Look Paul! I must have stolen a horse!!

My friend, Paul from the other church, has been taking riding lessons for over a year and finally bought a horse.  It is a match made in heaven.  As for me, I have always been afraid of horses.  Have you seen their teeth?  Those things are huge and I do not want to make one of them mad and have it bite me.  I am doing  very well with the cat and 2 dogs that reside with me.  We get along pretty good as long as I keep the groceries coming and the bed warm and the water dish full of fresh H2O.  But something has happened to make me question whether I have perhaps been living alone to long.  I did harvest the grapes and make juice which I drank all of it, but it was not made into wine so it should not affect me at all.

These are my grapes.  I only have one vine left, but they are the dark blue Concord with seeds.  Baby eats them by the handful, bug, bird poop and all so I figured I better get them picked and processed if I wanted them.  Best juice ever and not a drop of sugar in the whole gallon of juice.  If I were a jelly eater, I would have made jelly, but I am not so I just drank it all except what I shared with Baby.

This is my Climbing Cecile Brunner which did not bloom this spring at all.  I was very disappointed, but on a day when I was sad I looked at the bottom of the bush and here was a pretty little rose just for me!

But, now this is what happened the other morning.  I got up and went outside to hop in the mobile and go some where.  I passed this on the way to the car and did a double take.  What!  That looks like horse dodo.  Upon closer inspection it turned out that it was indeed horse leavings on my front lawn.  I was pretty sure I did not have a horse when I went to bed and upon further investigation I could not find one of the big hairy things anywhere on my property.  Not any on the neighbor lady's premises either.  I am very happy that I lock the doors at night, because Lord only knows what might turn up in there if I am not careful.  I do recall in the early years of homesteading out here on the Mesa that I had planted Tulips across the front of the house and I came back from town to find a big cow munching on the.  That was sad to stand and look down in the ground and see spots of yellow, red, and orange which would have one day been tulips.

I also recall coming home one evening about dusk and seeing 3 baby skunks playing on the grass.  My Chile dog used to get sprayed by skunks on a regular basis.  The remedy for skunk spraying is a bath in tomato juice.  After going through 40 quarts of tomato juice one season, I finally talked to the dog groomer and she told me she used Massengill Douche Powder.  That was way better.  Course the druggist looked at me a little strangely when I told him I wanted a pound of the stuff!  I was a tad naïve in those days.

Snakes and foxes, coyotes and chicken hawks.  centipedes and mice.  Always something creepy, crawly, or slimy set to ruin my day.  But I love my little piece of earth out here and I love my little 2400 square foot house.  I guess if strange animals wander in and relieve themselves on my yard, I can live with that.  I am not real fond of cleaning the house or burning the weeds or any of the mundane chores that daily life requires of me, but it is what it is and if this is the worst thing fate can throw me, I can live with that!