Dad's Slides - Winter Horse Work

It was 93 degrees yesterday and temperatures did not cool off until after 9:00 PM. I was hibernating inside as I looked through some of my Dad's old photos. This one gave me pause and made me smile.

That's my first horse trailer after we received 19 inches of snow! Look behind the telephone pole and you can see the Wabash River. As soon as that heavy snow began to melt, that river would rise and flood the road making it so that we were unable to leave home.

Having our home high up on the moraine protected us from the floodwaters, but getting up the driveway in the winter was a bear. 

We'd get as far as we could, then stop and hike the rest of the way up to the house. 

There was no running water down to the pastures. That wasn't a problem in the spring, summer and fall - I'd just run a hose down to the troughs to fill them up. But in the winter, I filled buckets from the spigot in the garage and carried that water down the moraine. More than once I slipped on the icy path and spilled the buckets. Which, of course, made the hike down to the pastures even more hazardous because that water froze on the path.

See that line across the snow in our front pasture? Those are my tracks. Not only did I have our horses to care for, I looked after the neighbor's horses and donkey who were down the road a ways. I remember slogging through that heavy, wet snow in the pasture as I hiked down to their barn and back.

I look back now and remember how hard some of those winter days were. I remember the bruises from falling while carrying water buckets, the complete changes of clothes that I had to do before catching the school bus, and shivering in the cold while tossing hay to the horses. It was hard work.

But, it was also horse work. And that was what I loved. 

Tomorrow I'll share about the horses and donkey down the road.