2026

I’m not doing horse goals this year, other than “keep Tristan happy and healthy.”

There is a certain relief in the goal that has always, always been the underlying, background noise goal and making it the one and only. That’s it – that’s all I have to do. Sometimes it’s trickier than others. This fall, he scraped a dime-sized piece of skin off his left hind (exactly like an overreach scrape, but on a hind leg, HOW?) and it took six weeks, two vet visits, prescription antibiotic cream, and daily rewrapping to close up. That’s how you know your horse is 30! Ten years ago, I would’ve slapped some corona on it and then forgotten about it.

On January 2, we hit an important anniversary: twenty years together, since he was delivered to me in Vermont (a different part of Vermont) and became mine.

Look at that fuzzy baby! That was taken the night we got him off the trailer. He was thoroughly unconvinced any of this was a good idea.

Here he is today, also unconvinced, but in this case expressing vocal displeasure at now being on second shift turnout on this very cold (1 degree when taken) morning.

Chores were hard this morning, in the way that sometimes things are just hard. I did all the right things – laid out my clothes, chose my layers with care, woke up an hour early and read and ate a good full breakfast with protein, felt mentally fine, had an engrossing audio book (The Rise and Reign of Mammals by Steve Brusatte) and yet. Hard. My fingers and nose and toes would not stay thawed; I had to ration my tack room breaks; I kept counting the stalls we had left and ticking them off in my head. Some days are just like that.