gottawonder

Today I am grateful for:

A peaceful day at home, letting go of the frustrations of not being able to do anything on the house for a while, and just enjoying the above zero warmth and sun of perhaps spring.

I heard some geese today, the harbinger of spring in these parts. The other one is when the chickadees start saying "Cheeseburger" (a mating call? Why not. It works on us.). The other is the horses shedding, which has begun in earnest.

I let the goats and ponies out into their bigger pasture since I had time to stay with them (because of the threat of dogs to the goats, when they are in that pasture I stay with them or frequently check on them). The snow was pretty deep, but the ponies bucked and farted a bit, rolled in the clean snow, and were ready to go back to the small corral. Nothing to eat in the pasture yet, of course.

Wonder has what I am fairly sure is an abscess, so I am soaking her foot in warm water and epsom salt and leaving a poultice pad on her foot, and protecting it with a horse boot. We've done this a few times now.

I had a very long phone call with my sister E, which was exactly what I needed. Just a long, rambling yack about everything and nothing.

In our conversation, I learned something new about our Mom. I did know that Mom was raised Catholic, and our Dad was United, but I didn't know that she was shunned by relatives because she married a non-Catholic. Apparently we have relatives in the area she grew up, that didn't speak to Mom afterwards (from what I know, her parents did not shun her, but I bet they weren't happy). Mom never mentioned those people to me, and I always assumed that she didn't have much for family on her side because we never saw them or heard about them. They all lived about half and hour away from our family farm, and it was like they didn't exist.

I kind of frittered away the day, but that's ok. Sometimes I feel like there's a lot of pressure to DO SOMETHING.

Since today was St. Patrick's day, I kept seeing those kinds of things on Facebook, and one of them had a donkey in the image. There have been a lot of historical references to donkeys and mules in Britain and Ireland and I thought "How did they even get there, historically?" . Turns out, they were likely brought to England by the Romans when they invaded about two thousand years ago. That said, they weren't that common in Ireland until the 1500's, when England needed all the horses they could get for their many wars, and bought up a lot of the horses in Ireland, making donkeys important to do all the labor that used to be done by horses. In 1897 there were 247,000 donkeys in Ireland, mostly working on farms and pulling carts. Today there are about 5,000, mostly used for recreation or as pets.

Horses were not plentiful again until after World War I, the last time horses were used in war for Britain.

https://donkeysociety.ie/history-of-the-irish-donkey/