Magic Red Mary Rose (aka Selva)
We do not leave the village all day. It is time to vote and Big Bear has to go and make his mark. I am the noisiest person when it comes to voting, because I never seem to be living in a country where I can vote. "It is so important," I tell people. Then I add how I threw away the only vote I made in Canada voting for the Rhinoceros Party.
I do not understand protesting by not voting. Isn't that what the other parties want? Maybe I was not listening during Political Science. Which now reminds me that once I was the founding member of the Apathy Party. There were three of us and we promised to do nothing once elected. We were voted for by most of the students and then found ourselves in the very strange position of suddenly feeling we had to stand up for something, even though we had won the vote by saying we had promised to do nothing.
Today I thought I would be writing about picking up the bee hive, but I have noticed in all the time I have been living here that Italians, and those of us who were born in Jamaica, have one thing in common. We become sleepy when it rains. A little drizzle and it is time for a nap. A downpour in the middle of summer and it is time to light the fire, pull out the red wine and then fall asleep listening to the rain. When I lived in Jamaica and looked after my mother's cattle farm I knew the men would not be in to work on a rainy day.
They were right. Guinea grass is like knives on a wet day. They would have been cut to pieces if they had tried to round up cattle in the wet grass. Here in the mountains I am pleased with the grass growing bright emerald green. I hope my horse will be coming to live here soon. It is tame grass that does not threaten to grow over your head. There is a lot to be done. We have to fence the area and we have to put up some kind of shelter for the horse in case it rains, or hails or snows.
The project has to be approved by the owners of the land and the town council. We have found used fence posts and they seem to be a reasonable price. Everything has to be portable. My horse will shelter in a shack that we can take apart and put on a truck to cart off somewhere else. The fencing will be that electric kind, maybe three to four strings of it to keep the wilder animals out. I am more afraid of stray dogs than wild boar, especially if my horse manages to have a foal.
We are waiting, waiting for the sun, waiting for my horse to come into heat so we can do the first test before we order the semen. This year we will try artificial insemination. The stallion is a Leopard Appaloosa. I chose him without looking up where he lived on Google Maps. Even if a friend transported my mare to the stallion he would still need to be paid for the diesel fuel. It is less expensive to ask a couple of vets to get involved.
I look at the photos of this stallion's offspring and hope my mare decides to go into heat. He is a working stallion, is ridden out on the trail. This is all very important to me, how can you know what a stallion is like if no one has ridden him on a day-long ride? But this is in the future. Seems all the mares in our area are late.
The vet tells me the mares were put off by the bad weather, the cold and the snow. "We must wait for her to change her coat," she says. Or, says a friend, "for the moon to change".
Tomorrow is another day.
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