutes.

Was he instantly better? No, because the soreness, just like in humans, takes much more than one treatment to resolve. But he was relaxed, and Ed showed me all the places on Baleno that were tight or locked up. Those spots closely matched Baleno’s laundry list of ills: He doesn’t bend or take contact to the right. Baleno’s head and neck were tight. His right hind doesn’t step up and under for collection—his right gluteus had a lump the size of a baseball.

We forget sometimes that our horses are athletes. They need the same muscle care—from stretching to physical therapy to massage—that we do.

Unfortunately, I didn’t follow up with Ed back then. Baleno got better, loosened up, had a few decent (although not great) dressage scores. It was a mistake not to schedule a follow up appointment.

When you watch Ed work, you realize how incredibly knowledgeable he is. He can pinpoint an exact spot and tell you what problems your horse is having. He can position his hands (incredibly strong and even a bit gnarled from years of work)in the right way to work out the kinks in the muscles and the muscle connective tissue.

During the clinic, Ed had us team up and work in pairs and threes on the demo horses. After the demonstration he’d come around and help us locate the spots he’d talked about and show us how to use our hands.

You have to dig deep. The horses react. Boy do they react. The lick their lips. Close their eyes. Drop their heads. Or sometimes they arch their backs in pain, “Ouch.” Ed says, too, that massage is part of the equine-human bonding process.

Even though Bee didn’t come along as a demo horse, he is going to get a massage, or maybe five. I’ve scheduled Ed to come out to the farm on Wednesday for a session with Baleno. And this time, I’m going to take notes and make sure I learn the moves myself so I can give the gang (not just Bee, but all the horses) a little loving touch.

If you’d like to learn more, Ed recommends a book called Beating Muscle Injuries for Horses, by Jack Meagher. It is quite old but still available from Amazon and other major book sellers.

This weekend I spent a great deal of time in the barn and in the saddle. I rode all three horses on Saturday, working on stretching out, and then some basic dressage movements with Baleno and Volare and, well, with Belle it’s still pretty basic (steering, mostly). It was an unusually humid day, so by the time I was done I was pretty wiped out. I cleaned the barn, dumped and scrubbed the water buckets, raked the aisle, watered the garden, switched out the boy horses with the girl horses in the pasture, and then took a two hour nap!

When I awoke, I got online and posted Help Wanted ads on three different local job boards. Given the economic times, I figured I’d have a few responses by the end of the weekend, but apparently everyone in the Albuquerque metro is gainfully employed and no one wants a part time barn job. Oh well. The chores keep my biceps buff.

Sunday was pretty much a repeat of Saturday, only I rode Baleno out in the back field and took him for a nice, long, fun canter along the sandy road alongside the alfalfa fields. I hadn’t done that for a while, focused as we’ve been on the dressage movements and the health issues, but I could feel how much we both enjoyed it! He’s not a very forward horse, so getting a good gallop out of him is always a challenge, but once his after-burners kick in, he’s pretty fun. And Sunday he was in the mood. I could feel him beginning to strain against the bit. “Why not?” I thought. The road is sandy and soft, he’s in the mood. And so I let him have his head and away we went. We didn’t gallop for long, but afterwards he was perky, his step sharper, his ears up. I had that, “riding is so much fun” smile on my face.

My marriage is good because my husband knows I feel depressed and cranky if I don’t mess around with my horses. He sends me out to ride if I try to pick a fight with him. “Oh, just go ride or brush a horse. You’ll feel better.” He also knows that horses (probably to his chagrin) will be in our lives for a long time. We’re both independent and yet we’re best friends.

But on the back side of my 45^th birthday, I have had a spate of physical reminders that back in the 1800s, I’d be close to dead. All my old riding injuries seem to be pooling up in various joints in my body and making me go, “Ouch!” every time I pick a stall or my bossy old Baleno yanks me over to the hay pile. When I have to bandage Belle’s leg and she’s having a tantrum, I want a little more help around here than a gentle man who still (after eight years) doesn’t really know how to put a halter on. My husband means well, tries hard, even does chores with me. (Although yesterday he came out when I was cleaning the very last stall. “Oh, my timing is perfect! I’ll spread the manure,” he said. That chore requires simply driving the tractor around the pasture. No heavy lifting involved.)

I don’t want get old. And when I do get old, I’ll want help. I can’t really imagine a life without horses, even though I think my dear husband would like to live in an apartment next to New York’s Lincoln Center and within walking distance of 15 great ethnic restaurants, none of them Mexican (our culinary choices in this neighborhood are limited, to say the least.)

I’ll never trade in my husband, who listens to classical music and writes insightful political commentary and influences the middle school minds of Albuquerque youth. But some days I wish he had a little more “farm” in his blood. 

Which brings me back to my beloved equines. So at what point will four horses and their various needs feel like too much? At what point will I have to back down from the mucking and the raking and the pulling and the hammering and the various other physical activities necessary to maintain my place? I hope never, because that will make me an extremely unpleasant person to be around and my husband will probably divorce me. Which will be worse than giving up the horses. Or will it?

Who knows. For now, though, I’ll probably need to place a “help wanted” ad in the local horse magazine: “Wanted, surrogate honey-do, willing to take on every farm chore with a smile. Horse savvy only need apply.”

As I write this, I'm sitting on the front porch of a charming bed and breakfast in a lovely nautical village called Port Townsend, Washington. My neighbors, who called just a little while ago to ask me a question (when I saw their cell phone number come up of course I feared the worst, but really they just needed the phone number of my computer support guy), are even considering retiring here. And I can see why. It's a storybook village with endlessly interesting shops and art galleries and a fine selection of stunning Victorian homes perched on bluffs overlooking Puget Sound. Not bad. Only there's something missing.

Guess what that is? Do I have to spell it out? My horses. Dang, you'd think I'd be over it by now. I live, breath and work horses. I think about them day and night. On the bus ride from the ferry stop to town I looked out the window and tried spotting the hooved ones, but it's all about boats in this part of the country.

So tomorrow we'll go sailing and eat and sleep and shop, but I won't ride or clean a stall or brush a horse. For once, I'll come in for dinner smelling like the sea instead of the barn. It's good to get away, but by Friday I'll be ready for that sweet perfume again: a mixture of pyrethrin and sweat and horse dirt.

“That’s the fourth one today. Did you get new hay?”

Yes, I got new hay. Along with everyone else is Central New Mexico, apparently.

New hay is actually a misnomer. This was eight bales of lousy hay that I paid too much for. It wasn’t moldy, it wasn’t even particularly dusty. It just looked spent. Weak. A little bit gray around the edges. Of course I went against my better judgment and fed it anyway, because I’d just paid almost $9 a bale for it. I have no idea what was in that hay, but within 24 hours, Belle had broken out in hives and Volare had a bad stomachache. I don’t even know if the two incidents were related, but after I talked to my vet, I got another brand new load of much nicer stuff. For which I also paid nearly $9 a bale.

Luckily, Volare’s colic passed quickly with a dose of banamine; two days later, Belle’s hives were completed gone. Was it the hay? Was it something else entirely? I started using fly spray on Belle—maybe she reacted. Volare is super sensitive to weather changes, and indeed, the temperature dipped a bit (from 97 to 85) that day and some stormy weather blew in from Colorado. Or maybe he just had a gas bubble that needed to pass. Or maybe it was the hay.

Taking care of horses is an awful lot like being a detective. The only information you have at first is speculation—maybe this, maybe that. Then you have to begin eliminating possibilities. I used the same brand of fly spray last summer and Belle did not get hives. Volare’s had three bouts of colic in the past year, one serious enough to send him to the horse hospital, so maybe it has nothing to do with hay, but is a more systemic problem. In fact, unless we find hard evidence (allergy tests for Belle, endoscopy for Volare), we’re left with the process of elimination and speculation. I do wish they could talk. Then all three of them (Baleno’s persistent “lameness” issues that seem somewhat undiagnosable) could clue me in on how to make them happier and healthier.

Although it’s unrelated to the topic above, I just have to share with readers how wonderful Little Belle is turning out to be. We went on our first ride outside the arena today. Volare (solid citizen that he is), piloted by my friend Kathleen, led the way as we walked along the irrigation ditch and out onto the 500 acre alfalfa field that abuts my back fence. Not only did Belle walk confidently forward, she wanted to be in front of her babysitter. Her ears were up the entire way. She was really happy to be out there. Jim and the farm guys were stacking hay in the bed of a pickup. One was standing on top of the stack and another on top of the hay already loaded in the truck. It could have been scary, and Belle surely looked, turning and facing the men and the hay stacks, and scooted a little sideways, but then she kind of said, “well, that’s okay I guess,” and on we went. She’s turning out to be a truly smart, fun little horse.