Ginger Rogers is off to the vet this morning. I want the doc to have a look at her belly-bomb. It is now the size of Guam and is leaking fluid in torrents.
Trailering horses is a nightmare. I just don’t do it often enough to get good at it. I am a lone crone, so even getting the trailer hitched up to the F-350 takes several lifetimes, and that’s with a tailgate camera. When it’s all put together the rig is about 40 feet long. You should see me backing that thing up. High comedy.
Then there’s loading the horses. Godferbid that Pearl, for example, should ever have to go anywhere; loading that loony mare requires an elite team of psychiatrists, Buddhist monks, massage therapists, bartenders, and ninjas. And that’s just my support team. The horse requires a pastry chef.
Sure, she can be lured in with exotic delicacies all right, but she’s no fool. She knows what’s coming. In her mind the dinging of the butt bar bolt is like unto the slamming of a coffin lid. So she dashes in, snatches a bite of your bananas Foster or carrot Wellington in peppermint aspic or what have you, and then backs right out again, licketty split, before you can hot-foot it around back to shut her in.
But that’s not the worst part. When it’s time to bring her home from wherever she was, it is a foregone conclusion that she will not re-enter the trailer under any circumstances. The strain of the trauma is too fresh, sting of my betrayal too sharp. So, no, she’ll be staying right here in this parking lot where it’d be 120 degrees in the shade, if there were any shade. This melodrama will ensure that complete strangers — universally icky backyard amateur dudes with offensive chivalric impulses — can stroll over with their vast horsemanship skills and offer to snap dressage whips at her, or hit her with brooms, or back her up in punitive circles, or whatever other asinine technique they saw on RFD-TV. This happens literally every time.
“No thanks,” I say. “Possibly — though I doubt it — your deadhead quarter horse responds swimmingly to brute force, but I assure you that if you swat this hot little Arab with a broom she will kill us all and then herself.”
Roiling beneath the surface of so many of these horse dudes is a real connoisseurship of sadism and exploitation. It’s pretty amusing the way they get so pissy when I spurn their “help.” See, they don’t really want to help me at all, they just want to assert their dudely superiority, enjoy a bit of mansplaining, get the crowd on their side, and receive applause for solving the little lady’s problems. I know this because when I decline their offer, their immediate response is to let me know how stupid I am. They shake their heads at me and and announce to whoever is within earshot, “well suit yourself, if you wanna be out here all day…”
Seriously? Dude, the reason old Pearl won’t load in the first place is because some big ape like you manhandled her in her formative years.
Fortunately, I will not be going through any of that today. Ginger Rogers is an old campaigner. She doesn’t overthink it. She hops right in and stays put as long as there’s a bucketful of alfalfa silage to stick her face in.