Horsekeeping Read Online Free PDF Page B

York City, but Salisbury is our home. Our house feels almost alive in that it predates us, transforms with each new occupant and, barring fire, will survive us. I imagine it two-hundred years hence absorbing
another family’s triumphs and tragedies. As our lives wear it down a little more around the edges, maybe we will etch it into “the Bok House.”
    Located at the eastern end of the long Twin Lakes Road, our house sits three-winged and nine-gabled on land studded with evergreen stands of mature hemlocks and white pines. Our eight-acre plot is bordered behind by hundreds of acres of mixed forest: northern hardwoods of beech, birch and maple as well as the eastern broadleaf species of oak and hickory that are more southern. One immense weeping willow resides solitary in the middle of our back lawn gracefully holding a dream-perfect tree swing. A plain wood plank is tied to the ends of two fifty-foot lengths of rope plugged via cherry-picker to a high, uneven branch. Housing purchases tend to be emotional, and I believe we bought this house because of this swing. Elliot and Jane love arching dangerously high into the gracefully hanging softer shoots, kicking down confetti of petite leaves. Because the long ropes narrow at the top, the seat spins like a carnival ride, minus the safety belt. More worrisome, our tree man advised me that the willow is weak, unlike the muscle-bound maple or oak.
    â€œWhat does that mean?”
    When willows fail, they fail spectacularly,” Skip answered.
    We gazed up at the tree’s massive horizontal arm, perfectly aligned for unobstructed swinging... and slamming a human into the ground as easily as a hammer would drive a thumbtack into corkboard.
    â€œBut we don’t have a maple or an oak.”
    â€œThen you take your chances.”
    We cabled the willow’s bicep against catastrophe, and I tried to think that the likelihood of that one trunklike, brain-crushing branch fracturing during the few hours a year my kids fly, spin and giggle into the breeze was miniscule, but my dreamy swing is now tinged by a harsher reality.
    Across Twin Lakes Road, over the years we had annexed another sixty-four acres along a sluggish length of the wide Housatonic River. Sixteen of these produce hay harvested for El-Arabia’s horses, twenty
is woodland, and twenty-eight sprout alfalfa grown by the local farmer, Mr. Duprey, as feed for his dairy cows. Every five years he substitutes corn to replenish the soil. Once or twice in my Christmas card I had asked the Dupreys if they could plant sunflowers as the rotation crop. I pictured southern France with acres of yellow fringed, seeded black faces bobbing eight feet high to the sun. I mistily envisioned my kids running breathlessly through their thick, fuzzy stalks in the ultimate game of hide and seek; of waking up, country-relaxed and sleepy-eyed, taking my warm teacup outside to survey a spectacular golden carpet, sighing with the wonder and beauty of it all. My fantasy remained rootbound. I suppose that sunflower seeds are expensive, and not appetizing to a milk cow’s palate. Oh well. My naïve request probably provoked guffaws from cows and farmers alike at the Duprey holiday repast.
    It is dawning on me that farming is hard, dirty work. Once I took Elliot, then a tender four-year-old, to see the milking at the Dupreys’: the 4:00 p.m. milking since we slumbered peacefully through the first at 4:00 a.m. Mr. Duprey’s stout son maneuvered these bulky, hygienically challenged animals into two lines on either side of a narrow barn. The cows obliged their longstanding routine. Duprey the younger, outfitted in high rubber boots, cast an amused glance at our feet. I pretended not to care that our white sneakers were lace deep in mud and cow effluvia—“big poopie” according to Elliot—and that dozens of buzzing flies, fat black ones and translucent babies, were lighting on every moist surface,