There are obviously a great many things I could or should write about right now, and I hope to do so with some planned time off, but for right now I wanted to capture something from my lesson this weekend.

Tristan and I are still learning how to communicate with each other without a bit, and it’s mostly going pretty darn well. One thing that stays the same is getting and keeping him forward.

On Saturday, we worked and talked a lot about how he feels when only one half of his body is responding well. By that I mean sometimes his hind end will speed up nicely, but his front end is still dragging, so he sort of buries himself on the forehand in a very sticky way. Sometimes his front end will be ticking along but his hind end drags, which means he falls out (literally, sometimes his whole hind end just collapses because he cannot even) or contorts himself to avoid working it.

We thought and talked a lot about it and I had a really good breakthrough that made sense to both of us and was an instantaneous improvement in the quality of his gait – how often does that happen?!

In short: as we’re going into the corner, he got a tap behind the girth with the dressage whip to remind him to keep up with his hind end and step under with his inside hind. This in addition to a bending aid to ask him to follow through the corner with his whole body.

Coming out of the corner, as I straightened him again, I tapped him on the shoulder with his dressage whip to remind him now that he’s straight and we have captured and translated the power from his hind end, to lift with his front end, too.

BOOM. Somehow that just worked for his brain. Deep bendy flexible corners with real energy straight through coming out of them. String a bunch of those together and he was really cooking along.

It’s not an every corner thing, but it was a brilliant short exercise to sharpen him up. I may try it in the future on a circle if I can get my timing down – behind the girth on the “points” and in front of the girth on the curves between.

I logged into Facebook for about two seconds for something from work, and this was today’s memory, 8 years (!) ago.

Context: we were trying to school him to land and go forward, instead of land and quit because jumping was just SO EXHAUSTING. So my instructions were to rev him up as soon as he found his footing on the other side of the (BN sized) log pile.

(would going forward have been helped by me sitting back and loosening my elbows and generally not choking him? yes. yes it would have.)

As you saw on Monday, Tristan’s mouth is kind of a mess right now. Hopefully it will just be a small mess for a short time, but no matter how bad and how long it gets, I’m going to take this moment to explore bitless options for him.

Step 1 will be an English-style hackamore, for two reasons: the barn has one I can borrow immediately and on Friday I’m planning on heading down to a local tack store’s tent sale, and they have a cheap hackamore in stock.

I’ve never ridden in a hackamore. I’ve ridden in sidepulls and halters, and some bits with leverage, but never a true hackamore. I’m not looking for anything with a ton of leverage – just a mild communication device until we can see where we are with his teeth.

So: any advice from anyone on riding in one? I figure I will use soft hands and let him seek it out in our first experimental ride, and I do have a lesson on Sunday that I can use to get more experienced feedback.

Step 2 I’d like to be a true bitless system. In a perfect world, that would look something like this converter from Thinline. (If I could find it in stock anywhere, this would actually be step 1.

Or, even better, something with a bit of under-chin leverage like the Dr. Cook system.

I’m not ready for a whole new bridle, though, and at $100 it’s just expensive enough (especially with looming and potentially quite large vet bills) for me to not want to give it an immediate try.

Does anyone out there regularly ride with a bitless solution? What do you use, and how do you like it? Any special advice on hackamores?

sigh.

I went to the barn this morning for what was supposed to be a quick vet visit. I actually hadn’t met our new vet yet, so I wanted to do that, plus barn time in the middle of the day sounded great.

On the docket: teeth and a lyme shot.

We got 95% of the way through the visit with no incident, I like the new vet very much, we even did a sheath cleaning while he was drugged up, and then the vet swiped his hand around in Tristan’s mouth one last time…and found a nasty little surprise on the left lower side of his mouth.

This is where I confess to an area of total ignorance around horses. You see, Tristan is the only horse whose mouth I’ve ever known so intimately. I do not have a ton of comparisons; I just have not looked deeply inside a lot of mouths.

So I did not realize that he did not have normal canine teeth. They just weren’t there…so I didn’t think about it. He’s had half a dozen vets in his mouth and no one has ever pointed out anything abnormal.

Well, Tristan does not have normal canine teeth. His lower canine teeth are what I now know as “blind” canines: they just never erupted. He has an abnormally wide space for his bit groove. I had absolutely no idea.

Except now one of them has erupted. Sort of. Or more accurately, it somehow got infected and the gum is open down to the tooth. Which is obviously NOT GREAT. And the cherry on top of NOT GREAT is that if we can’t halt the infection, it’s a difficult surgical process to extract it. (And expensive. Don’t forget expensive. Two days at a clinic expensive.)

So for now, he gets antibiotics and flushing 2x a day, and the x-rays we took are off to a specialty radiologist. The vet thought, on first glance, that the root of the tooth looked okay and that if we can beat the infection then the gum will just re-granulate back over the tooth and he will go back to being a weirdo without a canine tooth. (Well, it’s there – they both showed up on x-ray – but they are both below the gum line.) Hopefully the radiologist will concur.

I mean, the silver lining here is that he has exhibited no signs of pain or sensitivity (I’ve been riding regularly and he had a very intense lesson yesterday), no signs of quidding his hay or otherwise having trouble eating. When we found the infected bit it’s not like we had an OMG PUS moment, just a “well shit, dig it out, okay, there’s clean blood” moment; it doesn’t look great but I’ve seen some nasty infections and I would not classify this in that category. Plus, if we do have to extract, that’s obviously expensive and difficult but barring a problem with the procedure itself it’s not like he needs the tooth.

HORSES.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: The Duty of the Black Writer during Times of Unrest from tor.com

extraordinary and gut-wrenching writing

The Ones Who Stay and Fight by N.K. Jemisin

short fantasy story that hammers very close to home right now, and if you are at all interested in reading fantasy and haven’t yet read N.K. Jemisin then RUN, don’t walk, to your nearest independent bookseller and treat yourself. (If you have read them and love them, this NYC bookseller is offering up the trilogy for $30, and they’ll donate them to the NYC Books Through Bars program.)

The Horse Women of Cincinnati by Nicky Drayden

another short fantasy story by a woman of color that…well, read it.

2020 Queer Adult SFF Books from K.A. Doore

SUPERB list and the descriptions of the books alone are worth the price of admission.

How can I be more aware and not a jerk at work? from Ask a Manager

These are all exceptionally helpful reader comments, and many of them apply to life as well.

What are you reading right now?

I’ve slacked on these, but here we go.

Horses

1. Ride a First Level test at one of the two barn schooling shows – okay clearly this is not going to happen BUT I have plans
2. Take notes (however brief) on every ride – Still going strong!
3. Clean tack at least 1x a month – hahahahaha. no.
4. Volunteer at 3 events – sigh.
5. Take 25 lessons – 14/25 on track nicely
6. *Reach goal: Go to Crossfit 100 times (or roughly 2x a week) for additional fitness – This is proving hard to track but I am mostly happy with it. Last week I re-aggravated my SI but I’m hoping to get back again next week. I would say on average I’m on track for 2x a week.

Business

1. Keep up with monthly expense/revenue tracking – really struggling with this
2. Maintain 100 listings in the Etsy store – I keep getting up there and then sliding back
3. Mustang gear goes live – honestly not sure if this is going to happen; I am more than busy with my current stuff
4. Sponsor 5 riders – I need to get back on this
5. Table at a horse show – FFS
6. *Reach goal: Get to 1000 sales on Etsy – 754/1000, holy shit you guys, this is really happening

General

1. Try 25 new recipes – okay I have definitely nailed this by now though I lost track
2. Try making: croissants, eclairs, cinnamon rolls – cinnamon rolls check!
3. Declutter in February – okay I got halfway through this so I need to find some way to carry out the back half of this
4. Finish 5 craft projects – 2/5 done! do endless masks count as a craft project?
5. Finish upstairs bathroom, front guest bedroom, and nook room – nope.
6. *Reach goal: submit Morgan article for publication – well…no. but I did get pulled into another cool Morgan horse history project, so there’s that

Like many, I have been ill while watching the news lately. It is not a surprise or shock to me that I am part of a racist system. But I have not done enough. I also know that this is not about me, so here is my goal: to talk about equestrianism as a racist system, and to make space for voices of color.

Think about the last horse show you attended. Think about the fellow boarders at your barn. Think about the kids in your lesson program. Think about the Instagram accounts that you follow and the blogs that you read. Think about the models who show off new tack and clothing trends in catalogues. The overwhelming majority of them are white. Maybe they’re in fact exclusively white. Has that ever occurred to you? Maybe, if it has occurred to you, you thought it was just a coincidence.

It’s not a coincidence. No space that is exclusively or near-exclusively white is a coincidence. It is a deliberate, systematic erasure accomplished through a variety of ways: careful stacking of privilege, intimidation and bullying, and then careful removal. Black people, and more broadly people of color, have been closely associated with horses for as long as human beings have been.

It’s important to know, understand, and sit with that. Equestrianism is not neutral. It is not an escape – or if it is those things for you, then that’s a sign of your own personal privilege. What are you going to do about it?

Below, I’ve tried to gather a collection of links that represent people of color in the horse world, both past and present. If you have something to add to this list, please leave a comment. I will continue to update this post. I will also continue to update as I do more of my own research. If you want to start to undermine the whiteness of equestrianism, start by listening to these voices.

First: an excellent roundup by L. Williams of Viva Carlos here: So You Want to Be an Ally… I will not duplicate any of her work in this post; you should read it in her own words and appreciate the work she did to pull it all together.

Instagram Accounts

@alexgreerdressage
@theblackequestrian
@dressagebyjayne
@worktoride1
@theconcrete.cowgirl
@cowgirl_chanel
@chetakhorses
@ctc_dressagequeen
@comptonjrequestrians
@urbansaddles
@theurbanequest
@urbancowgirlsllc
@ebonyhorseclubbrixton
@breexybby_
@stephkall
@thepersistentequestrian
@clipclopbook
@theericahills
@fitjumperrider
@itstheajway
@youngblackequestrians
@detroithorsepower
@equestriannoire
@comptoncowboys
@saddleupandread
@theblackcowgirl
@urbancowgirl510

Blogs

Viva Carlos
Ambitious

Podcasts

Young Black Equestrians

Books & Articles (~ denotes a children’s book)

No Room for Bigotry in Equestrian Sport from Horse Nation
Buffalo Soldier from Wikipedia (includes a list of Medal of Honor recipients)
The Kentucky Derby’s Forgotten Jockeys from Smithsonian Magazine
Cheryl White was first out of the gate from The Undefeated

Nonfiction

Race Horse Men: How Slavery and Freedom Were Made at the Racetrack by Katherine C. Money
Beautiful Jim Key: The Lost Story of the World’s Smartest Horse by Jim Eichler Rivas

Fiction

~The Last Black King of the Kentucky Derby by Crystal Hubbard
Buffalo Soldier by Tanya Landman (YA)

Equestrian Organizations & Businesses (* donates that they accept donations as a nonprofit)

*Saddle Up and Read (and their GoFundMe) (I will post further about this excellent organization shortly.)
*Work to Ride
*Compton Jr. Equestrians
*Urban Saddles
*The Urban Equestrian Academy
Equestrian Noire

I am going to try to get into the swing of these, if only because maybe that will force me into some more work to show you?

I am really terrible at yard work and having a lawn, and one benefit to mostly being stuck home has been that I have had the time and opportunity to try and get a little better.

So here, an assortment of small projects.

First: cutting waaaaaay back on a rogue forsythia bush and then rucking up and replanting the soil around its former base so it’s part of the yard again. The grass seed has caught quite nicely.

Then, see that fence in the background? It edges the yard and delineates the drop off for a quite steep hill down to a back quarter-acre lot that we also own and let run totally feral. It was in really tough shape. So we got a post hole digger and re-set several pieces of it.

Oh, and I also raked the whole yard pretty obsessively and cleaned out and redefined the bed of perennials you can see in one of those photos.

I also was gifted many perennial plantings from a friend and pulled out some old granite edging I had salvaged from a work thing to try and claim another part of the yard. I have more work to do with this to weed and keep adding plants so it looks more finished, but it’s a start.

And last but not least we had a fairly epic job of weeding to clean out & plant various garden plots. No photos of planting because I left my phone inside but here’s my husband weeding the herb garden.

I fell victim to the run on garden stores this year, so we’ll see what I am able to get in the ground (I did not start seeds, which was dumb of me).

Allow me to be the umpteenth million person to say: these are strange times.

It seems like I can never quite get everything going even moderately well at the same time. In the last week, it’s been work and the barn. Though I have the kind of job where you can never ever feel like you’ve done enough, I’ve actually been doing pretty darn well – using my time fully, thinking on my feet, taking care of loose ends. At the barn, I’ve been really happy with Tristan’s slow climb back to pre-closure fitness. I’ve been using up my scheduled time fully to groom him to a fare-thee-well, and after two weeks of rides he’s already measurably a little bit more fit.

(In another universe, last weekend would’ve been our First Level debut at our local schooling show, but mostly I don’t think about that. One of the nice things about having a 25 year old horse that you’ve owned for 15 years is that there are literal dozens of missed opportunities in our past, and they make this year’s sting a little bit less.)

On the other hand, other parts of my list are a real struggle. Things both important and not are getting left behind because I just can’t muster up enough brain power to focus on them and force myself through. I’ve had “vacuum living room” on my to do list for two weeks. It takes maybe 15 minutes to vacuum the living room. Last night when I did a kettlebell class I was actively grossed out by how full of dog hair the rug is. Did I vacuum after that? No. I played Stardew Valley for an hour before dinner. Or, I’ll just forget about things. Walk off with a slice of banana bread on a plate on the counter and discover it 2 hours later. Put something in front of the garage door, go inside the house to open up the garage, and then completely lose track of what I was just doing and never open the door.

I am stuck between the eternal feeling of “if I just wrap up these obligations/projects/to do list items then I’ll feel like I have a clean slate and get better balance!” and “but what if finding 8 new exciting projects will give me the energy I need to just be awesome at everything?” Both are equally unrealistic, especially for me.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about phases of quarantine. For me, they seem to last about two weeks.

There was the two weeks where I could not physically get enough sleep. I would sit down to read and fall asleep. I could not get out of bed in the morning. I would go to bed right after dinner and just pass out.

There was a two week stretch where I worked out, hard, every day. Every single day. I crushed the at-home WODs, I walked or ran with the dog for miles. I was antsy to be up and doing, I raked the yard endlessly, I cut back bushes, I re-seeded whole sections of the yard, I worked on the upstairs bathroom.

There was a two week period where I made four batches of chocolate chip cookies and only sort of worked out once or twice, but read a ton. I could not put books down, I could not get enough of them. I was ransacking my shelves to make stacks for when I finished the one I was on.

Right now, I’m in the middle of a stretch of not sleeping at all, really. I stay up until midnight, and my body won’t go back to sleep after my first alarm at 6am. For someone who usually needs 8 hours, minimum, my body is not happy with this, but it also won’t fix it. I haven’t had this much trouble sleeping since before grad school, 10 years ago now, when I was so constantly overwhelmed and stressed and exhausted that I completely fucked my body up and subsequently changed my entire lifelong relationship to sleep. (Prior to that, I’d been a terrible sleeper; during and after, I could put head to the pillow and drop off instantly.)

In Vermont, though our numbers are among the best in the nation by every measure, though I have my barn time and my gym time back (outdoor classes + Zoom classes, with an announcement expected soon about in-person), though I feel more secure about our grocery situation and have had a few carefully socially distanced visits (outdoor picnics for the win!)…it still feels like we’re holding our breath. I still feel like something broke that can’t or won’t be fixed. Maybe that’s dramatic. I don’t know.

Anyway, with that meandering. Tris is going well. I have actual horse content planned soon. Just needed to process my brain a little bit this morning.