Return to BriarCroft Web Log Home Page

Mired in Mud

Ten solid days of rain can have its effects. It takes
its toll in a variety of ways on the human psyche--the bleak
gray seeps into our brains, making our gray matter much grayer than
usual. Everything slows down to a crawl and climbing out of bed to another
gray day requires commitment and effort.

Managing barn chores and horses these days is a
challenge. Despite years of effort to create well drained paddocks with
great footing, there is no such thing when the ground is super
saturated from unrelenting inches of rain, and when the barn and
paddocks are unfortunately placed on the downside of a hill.
Every bare inch of ground has become mud soup with more water
pouring off the hill every moment.

Mud in all its glory rivals ice for navigation hazard. Yesterday it was
a boot magnet as I tried carefully to make my way with a load of hay to
a bit drier area in a paddock, and found with one step that my boot had
decided to remain mired in the muck and my foot was waving bootless in
the air trying to decide whether to land in the squishy stuff or go back
to the relative safety of the stuck boot. Standing there on one foot,
with a load of hay in my arms, I'm sure I looked even more absurd than I
felt at the moment, and at least I gave comic relief to people driving
by. I won't tell you how I figured my way out, but it did require
doing laundry later.

I remembered a few years ago when my daughter was about 5 years old, I
was busy with chores as she was exploring a similar muddy paddock and I
realized I hadn't seen her for a few minutes and I went looking. There
she stood, bawling, with one stocking foot in the mud, an empty boot
stuck up to its top, and her other boot so mired, she couldn't move
without abandoning it too. By the time I got her extracted, we were
both laughing muddy messes.
More laundry.

The Haflingers are not averse to the mud if they are hungry enough.
They'll hesitate momentarily before they dive in to reach their meal but
dive in they do. Those clean blonde legs and white tails are only a
memory from last summer. Even their bellies are flecked with brown
now. Later, back in the barn, as the mud dries, it curries off in
chunks and I start to see my golden horses revealed again, but it seems
they will never be truly clean again.

What things lure people into the mud, enticing us deeper in muck that
covers and coats us so thoroughly that it feels we'll never be clean
again? Whatever we want so badly that we're willing to get hopelessly
dirty to reach it, once there, it is tainted by the mud as well, and
never as good as we had hoped. We become hopelessly mired and stuck,
sinking deeper by the minute.

Rescue comes from an outreached hand with strength greater than our
own. Cleansing may be merely skin deep, only to last until our next
dive into the mud, or it can be thorough and lasting--a sort of future
"mud protective coating" so to speak. We can choose how dirty to get
and how dirty to stay and how clean we want to be.

I need to go do laundry again.

Emily from BriarCroft
http://www.briarcroft.com/emily.htm