A good dog.

At this exact moment, I'm very busy not helping my daughter pack.  She's going to the beach for a few days with a friend's family, and she copes with the stress of packing by not packing until the last possible moment, and I'm over it, so I'm sitting here not helping. 

Yesterday we had a full day out at the barn, in the sun and heat.  It hit 87 degrees, according to this morning's paper, which means my internal thermostat, which thought, "Hot, hot, hot," was correct.  In the very early morning my daughter and I wrestled those damn mats back into the trailer, becoming admirably filthy in the process.  This was unfortunate: I was wearing my white Holston Pony Club polo and what had been a clean pair of blue jeans, because I was running a pony club rating on my farm. 

For those of you who don't understand pony club, I won't go into tedious detail.  Just know that ratings are a type of riding, horse care, and horse knowledge examination.  They mean a lot to the children involved.  I'll be running another rating at the close of our pony club camp in a few weeks, but we had so many kids wanting to rate that I had to split them. 

"Running the rating" meant that I:
1) made sure the fields we needed were mowed;
2) made sure horses weren't turned out in those same fields;
3) set the requisite jump course;
4) opened the green barn, which we only use for pony club stuff;
5) cursed the men who, while making some repairs to the green barn, had filled the only functional wheelbarrow there with their Mountain Dew cans and fast food trash;
6) emptied the wheelbarrow in the trash can beside it;
7) found a replacement light bulb for the toilet  (The green barn has a flush toilet!  Such luxury!)
8) schooled the riders over the jumps, particularly the cross country ones, the night before;
9) stood beside my friend Lisa while she conducted the rating (this is called being the Impartial Observer; it's required); and
10) tried to keep my mouth shut.

We finished up around noon, right when it was starting to get really hot, and just when the farrier showed up to shoe the horses.  Horses' hooves are like fingernails, constantly growing and needing to be trimmed.  We've got 7 horses on the farm now, 6 of mine and 1 belonging to a friend.  A standard four-shoe horse takes about an hour for the farrier to do, but the only standard horse is my friend's thoroughbred, Syd.  My daughter's horse Mickey needed stud holes drilled and tapped into his shoes, so he can wear cleats for cross country.  My son's retired pony doesn't wear shoes at all and only needed his feet trimmed.  (I also cut his dreadlocks off with scissors, providing an excellent example of why you never cut a horse's mane with scissors.  He looks like that kid in kindergarten whose mother cut his hair the morning of Picture Day.)  Sarah, with her big honking draft horse feet, only wears front shoes, as does Gully since he's mostly retired, as does Shakespeare, my daughter's first pony, now 30 years old, as does Pal, my daughter's second horse.  Pal is 25 now and no longer up for the kind of riding Katie does, but he's still a very useful guy, and now that he's got new shoes with pads (Pal has very sensitive soles) he's going over to Lisa's barn to teach adult beginners how to ride.  He'll be very good at that, and he likes to be good at things.

I always stay at the barn while the farrier's there so that I can call 911 if one of the horses kicks him in the head.  Also, I like to see how the horses' feet are doing, and I usually have to reassure Mickey that the world is not going to end.  I spend most of the time cleaning tack or stalls.  Yesterday I spent most of the time sitting on an overturned bucket.  It was just that hot.  The tack room is a mess; it wants the sort of cleaning where everything in it comes out and is analyzed and put back in rational order.  Yesterday that wasn't going to happen.  If I ever played Angry Birds, yesterday would have been the time.

But at one point, moving things on the top of the tack room cabinet, I came across our old dog Xena.  Her cremains.  Xena died nearly four years ago, according to the date on the box--I had a hard time believing it was really that long ago, since I still miss her.  She was a Great Pyrenees, a big dog, and when we had to put her down due to the infirmities of very old age, my husband was afraid he wouldn't be able to dig a hole deep enough to bury her for good.  Out here in the country, something might have dug her back up.  So we cremated her, and of course I ended to bury the ashes, but somehow I stuck them on the tack room cabinet and--I don't know, Xena always loved the tack room.  She disliked thunderstorms, so whenever it was storming I opened the tack room door and let her hide under the rack of saddles.  She would lay there anxiously panting in a puddle of her own drool, but she never damaged a thing.  Xena only chewed things she recognized as her own, such as the deer head she brought back from the fields one day.

Some day, when it's cooler, I really will clean the tack room.  I don't know about burying Xena though.  I kind of like still having her around.

Ways I Am Not Like Ann Romney

When I wrote last week about acid-washing my horse trailer, a long-time friend commented that I did not sound much like Ann Romney.  Honestly, I never thought I had.

Ann Romney likes horses, so I'm told.  I assume she rides them.  She owned part of a horse named Rafalca that competed in the London Olympics, and I believe she also attended the London Olympics, as did I.  We are both women.  Both white.  But that's pretty much it.  Our paths never crossed at the Games, for one very important reason.  I am an eventer.  She does dressage.

When I tell you that eventing is a three-phase competition comprising dressage, cross-country jumping, and show jumping, it sounds like I have at least one more thing in common with Ann.  No.  Not really.  Top-level eventers will concede that dressage training improves their horses' abilities to jump, but mostly we all just get through it.  We call it "playing in the sandbox."  Or "dressidge," said with a fake snooty accent. 

My trainer Betty once sent me a Facebook post showing two portapotties.  The one on the left was a standard portapotty.  The one on the right was a deluxe, oversized portapotty with an added hand-washing station off to one side.  "Event on left," Betty wrote.  "Dressage show on right."

A food vendor sold me my standard bacon-on-white-bread sandwich early one cross-country morning with the comment, "We love eventers.  You people eat."  He added that the week before they'd worked a dressage show.  "We had to make them gazpacho."

There you have it.  Kim Bradley=sizzling hot bacon.  Ann Romney=cold tomato soup.

These People Left Too Soon

I just came back from the World's Most Relaxing Weekend, in which I slept very nearly as many hours as I was awake, to discover that last week my daughter (and I, since I'm her transport) missed yet another orthodontist appointment. 

I feel like I should care more about this than I do.  She's been out of braces for a year, so this is just one of those last checks where they tell her whether or not she still has to wear a retainer.  I didn't miss appointments when my children were actually wearing braces.  Still, it's a complete pain for the office to have her not show up, and then have to reschedule her.  I completely get that.  I seem to be messing up appointments a lot more in the past year than in all the rest of my life.  I think it's because my children have their own agendas now.  They're quite likely to text me from school or their friend's house or wherever and tell me that their plans have completely changed, and in the effort to remember everything I forget most of it.

Anyway, this weekend I read two obituaries of women I never met, and wished I had.  One was my friend Anne Howard's mother, Alexsandra Howard.  Anne was a classmate at Smith; she was unusual (at least to me) in that she was very involved with horses, but not with the Smith barn.  She brought a young horse to school with her and wanted more turnout for him than the very limited turnout Smith's stable offered; also, she did some sort of riding--I didn't understand it at the time--that wasn't the hunt seat riding we did at Smith. 

I learned to ride in college, culmination of a life-long dream, and threw myself into horses the way you'd run down the pier and belly-flop into a cold lake.  I was in over my head most of the time, never cared, and learned about everything side-on and with great enthusiasm.  Which is also pretty much how I approached foxhunting, when I got the chance to do that, and later my wonderful sport, eventing. 

What I knew in college is that all my horsey friends had great respect for Anne and didn't seem offended that she wasn't on the riding team or keeping her horse at the school barn.  I'm pretty sure it was Anne about whom my horsey friends said, in hushed voices, "She's an A pony clubber," an A rating being a huge achievement.  Anne did social things with the Smith Riding Club; my sophomore year, when we went to the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden, she spent a good part of the day teaching me about canter leads.

Here's what I didn't know:  Anne's mother, Alexsandra, was a world-class rider.  She represented the United States twice at the world championships in dressage, and would have been on the Olympic team in 1980, the year we boycotted the games.  She also rode hunters, evented, and helped a group of women form a vaulting team called the "Flying Buttresses."  Her obituary described a woman brimming with adventure, enjoyment, and achievement; in Anne's words, she "wasn't ready to go."  I haven't seen Anne since our graduating 24 years ago, but we're in touch via Facebook.  I'm very sorry I never knew her mother.

Then on Mason-Dixon Knitting I read about the death of Kathreen Ricketson, a forty-year old craft artist and blogger from Australia.  She and her husband had taken their two young children out of school for a year-long adventure around Australia.  Both she and her husband drowned, in view of the children, while swimming in the ocean.  It's horrible.  I'd never heard of Kathreen, but a few dozen bloggers added their tributes to her on the mason-dixon page, and now I wish I'd known her, too. 


A long time ago, someone I knew died, and that person's death seemed to increase, not decrease, the happiness in the world.  It was actually beyond horrible, to contemplate that.  I have wanted ever since to make the world better by what I did while I was alive.  Alexsandra Howard and Kathreen Ricketson did.

Messy Thursday

So, Tuesday afternoon, after the fabulous BFIA board planning session, I went home and got completely badass on my horse trailer.  My daughter and I pulled out the three (heavy, filthy, unwieldy) rubber mats that cover the floor.  My son hooked up 100 feet of garden hose.  I swept the aluminum floor clean, then used muriatic acid to get rid of the corrosion spots.  For the record, that's just another name for concentrated hydrochloric acid, so yeah, there I was in a horse trailer in 80-degree heat, wearing nitrile gloves, rubber boots, my "sheep" jeans (so-called because I wore them shearing sheep, hence the jagged cuts in one leg), a t-shirt I planned to throw away, and a respirator.  Because the acid reacts with the corrosion to form chlorine gas. 

After that I semi-power-washed the whole outside of the trailer with some sort of anti-mold soap spray I found at Lowe's.  The trailer had been looking a little green in some places, and I figured green = mold.  Anyway, it looked so much better when I was finished--all sparkling in the sun.  I left it all open to dry out.  My plan was that once the inside of the trailer was completely dry, I'd spray the floor with sealant (it's mostly covered with sealant already, but in some places the sealant had chipped away, and that's where the corrosion was setting in), put the mats back, re-bed with fresh shavings, and rejoice in one lovely clean trailer.

And then it rained for the next three days.

This would not have mattered at all if I hadn't needed to ship my daughter's horse up to the middle of nowhere, Virginia, to an experienced eventing vet, on Thursday.   (I know you're thinking, "What is an experienced eventing vet doing in the middle of nowhere?" The answer is, people have stashed a whole lot of horses in that particular nowhere, unlike, say, the nowhere in which I live.)  Anyhow, I did the math, and decided that my daughter and I would need to be on the road by 9 am.  On Wednesday night, watching yet another thunderstorm, I decided that on Thursday morning I'd wake early, alongside my husband who had to get up before 6.  I'd toddle out to the barn, to the trailer which would surely have dried off by then, and spray the doggone floor.  It would dry by the time I finished breakfast, and I'd throw the mats back in and we'd be golden.

But then I overslept.  When my husband got up I mumbled something incoherent and rolled over.  I didn't worry much, because I knew he'd kiss me good-bye when he went downstairs, and I'd get up then.  Only he didn't.  So when I finally did wake up, it was past 7:30.  Also, it was raining.  Pouring.

I shook my daughter awake and explained the situation.  The lovely thing about raising girls on farms with horses is that they don't fuss over a little dirt.  Now that the mats were wet and slippery my daughter and I could barely manage them between us, but she heaved and shoved and pounded them into place.  Our shavings bin out back, tarped against the rain, stood in a thick sea of mud we couldn't imagine getting a wheelbarrow through, so my daughter shoveled unused shavings out of the corners of the horse stalls, and shoveled that into the trailer.  She put the horses into the barn, fed them, and put the shipping wraps onto the ones going with us.

Meanwhile, I was hitching the trailer.  It's a known fact that when hitching, you either get the ball lined up correctly the very first time, or you have to try one thousand times, until you're so blindingly frustrated you smack the trailer with your fists and it bounces sideways an inch and drops onto the ball.  Since it was pouring, and I was running late, you can guess how the hitching went.  Uh-huh.  I started to sweat inside my rain jacket to the extent that I fogged the truck windows, which didn't help my hitching at all.  I stripped the jacket off, pounded the trailer with my fists, attached the breakaway chains, and stalked into the barn, where my daughter was singing a made-up song to her horse to the tune of "My darling Clementine:"  "Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my dar-ling idiot, you are driving me-e crazy, why can't you just stand still."

Then the horses (we took my mare up, too) didn't want to load.  Because, you know, it was raining, so it was a lot more fun to make the humans stand and get wet and wave their arms around.  But eventually they climbed in, onto the freshly-bedded mats on the floor, that I'll have to strip and wash and dry and seal whenever it does stop raining.  I took off my muck boots and put on my muck shoes, for the drive.  My daughter took off her hat and flung her wet hair over the back of the seat.  I turned on the truck.  I had no idea what time it was now--I wasn't wearing my watch, given the rain--but it felt like the morning so far had lasted three hours, maybe four, maybe seventy, and whatever else happened we were sure to be late.

The clock in the truck came on.  9:01 am.  My daughter and I laughed, high-fived, and hit the road.

Tornado Warnings

Yesterday at the start of our FIA board retreat, Tyler, our Executive Director, checked his cell phone for the latest death toll from Oklahoma.  One of the other board members shook his head.  "We're going to have to do something to make sure that never happens again," he said.

Do what? I wanted to ask.  At the risk of sounding insensitive, it's probably not possible and certainly not cost-effective, to make a school or any other building capable of withstanding a direct hit from an F5 tornado.  I grieve for those children, for all the tornado victims; we all do.  But, I think in part thanks to the internet, we're ending up with a skewed sense of risk these days.  Right now--this according to NOAA Weather Partners--the average number of deaths caused by tornadoes in the U.S. is around 0.1 per million of population.  That equates to roughly 31 a year.  It's a lot, but it pales in comparison to the rate for homicides among young black males (ages 10-24), of 558 per million.  Or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, 30 per million.  Or deaths by asthma, 11 per million.  You're one hundred times more likely to die from asthma than be killed by a tornado.  You're over a thousand times more likely to die from a car accident--and driving a car is two and a half times safer than it was back in the early 1970s, when I was rattling around loose in the back of a station wagon with my baby brother, the two of us happily unencumbered by seat belts or car seats.

The other day--before the Oklahoma tornadoes, for which he expressed profound sympathy--Pope Francis noted in a homily that in our media-driven world, the collapse of a bank is seen as a national tragedy, while the death of a homeless person too insignificant to mention.  That's not so much a skewed sense of risk as a skewed sense of priorities. 

I've been reading a lot about Haiti lately, in part deliberately, because my dear friend Sarah lives there, and in part because Haiti seems to keep popping up wherever I happen to read.  I follow a blog of a woman whose younger son was adopted from Haiti.  I sponsor two Haitian girls through Help One Now.  I know there are a ton of orphans in Haiti, due to the earthquake, the HIV epidemic, and parental abandonment from extreme poverty.  The most recent statistics say 440,000.  Five percent of Haiti's population: orphaned children.  I figured adoption was a pretty common solution, but I was wrong.  How many orphans adopted from Haiti per year?  About 200.  Which is to say, 439,800 weren't. 

If you want to get rid of the risk of tornadoes, you might be able to build a stronger school.  You might be able to build a school that was better designed.  You might be able to get better warning systems or a more efficient way of responding to them.  You probably can't eliminate the risk entirely, but, especially in an area prone to tornadoes, you might be able to substantially mitigate it, just the way that seat belts and air bags and antilock brakes have improved automobile safety.

What about the homeless?  Better mental health care--not nearly as easy as building a stronger building.  The orphans?  Better orphanages?  Maybe more adoption--but that becomes a slippery slope fast.  Orphan prevention, by addressing the causes of parental death and extreme poverty?  That's a very hard problem to solve.

I still think we should try.  You?

Summer Time

Here at the Bradley house, summer begins tomorrow at 11:40 am, when my daughter completes the last exam of her freshman year.  She's going to celebrate by joining me at Faith in Action for the last few hours of my usual Wednesday shift, something she actually thinks is fun.  She and my son both love the Wednesday crew at FIA.

We had a fantastic graduation weekend--a full house of family, a lovely graduate, three small lively nephews.  And I'd like to say one final time how very proud I am of my son.  Meanwhile, once all the family left, a sense of anti-climax--or was it exhaustion? crept in.  Yesterday morning, other than picking the old dog up from the kennel (he'd spent the weekend there so that he couldn't bite the babies), I could not think of one single thing I had to do.  Well, okay, laundry.  And the dishes.  But other than that?  Nope.  It was raining, which ruled out everything outdoors.  And I thought, nothing.  I want to do nothing.

So I did.  It was bliss.  I read a book about hoarding, and I ate crackers and bar cheese, and I napped.  And when I woke up I was amazed at the transformation.  First of all, I could think of several hundred things to do, and I did a half dozen of them immediately, with energy.

Second, I had slipped into summer.

Summer is our busybusy time.  We fill summer up, let it overflow.  My daughter has pony club camp and tennis and the regional pony club championships.  My son is going to the U.S. Open (golf) with friends, and to England with his Dad.  My husband is going to England with our son and to Atlanta to golf, and having friends come here.  I'm running the pony club camp (yikes) and competing my horse.  We'll take a family vacation in July and we're expecting lots of family for fireworks on the Fourth.  I wanted to take a few days to go visit Angelica, one of my fabulous horse trainers, but her schedule looks a lot like mine, except that our free days don't coincide.  We've had text conversations that have gone like this:  "The last week in May would work for me."  "No, I'm in Europe over Memorial Day weekend."  "Well, not Memorial Day weekend, I'm busy then, too.  How about the first week in June?"  "That might work!"  Later:  "No, sorry.  How about the week of June 24th?"  "No, sorry--I'm pretty much booked June 10 through August 5th."  "Okay.  How's September?"  Yesterday I tried to call her and her phone sounded funny, as though the ringing noise had changed to a busy signal.  A few minutes later she texted, "Can't talk--I'm at dinner."  It was 2 pm.  My time.  I thought for a moment.  She was already abroad.

Yesterday my son had had friends spend the night.  The friends arrived after my husband and I had gone to bed.  I tiptoed downstairs in the morning and was relieved to find the family room empty, since it's right next to the kitchen where those of us who hadn't just graduated high school were having breakfast at 6:30 am.  I was fiddling around--this was before I'd decided to do nothing, when I was still just aimlessly doing nothing--and one of my son's friends came downstairs, telling me sleepily that he had to get home so that the lady whose lawn he was supposed to mow could call and cancel, since it was raining.  "Okay," I said, "But first tell me, who is in this house and where are they sleeping?"

Driving John Rocco

Last week my children's former school, St. Anne Catholic in Bristol, VA, hosted John Rocco as their annual author.  St. Anne's hosts an author every year, which I think is absolutely a fabulous thing to do.  Kids get inspired to read and think about books when they meet at author; if the author's any good at presenting, they also learn a ton.

John Rocco was fantastic.  He's the same age as me, but came to writing through a circuitous route that involved, among other things, helping design rides at Walt Disney World and being an art director for the movie Shrek.  He won a Caldecott Honor last year for his book Blackout.  John was great at capturing the students' interest and taught them a surprising amount about how he uses colors to help carry emotion in his  stories.

I always help out for the author visit, in part because I'm such a nice person and in part because, living in the hinterlands as I do, it's a real treat for me to talk to another person in my field.  So on the second day of John Rocco's visit I volunteered to pick him up at the hotel, get him breakfast, and take him to the school.

You know how you become so totally used to something in your life, and then all of a sudden you can see it from an outsider's point-of-view?  Yeah.  That was my minivan when I was driving John Rocco.  I really am not bothered by my semi-derelict ten-year-old car.  I don't care much about cars.  The thing goes forward when I step on the accelerator, stops when I step on the gas, and doesn't leak when it rains; that about covers my needs.

But when John Rocco--who is completely friendly and very polite, and whom I did not suspect of making snap judgements about people based on the amount of grit in their cars--lest you think the problem was with him and not me--opened the door, I suddenly saw the hay, rubber orthodontics band, and used ballpoint pen sitting on the passenger's seat.  I swept those off, then reached down to move the 200-page manuscript out of the way of John Rocco's feet.  I opened the side door so he could put his bags in, implored him to move the tennis rackets out of the way, not to bother about those horse supplements, and, oh, right, those books can just be shoved farther in the back.  I couldn't put his bag in the very back because that space was filled with a lawn chair, several dirty saddle pads, and two trumpets in their cases.

Meanwhile the driver's side mirror sat on the little platform between the two front seats.  The space under the platform was home to a dressage girth, a broken piece of a bridle, a crushed box of Kleenexes, and the foreign language CDs I listen to when I'm trying to improve my mind.  And six pens.  And a novel or two.  Probably overdue from the library.

I hadn't dusted my dashboard in, oh, forever.  My daughter and her teammates had peeled off their name tags from quiz rally three months ago and plastered them onto the seats.  The cupholders held two hair bands, two bottles of eye drop samples, the keys to the tack room of the green barn, a pretty rock, and a handful of golf tees.  Also a granola bar.  Also my coffee cup, the one with the extremely vulgar statement about writing on it.  But that at least John Rocco understood.

So we drove off to breakfast and then to school.  And, on Mother's Day, my husband and children cleaned out my car.  Now I'm all set for next year's author.