Spring Cleaning

Life is tough and keeps moving on, sometimes blind folding you just for spite and then rearranging the furniture so to speak, every time you just get to knowing the lay of the room. It's a contact sport, if you are going to live it to the fullest and get the most of everything you can out of it. That's how I perceive it anyway.

And one day it leaves you with walls in your house covered in pictures of horses and people who are just gone. Kids grow up and become adults making a living and a family and telling stories about when they were kids. Sometimes they tell stories about you.

Horses, well they are sold or retired or buried on the hill up near the arena. It's a business, and it's a living, and it's your dream all in one. Your dream in the black and white, bare bones and nitty-gritty of it. In the ugly and the beauty. That's life...the real one, not the social media one.

Taking a day to do some spring cleaning yesterday, I stood back and looked at our walls. They are covered in pictures. Every room. I realized that we have ghosts right here in our home, and they are welcome. I embrace them. There are dogs laying on the deck in the sunshine, and Evil the cat is sitting in the middle of the table where she isn't supposed to be and hasn't been for years. The kids who used to hang out here, the ones we never brought into this world and yet somehow ended up fully committed to loving, are out playing Man Tracker. In the front pasture, standing hip shot in the spring sun, is a black and white horse...and a buckskin...and a bay...and a big old chestnut Thoroughbred gelding I cuss out everytime I have to get off to open a gate. He's so dang tall! And he doesn't stand still...that's his kink; get on him on the fly and he won't buck.

So I dusted picture frames and ghosts yesterday; saying hello and goodbye to old friends, both two legged as well as four. I swept the floors and beat the rugs and did the laundry, and it was exactly the spring cleaning I needed. It was a good day to sit down and pull the blindfold off. To revisit times I had forgotten, to reminisce about old friends fallen by the wayside, and good horses gone.

I appreciate this life I've been lucky enough, and tough enough, to live. It's banged me up a bit, bruised me inside and out, but it's never broken me (the odd bone doesn't count) and it's given me far more than it's ever taken from me.