So, Why a Barn Fly?
Welcome to the first post from Maine Horse Trails and
Carriage Tales. The Roaming Stories of a
Maine Barn Fly. Yup, that’s the name of
it. That’s what I called it.
You may think, “Okay. I get the Horse Trails and Carriage Tales. You’re going to talk about horses and riding
and carriages and stuff. No-brainer
there, I get it. But a barn fly? Really?
That’s kind of…um…odd. I mean, who
wants to be associated with a barn fly?
You do know where they hang out
and what they walk on, right?” Let me explain:
I have the typical story of many little girls growing
up. I was CRAZY for horses. Every piece of paper had a horse scrawled on it. Every recess was spent chasing my other horse-crazy friends around the playground pretending to be horses. I had one of those bouncy horses with springs
mounted on an aluminum frame out in the barn of our suburban North Deering home
in Portland. I spent hours out there
with “Wildfire” (named after Michael Martin Murphey’s 1975 song) bringing her grass clippings for
hay and pulling her into her “stall” in the corner of the barn before Grampa
parked the old Ford Galaxy for the night.
Every horizontal tree branch around our house had an old rug thrown over
it and a rope tied in it for a makeshift horse.
The trail rides I took in those trees were the stuff of legends, even if
I did get thrown off my “horse” a few times and ate dirt. It was all part of the experience.
Fast-forward to my adult years, past high school and
college, past the marriage and the establishing of a career and the mortgage
and the kids and the soccer games and all the other grown-up stuff; the call of
the barn still buzzed in my head. I had
long since outgrown Wildfire and moved away from my childhood home with the
tree-branch horses. I finally got up the courage, saved a few
bucks and contacted a barn to inquire about lessons. OUCH.
Way too expensive! (See kids and soccer games, et-al above.)
They say, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” and I found
my way through the magic of horse-poop.
You see, horse barns are full of horses and horses are full of…well…you
know. It’s a dirty job but if you want
to be around horses and learn as much as you can about them you start, quite
literally, at the bottom.
Soon I was spending as much time as I could at the
barn. Scooping and mucking, lugging
water and hay and even sometimes getting to lead a horse from one stall to the
other. And I learned. I watched and asked questions and listened
and learned some more. I never missed
the farrier or spring shots or clinics. I watched other people’s lessons. I loved the aromatic scent of horses and
shavings and hay…and manure. I went from
one barn to another asking questions and listening to horse-people share their
stories, practices, routines, remedies—anything they would share related to
their horses. I learned that there are
as many was to do things as there are barns!
Some keep their horses out 24/7, some keep them in stalls; some feed this
while others feed that; some provide more bedding in their stalls and some
provide less. Some horses are shod while
others go barefoot.
In this blog, I will share with you the stories of the
barn, the horses and their people as observed by a fly on the barn wall. I hope you enjoy them.
