When I was young, Art Linkletter had a show on in the afternoons.  It was kind of a combination of variety and talk show I guess.  Can’t quite remember at this point, but he had a segment with young children called “Kids Say The darndest Things”.  He would ask them simple questions and they would come up with the most hilarious answers.  You’d wonder where they got that stuff from.  It was so popular that he wrote two books with their answers.

I’ve watched late night TV in the past couple of years, and I know some of the talk shows have sent people out on the streets and asked a passersby simple questions like who is the President of the United States and these college students would reply something like Abraham Lincoln or something so out of touch you wonder what rock they crawled out from underneath.

Now with horses, it’s not a matter of what they say, but what they do.  You walk out into a pasture and their eye lid is hanging off, or they’re waving their leg in the air, like “look mom what I did.”  Usually If you ask them, as I know we all have with the high-pitched question of “What Did You Do?”  They usually won’t discuss it.  It’s, “does it really matter? Just fix it.”  They almost look proud of their accomplishment or they have no idea what you are talking about.

You rack your brain as to what they got into.  They are in a horse safe pasture.  You’ll walk around and look for bits of hair or skin attached to something, but there is nothing to be found, and they are definitely not talking.  They go on as if nothing happened and you lose sleep wondering what went wrong.  Funny how that works.

The most trying thing is the length of time it takes them to heal.  Some horses heal very fast, while others are out of commission, what seems like forever.  I have one right now who, no matter what it is, takes forever to heal.  It doesn’t matter if it’s an eye infection, a bowed tendon, or a cut, she will take her good old-time getting back to normal.  She’s fine with it, I’m tired of it.  I feel like I’ve been wrapping her leg since the disco era.  I know it’s only been a couple of months, but it’s aging me.  A couple of months at this point in my life is like watching the “sands through the hour-glass” running out.  I feel like yelling at her “I don’t have that much time left on this side of the grass, you need to get better now!”  But she will just go about being herself.

Sometimes I swear they do it on purpose.  The day before a big competition, or whatever you had in mind to do, they will turn up lame or hurt.  We were up to five hunt horses so that we would always have a spare, and guess what?  All five would be broken, and I’d be borrowing a horse.  What is wrong with this picture.  I know it’s not just me.  About thirty years ago, in the Western Horseman magazine, there was a cartoon, and I’ve never forgotten it.  It was a picture of a cowboy standing there with his tack in his hands looking down at his horse.  The horse was laying on his back, with his legs in the air.  The caption was “Cut the dramatics Walter, you knew today was the trail drive.”  I laughed then, and I still laugh when I think about it.  It is so true.  Their timing is perfect.

So as we all know, there is never a good time for them to be hurt or sick, but they do seem to do it at “the darndest time.”