Maybe I'll Go Back to My Typewriter

The other day, in a fit of despair, I decided to hook up my new printer.

I despaired because I don't always like new things, particularly new electronic things. I still use my original Kindle from back when they were only books, no color, no internet. I happily drive a 2004 minivan. My laptop is five months old and still does these weird fits where I'm writing my manuscript and suddenly it shows me an email from several weeks ago, and I can't get the email off the screen, and I don't know why. However, the printer in my office had decided, after many smaller fits, to never work again, and it turns out I actually do need a printer. I bought one and carried it around in the minivan for a few days, and then realized I would actually have to take it out of the van and connect it to something.

It was a colossal pain in the neck. My previously reliable, though venerable (let's put it this way: we predate Windows XP) desktop computer kept insisting that it wasn't actually online, and the online thingy kept insisting that it was. Printers come with far too much intelligence these days, so I had to keep doing things--and then the computer would yell, "Offline!" even though it wasn't. My laptop was online and running smoothly, except that I kept getting frustrated when the desktop mouse wouldn't make the laptop cursor move--then I couldn't find a manuscript that I SWEAR I'd saved on my laptop, though as I type this I just had a brilliant thought, it might be on a USB stick. I might have written it when I was struggling with the Once and Former Laptop, ye of little memory and sluggish speed. Halleluia. Because of course that was the part that was pissing me off the most.

It wasn't an important manuscript. It wasn't a novel. But manuscripts of any sort are things I'm not supposed to lose.
 

After awhile, when everything seemed quite functional and normal (except the missing ms) I went away to brew a restorative cup of tea. When I returned the computer was broken. It seems to have committed suicide, which is startling, because I never knew it was feeling bad at all. Now this funky error message in a little box moves randomly across the screen, and that's absolutely all it does. I've restarted it several times. It does nothing else. I don't know what it means, and no buttons or combination of buttons or clicking or whathaveyou seems to affect it in any way.

Which means, probably, that I'll have to buy a new computer. And then I'll have to take it out of the box and plug it in, and probably teach it to go online and everything. It will be horrible. I've actually thought of abandoning the desktop machine and just using my laptop in my office. The problem is that I've got a lot of stuff taped to, leaning on, or hiding behind my desktop monitor. Get rid of it, and I'll have to clean. Hard to say which is worse.

The History Club

Yesterday I spoke at a meeting of the History Club of Bristol. The History Club was founded in 1931, and none of the current members recall why it was ever named the History Club, though some of them may have been members at the time.

From my perspective, it was lovely, and I hope they all thought so too, though I'm told I disappointed them by not bringing my dear husband along so they could admire the view. One woman, whom I'd not met before (I already knew several of the ladies there), upon hearing I was originally from Indiana, said, "Oh, so you must just love living here!" That, as my son pointed out when I repeated the comment to him later, is the essence of a Southern dig--sounds like a compliment, and it's only when you get home that you work out there's an insult in there somewhere. But it wasn't an insult to me, it was to my birthplace, over which I had no choice and can be given no blame. Plus, it was funny. Bless her heart.

From the meeting I went to Food City for groceries, but not my usual one--I was closer to one "by the Japanese restaurant." (This is how everyone in Bristol gives directions. Either "by" something else, or, worse, "by" where something else "used to be." I stopped at the fish counter to see what was fresh and the man working there said, "Hey, I recognize you from somewhere."

I took a look at him and suggested St. Anne's Church, at which point he started laughing and said of course St. Anne's. "You're the one that writes books," he said. (He recommended the potato-encrusted cod, which is the first time I've bought pre-encrusted anything. But it was very good.)

This is so typical in my small town. And I love it. I told the History Club the story of how I once fell sound asleep in the comfy chairs at our library, in front of one of the little gas fires, slept for two hours, nearly missed picking my children up from school, and woke to find a puddle of drool on my shirt. But at least my picture didn't get taken for the newspaper. It could have happened. Though I like to think that if one of the newspaper boys had dropped by, the YA librarian would have come to my defense.

Scratch that. I know her too well. She probably wasn't even at work that day. If she'd seen me snoring, she would have called up the newspaper boys herself.

What's a Sin?

When I was studying chemistry in college, I walked through the biochem labs one day and saw my friend Ruchira chopping up and blenderizing a very large heart. "Chira," I said, somewhat stunned, "is that a cow heart?"

Ruchira nodded. "I can never tell my mother," she said.

Ruchira's family is Hindi. Cows are sacred to them. Blenderizing cow hearts is, to them, a sin.

In pony club a few years ago, when we were making plans for the food for our end-of-the-year party, the mom of two of our members reminded us that they kept Kosher, which meant, in addition to no ham, no shrimp or other shellfish.  Eating ham or shrimp is, to them, a sin.

I grew up in a county with a high concentration of Amish people. They'll ride in a car if someone else drives it--say, to get to the downtown hospital, where there's nowhere to park their buggies--but to own a car, or drive it, would be a sin.

I'm Catholic. A few weeks ago, as I was driving a vanload of pony clubbers to quiz rally on a Friday evening, I told them we had to go to dinner somewhere I could get a decent vegetarian meal. I'm not a vegetarian, but on the Fridays of lent I don't eat meal; to do so would be a sin. We went to Ruby Tuesday's, where the Christians in my van who weren't Catholic--which is to say, everyone but me and my daughter, cheerfully ate non-sinful steak and turkey burgers while my daughter and I ate fish.

If I, a Catholic, marry via the justice of peace, my marriage is invalid in the church, although perfectly legal, and the relations I have within it are as sinful as if I were unmarried.  My atheist friend can be married beside a river by her best friend from kindergarten, and it's perfect okay.

I could go on.

I got some hate mail recently on the blog; it was, predictably, about my views on homosexuality. I understand that not everyone agrees with me, and I actually welcome conflicting views except when they're expressed with venom and hatred.

One person, instead of writing, "Kim Bradley, I disagree with you," wrote, "Writers must be unable to think." Really? All writers? Another--who may have been the same person, I haven't figured out how to tell--claimed that all gay people were "Tyrannical fascists."  Hmm. Some gay people, certainly. Every single one?

I could never tell you what All Gay People think, any more than I could tell you what All Straight People Think. I will point out that the Christian friend who reminded me not to judge Fred Phelps harshly is gay. I will say that my gay great-uncle was widely felt to be the kindest, most loving person in my family.

My husband called me out on doing the same thing recently, when he said that I was using the word Evangelical in my blog as though all evangelical people thought and acted the same way. He's right, and I'll try not to make that mistake again. One of the great things I've gained from working at Faith in Action is an understanding of how people of different beliefs can be united in Christ, not just divided by their differences. I don't know what doctrines Vic subscribes to, where he stands on gay marriage, transubstantiation, infant vs. adult baptism, predestination, or forgiveness of sins. I know Vic has the openest heart of anyone I've ever known, and I would never feel anything but love for him. I know that sweet Jackie, a Baptist, really does believe homosexuality is a sin, but also would never bring herself to condemn or judge another human being, not even me when I pointed out snarkily that Leviticus forbidsalso the eating of bacon. Jackie giggled, and said, "Well, I'll never understand it all," and that was the whole truth, so far as I could tell. We will never be certain. We will worship cows or avoid pigs or do whatever we feel we are called to. What we can't do is hate everyone who disagrees with us. You may believe something is sinful. I am not required to agree. We will not discover which of us is correct this side of heaven. ("For now I see as though through a glass, darkly, but then I shall see face to face.") I'm learning to be okay with that, and I hope that you are, too.

Ten Thousand Children: Two Days

Ten thousand children. That's how many lost their sponsorships in the two days between when World Vision publicly announced that they were willing to hire married gay employees, and when they reversed their decision.

World Vision had actually changed the policy several months ago, in recognition of the fact that many married gay Christians are fully accepted by their mainstream faiths. It was only when magazine Christianity Today threatened to make a big stink about the policy that the sponsorships hit the fan.

On the second of those two days, I sponsored a World Vision child. I didn't do it to make a statement about gay marriage. I did it because I'd been thinking about doing it, because I like World Vision's community approach, and because I could sponsor a girl in South Africa, one of my favorite countries in the world.

Her name is Sanele. She's seven. In her sponsorship photo she looks mutinous, as though objecting to her photo being taken. As soon as I hit the "sponsor" button I was invited to send her an email, which will be printed out in South Africa, translated into her language, and given to her.

I love World Vision because their approach works. Some of my monthly donation will go to Sanele, but most will be spent in her community supporting their specific needs. World Vision makes master plans for each community that involve working with local leaders, creating self-sufficiency, and ending their support within 15 years when the community has developed the resources to thrive on its own.

I love child sponsorship because it works, too, though not exactly how you'd expect. I read about it in a book--I think it was one of the Malcolm Gladwell ones, not sure--anyhow, they did a specific assessment of children who became sponsored when World Vision came into their community, and their very slightly older siblings, who weren't eligible to be matched. Everything else--home, family, community support--was the same. The sponsored children ended up staying in school longer and becoming more gainfully employed. The reason: because they'd been given hope. The biggest benefit to being sponsored was that, through the exchanges of letters and photos, they developed a relationship with an adult halfway around the world who cared for them and wanted them to succeed. I've always thought our relationships with each other were what mattered most, and this study, the first wholly independent one of any sponsorship program, proved it in spades.

Reaction to World Vision's announcement about not discriminating against gay couples was swift and furious. At World Vision headquarters, the phones rang 7000 times the first day.

A friend from my old writer's group has sponsored a child in Lesotho through World Visition for years. Eventually her relationship with that child turned into a love of Lesotho and a great interest in the children there. A few years later, she and her husband adopted their son from a Lesotho orphanage; while in the country, they also visited their sponsored child. The whole community came out to welcome them, cooking for them and sharing a meal. Their sponsored child was thrilled to actually meet them.

Yesterday that friend wrote on Facebook, "Ten thousand children just like my son."

The moment World Vision reversed their decision, their phones stopped ringing. They'd lost 10,000 child sponsorships in less than two days.

Once upon a time, in one of my stints as Acting Director at Faith in Action, the food pantry there ran exceptionally low, enough so that I went to Sam's Club and loaded up the shelves myself. My mother-in-law was helping me, as were my two children, who weren't yet in high school. As we worked, my MIL kept saying things like, "This is so wonderful, to be helping The Poor," and "Won't The Poor be grateful to have all this food?" It was getting on my last nerve, how she referred to The Poor as a separate type of human, wholly removed from herself, but I knew she meant well, more or less, so I ignored it.

My son did not. "Gram," he said, very politely, "Please quit calling them The Poor. We really don't know whether the people who come here are poor or not. All we know about them is that they're having trouble, and they need some help."

My son has always been capable of these moments of incandescent truth.

Many of the donors who dropped their World Vision children said that they made up for it by sponsoring a different child from a different organization. In other words, their sponsored child wasn't real to them. Despite the photos, despite the letters, despite the call to be in a relationship, they looked at the child they'd been matched with and saw The Poor. The faceless, undifferentiated Poor.

On Wednesday I sat on the back steps of Faith in Action talking with one of our clients. She wasn't eligible for financial assistance (we only give that every 6 months) but she'd come for some food. She works cleaning an elementary school, and didn't get paid because of spring break. Nothing left to eat, and her food stamps didn't renew until April 11th. We gave her what she could carry; she doesn't drive and it was a long walk home. Before she started out we talked for awhile. She needs a new job--school will be out for the summer soon--but her lack of transportation makes finding one difficult. Anyway, we talked for fifteen minutes or so. I didn't have anything to offer except that conversation. But I told her to come back next Wednesday if she wanted to. I'd be there.

This is Not A Hobby, It's Our Job

Yesterday a friend of mine, a fellow children's book writer, put up on Facebook for discussion a message she'd gotten from an irate parent at a school she was scheduled to do a Skype talk with. Skype talks are a new thing; instead of paying an author to make a visit in person, one pays an author for a Skype visit--no travelling expenses involved.

I've shied away from Skype school visits so far. I'm not really computer savvy, and while I have full confidence in my ability to hold the interest of 200 middle school students packed into a gymnasium in person, I'm not convinced I could do it from a little screen. My style is not flamboyant.

I ought to also confess that while I think I'm good at school visits, they require lots of preparation time and lots of energy; I'm not convinced that the amount I charge, though in-line with others of my experience and background, is really worth it to me. So I don't market myself very intensely, or pursue this line of business very hard. Others differ; for some writers, speaking engagements are a big part of their income.

If I do start Skype visits, I'll charge a pretty good fee per hour, because of the prep time, because I think my presentations have value, and because I need to make it worth my while. Nearly every published author charges for Skype visits as well as in-person ones, and it's the official policy of the
Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators that they should do so.

Apparently the school in which my friend is scheduled to speak decided to pass the cost of the Skype visit directly to the students: they charged $5 per child for the author Skype, and any child who didn't pay could not participate. Now I do think that is dreadful. I once, at a school visit, signed a book written by Betsy Byars, because a child asked me to--it turned out he was in foster care, he'd earned the book through participation in some school program, and it was the only book he'd ever owned. He was thrilled to have my signature on it. I don't think Betsy would have minded at all. I've been to plenty of Title One schools filled with kids who could never, ever, afford to buy one of my books themselves or pay for any part of my visit, and some of them are fantastic eager book-loving students who will get my books from the library and gain a lot from my presentation. But please note: it was the school's decision to charge the students, not my friend's.

So the parent email blasted my friend for not doing her Skype visit for free. The parent said that she volunteers at the school, so why wouldn't my friend?

Yesterday I also got yet another email asking me to contribute a signed book to a school's silent auction--this one was somewhere in Missouri. I get these emails so often you would not believe. Please note that the school, which I am not connected to in any way and have never heard of before, is asking me to take a book that I have personally paid for (I get a discount, but I don't get unlimited free copies), sign it, buy a padded envelope, drive to the post office, and pay for the postage to send it to them, which sounds like a damn lot of work given that they probably won't make more than ten bucks for it. So I don't give books. I'll happily give signatures. My standard response is that if they send me one of my books with a paid envelope, I'll sign it and mail it back. I've never had a school willing to do that.

Here are the things that the parent who blasted my friend doesn't understand, and the people who email me don't understand: 1) this is not a hobby, this is our job. Our real job, our bill-paying job. It's no more incumbent upon us to give their child's school something for free than it is for the teachers there to teach for free, or the custodians to clean the school for free, or the crossing guard at the school to wave her arms for free. I'm not being facetious: I love the crossing guard at my daughter's school, who is always cheerful and always keeps the students safe. I think she deserves to be paid. I think I deserve to be paid as well.

2) your school is not my children's school. Of COURSE I didn't charge my children's school for visits. Of COURSE I gave them signed books for fundraisers. But there are an awful lot of schools in the world. The parent who thought my friend owed her child's school something was not realizing that my friend has children and grandchildren of her own--that she has volunteered plenty where it matters to her.

I give signed books in support of any charity I feel personally called to. I'm speaking at a meeting of Bristol's History Club on Monday, and they've graciously invited me to bring books to sell. I could take the profits, but instead I'll ask club members to donate to Faith in Action, which will be win-win all around.

I'm sorry my friend got called out; I know she felt grieved. She didn't need to. I've heard her speak; the woman's amazing, and I would definitely pay to Skype with her.

P.S. When I speak at the Bristol Public Library, they honor me by insistently paying me the same as any other speaker who was not from our town. I pay them back in overdue fines.

Eggs with a Side of Grit

On days when my husband performs surgery, he leaves the house at 6:30 am. Since we have always eaten breakfast together as a family, this means that on surgery days we wake up at 5:30. However, between 5-hour tennis matches and homework, the last two nights have been kind of rough on our daughter, so this morning we let her sleep until 6 am. Because I'm such a good parent, I slept in, too--I'm generous like that. Then I roamed the house in search of a functional shower (oh, don't ask), got dressed, hollered a few times to be certain my daughter was awake, received reassuring replies, and went down to figure out what I could have for breakfast given that I needed to go to the grocery about a month ago and haven't.

"You want eggs?" I yelled.
"Sure," my daughter replied. She came down the stairs looking harassed. She'd had a nosebleed, she said, and it wouldn't stop. No big deal, she gets them all the time. I was happily chopping fresh parsley and green onions. "Are those eggs going to be ready soon?" my daughter asked, rather pointedly for someone who was getting a hot breakfast cooked for her.

I assured her that the eggs would be ready soon. She took the dogs outside, and when she came back in with them made a sort of noise at me which sounded like profound impatience. I was stirring eggs. You don't want to cook scrambled eggs too quickly, it curdles them. I poured myself some coffee and clicked on my phone to check Facebook. Stir, stir. Then I saw the time on the top of my phone.

"Is it seriously 7 o'clock?"

"Yes," my daughter hissed. Suddenly her impatience made a lot more sense. She leaves for school at seven o'clock.

Okay, so she ate the eggs, slurped coffee, and was out the door at 7:04. Crisis averted.

Here is the thing about my children: they amaze me. They are a long way off perfect--in fact, they are often annoyingly imperfect--but oh, my, are they amazing. Smart as whips, both of them. And both of them played, or play, high school sports. When they were little playing different sports in rec leagues I would have said that apart from getting exercise, their playing sports wasn't important to me. Now I see that I was wrong.

I've never been the sort of mother who gets angry on the sidelines. I still see athletic events as a chance to get a lot of knitting done.  I never charted my kids' stats, I didn't keep track of their league standings. I sometimes forgot to bring snacks when it was my turn. Especially in the soccer and little league years, I never cared how well they did, because it seemed miraculous to me that they could do any of it at all. My son could catch a ball! My daughter could run and kick! Honestly, my mental bar was set pretty low. I just loved to watch them play.

Yesterday I realized that I am glad they play sports for a different reason. Sports aren't easy. Sports are a struggle. Both of my children have found school work easy, at least through high school, and while we've always stressed the importance of hard work, there's really no way to make homework difficult when it simply isn't. When your kid breezes through it. But I want my children to know the value of not doing well, of fighting and struggling and sometimes getting it right and sometimes getting it wrong. I want them to understand that the world doesn't end if they fail at something. I want them to understand what failure feels like, and also success; I want them to know that they can work really hard at something and still not be as good as the talented slacker next to them. Forget stats. I'm about grit, and grit is something sports have taught my children.

Yesterday my daughter's tennis team played one of their divisional arch-rivals. In singles my daughter went down 3 games very quickly. She muttered to herself, hands on hips, got her game face on, kept trying. She fought back. She lost. At the end of singles, the teams were tied, 3-3.

My daughter has a new partner for doubles this year and they suit each other well. They went ahead early, but the other team came back, and then it was tied. Then my daughter served and won. It doesn't sound like a big deal, and in the grand scheme of things it wasn't, but I'll say that her serve is the weakest part of her game. That her overall play is much better this year. That performing under pressure isn't easy, and that she played very well when it mattered most.

She threw her arms in the air, and then she threw them around her partner, and then she threw them around her coach.  One of the other doubles pairs won, and one lost, so my daughter's team won the match. Later her coach came up to me. "She's a fighter," he said. "I like that."

Oh, me too. Me too.

An April Morning on the Farm

Usually when the rest of the family leaves, I settle down to writing first thing. I work best that way. But this morning I'd agreed to do morning chores for my friend who boards his horse, Syd, on our farm. All I had to do was give Syd his morning grain, give a token handful of grain to Shakespeare, our elderly pony, who is Syd's best friend and spends the night in the barn with him, and then turn them both out into the back pasture.

But it was such a lovely morning. Overcast, with more than a promise of rain, and yet warm enough that even I could be outside with just a sweatshirt (and pants. I promise I wore pants). The air smelled of the newly greening grass and the robins were fighting for good spots to build their nests. The plum trees in the orchard, which I have been planning to prune for months now, are blooming, meaning I won't be pruning them anytime soon. It was a fine morning to be outside.

So, after I fed Syd and Shakey, I decided to move Gully and Hot Wheels into the old sheep pasture. Gully, my first event horse, and Hot Wheels, my son's old pony, are both retired. They're also both metabolically challenged, in that they could grow fat on a asphalt parking lot, and keeping them to a weight that doesn't kill them is a perpetual issue. I let them graze in the big field in the dead of winter, when the grass was sere and brown: they plumped up like Thanksgiving turkeys. A month ago I moved them into the "pony paddock," a third of an acredirt  lot at the back of the barn. I put them on a strict diet of 8 oz grain and 2 flakes grass hay per day, and guess what? They've barely lost a pound.

Anyway the pony paddock needs a break--it's a mess. What it really needs is a good hard rainstorm and then a few days baking in the sun, which it might get, given the forecast. So I poured 8 oz grain in two buckets and went out to the ponies. They milled around me, desperate for food, until I opened the door to the adjoining sheep paddock, which is also about a third of an acre in size. We tilled it last fall, because our sheep dog had dug so many deep holes in it. I really need to reseed it but I haven't done that, either, so it's perfect for the chubby ponies, little sparse tufts of grass but nothing overwhelming. Grain graingrain, they thought as they followed me to the gate. Grain grain OH. Grass. Both ponies slammed their heads to the ground, ignoring the grain buckets entirely. I moved a water trough into the field and filled it, but for today giving them hay will be a colossal waste of time. And hay. They're happy.

Back in the pony paddock, I dumped the trough there and left it on its side to drain. Put Shakey's grazing muzzle--sugar is bad for him, so we have to restrict his grass intake, too--on him, then let him turn himself out while I haltered Syd and led him to the field. Syd danced and cavorted. Shakey looked disapproving. He usually does. "C'mon, Boo-Boo," I said. He cut his eyes at me. Don't call me Boo-boo, bitch.

I called the other horses--Sarah, Mickey, and Pal--up from the big field, then tended to chores in the barn, cleaning Shakey's stall and rebedding it, and making his hay mush for the night (he's so old he doesn't have many teeth left, so he can't chew hay that hasn't first been soaked). It was too early to feed the cats but I gave up and fed them anyhow, after tripping over them half a dozen times. I straightened up the manure pile (why am I the only one who straightens the manure pile?), cleared away the hoof shavings in the wash stall (ditto; why??), set up the grain for Sarah, Mickey, Pal. Then I went out to the big field.

They were far down in the bottom, ignoring me. They like me, and they like grain, but grain is nothing really compared to the glory of spring grass. "Saaar---ahhhh!" I called again.  "Dinnnnnner!" Sarah looked up. She loves me, adores me, usually comes running when I call. She bobbed forward happily, then disappeared from view as she got to the base of the small hill in the field. I waited to see her ears coming over the crest of it. Meanwhile my daughter's horse, Mickey, turned his back to me. Old Pal, another retiree (for the record, that's 4 retired horses, 2 we can ride, and Syd), looked up quietly. He conserves his energy, and I knew he'd never move until Mickey did.

I waited. Waited. No ears. Then I saw Sarah trotting away from the base of the hill, ears perked gaily, tail held high. It was one of those days. Spring gets to them, I swear.

"Sarah!" This time I went with the Authoritative Voice. She swished her tail. Mickey, unexpectedly, wheeled around and began to run toward me, which made Sarah run (everything's a race) and even Pal start forward at his steady walk.

They got to the top of the hill and slammed to a stop, staring at me. "Oh, for heaven's sake," I said.  "Come on."

Nope. Nope. Dancing, prancing, a whole bunch of snorting. Meanwhile Pal continued forward progress, and it was only because the other two couldn't stand to have him pass them that they approached the barn at all.

WILD SPOOK!  Horrors!  There was something Very Scary near the barn! The water trough in the pony paddock was laying on its side. Clearly it had eaten Gully and Hot Wheels, and was coming after the three of them next.

Huh. Eventually I got them all inside. Sarah finished quickly--big mouth, small serving--and I haltered her for our planned work for the day, which was 15 minutes of walking on the concrete driveway. We're doing that 3 times a week now--Sarah has a weak ankle ligament and this strengthens it. We march down the drive to the second lamppost (just before the drive gets steep) and back, over and over. Sarah finds this inutterably boring. But, she says, better than that effing dressage.

Yesterday I rode her very carefully and precisely in our dressage arena, mostly at the walk, mostly working on an exercise Betty gave me in Florida that is easy to do but hard to do right. Chin up, I tell myself. A boob on each shoulder. (Don't ask; it makes sense to me.) Keep your hips swinging. But doing all that at once is like walking and chewing gum at the same time, and I manage to screw it up. Sarah's back goes tense: I've stopped my hips. I lose her shoulder: I'm looking down. I lose her hind end: could be anything. After awhile Sarah, who actually only wants to jump things, grew so frustrated she let out a huge buck and nearly had me off.

"I hope you smacked her," my daughter said. I said no; it had not been a smacking sort of a day. You pick your battles with horses. Especially mares.

So now we're walking, walking, clomp clomp on the concrete, and Sarah is sighing with the sameness of it all. I'd latched the stall doors but not double latched them, and Mickey, who's done eating and is dying to know why Sarah's on the driveway, wiggles the bolt loose. He bursts into the field like the racehorse he used to be. This livens things up. Sarah wheels around. Mickey farts, bucks, rears. He races along the pasture fence beside the driveway. See, Sarah, I'm faster. I'm faster. I'm winning.

It's so annoying. Sarah can't go faster, because I'm holding her back. She never does beat him anyway. Pal hangs his head over his stall door, chewing. He could be watching a good movie from the look on his face. Mickey runs, spooks at the overturned trough--"it's not even in your field, doofus," I yell--bucks, runs some more. It's no wonder that of all the horses, he's the only one we can't keep weight on. He never stops moving.

Sarah and I finish her walk. She sighs and lowers her head so I'll pet her. When I turn her out, she marches straight to the pony paddock side of the pasture. She stares hard at the overturned water trough, then, snorting, runs down the field, Mickey and Pal trailing behind her.

It's very good to be on a farm in the spring.