Maine wildlife

I’ve set myself a goal to blog twice weekly – on topic. I achieved that for a decade when I wrote about chickens, and I’ve done that since May of 2016 here at Cooperative Horse. It’s a challenge to come up with ideas week in and week out. This morning […]

Metaphors

by
2019 was quite a year of change for me. Steve and I moved from our wonderful home in Massachusetts to an equally wonderful, but quite different, home in Maine. Instead of chickens in the backyard, we now have bald eagles hunting in the wetlands in our front yard. Instead of […]

It Was a Good Change

by
It started snowing yesterday. As predicted, 8-inches fell. The horses were kept in. I have a 4-wheel drive truck with superior ABS and other safety features. I drove to the barn. Rode Tonka for an hour in the indoor. We had a big loose trot and canter. Did some fun […]

Snow(shoe) Day

by
Yesterday started out sunny and the two-acre field in front of our house was literally abuzz with bees. This landscape is a combination of blueberry barrens and overgrown lawn. It’s a bee, butterfly and firefly haven, and as scruffy as it looks from a distance, we’ll keep it that way. […]

Cold Bees

by
When your horse is worried, it’s never nothing. I’ve written about this before. Tonka and I have ridden here a gazillion times. From the field, he can see his barn and his friends in their paddocks. It should be a worry-free place to do conditioning sets up and down the gentle […]

Tonka Knows More Than Me (continued…)

by
If there’s anything that can bring home the idea that the natural world has more levels of complexity to it than we pay attention to (or know much about), it’s what you hear in a field by a marsh in Maine in late summer. This is what it sounds like […]

This Wonderful, Complex World

by
One thing that I’ve learned in the few short months that I’ve lived by this marsh in Maine, is that there’s a lot I’m not seeing.   You have to look closely to see what’s really there. What looks an abandoned field between the stone wall and the water is […]

More To The Table

by
Between the stone wall and the marsh, there is a blueberry barren.   Wild lowbush blueberries grow there.   I’ve been picking them by hand, separating the ripe from the unripe. Bent over. Where there are ticks and deer flies.   By the time my small basket isn’t even half-filled, […]

Sharing The Blueberry Harvest

by
It’s a cliché to say that life is a complex, intertwined web, but when you live in a place that looks like this, the cliché comes fully to life.   I’m a human with dull senses. The spotting scope that we have in our window helps, but still. Although some […]

Seen and Unseen

by