Category: Family

There’s Something About the Outside of a Horse

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man…
~Long time equestrian wisdom attributed to many famous riders

Twenty-five years ago today, two days before the world changed forever, I helped organize a gathering of Haflinger horse owners from western Canada and the United States in our nearby town of Lynden, Washington. We enjoyed an annual meet-up at the local fairgrounds to enjoy our horses together for a few days doing breed demonstrations for the public, riding, jumping, dressage, driving in teams, vaulting –
a little of everything with our versatile horses.

We received permission from Lynden City Hall to have a Haflinger parade on a quiet Sunday morning while local folks were worshipping in the many churches in town. We wanted to be sure to begin from the fairgrounds after services had started, do a two mile route through town and back to the fairgrounds before the traffic increased later.

It was a remarkable sunny morning of over ninety Haflingers and their people – some riding, driving, or leading their horses — all enjoying the quiet peace of a Sabbath morning in a friendly little town. Some of the owners and their horses had been in local parades in their home towns, but none had the experience of being an “all Haflingers” troop through a downtown.

It all went smoothly without a hitch.
Well, actually there were several “hitches” in the parade: carts and wagons being pulled by our golden friends.

Everyone returned safely home before September 11, 2001. Life hasn’t felt as peaceful or calm in the same way ever since. This 2001 Haflinger parade was the one and only time it happened in our part of the world.

This is to remember those few days we spent together — the insides of us enjoying the outsides of our Haflingers.

Just What I’ve Gone and Done

barnstormingblog2 Comments
bearded nobless

Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day.
Vision held open in the dark
By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.

And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we’re asleep.

When we work well, a Sabbath mood
Rests on our day, and finds it good.
~Wendell Berry “Sabbath Poem X, 1979″

buttercupponies1
sascha9182

Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,
then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?

This is the best—
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso—
and, if necessary, the windows—
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.
~Billy Collins from “Morning”

photo by Krisula Steiger
hayjobdone

He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
     behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
     sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
—The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds—
“I’m sixty-eight” he said,
“I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that’s just what
I’ve gone and done.”
~Gary Snyder – “Hay for the Horses” from Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems

haymaking
goldenoctmorn6

Sure enough, I’ve gone and done it — spent over 50 years of my life taking care of horses. I hope for at least a few more years of horsekeeping as long as I am able while our three retired, aging Haflingers stick around.

No one said I had to do this and plenty of people saw it as expensive folly, including a few cherished folks who continue to aid and abet my horse ownership.

When I was young and agile and full of energy, I didn’t really project ahead fifty years to see that picking up hay bales, moving manure piles and being bumped or stepped on by a 1000 pound animal is a bigger deal now than it once was.

Fourteen years ago, I wrote the following on this website:

From September through April, I scramble to the top of the hay pile in the barn to push down two bales to feed to our horses, now that the pastures are resting and “left to grace” for the winter. My husband has been busy spreading our composted manure out on the fields to give them an extra fertilizer boost for next spring’s growth.

As farmers, we have to always be thinking one or two seasons ahead:  the hay brought into the barn in June or July does not leave the barn until late-autumn.  The manure piled up in winter gets spread on pastures the following fall.  The tilled cornfields surrounding us are seeded in May and not harvested until October after several months of rain and sun and rain again.

More than practicing forethought, as farmers we know our meager efforts, as tangible as they are, are dependent solely on grace: that there will be enough rain, that there will not be too much rain, that there will be enough days of sunlight, that the seed will sprout, that the machinery will work when needed, that there will be no blight or pests, and that the hay crew will materialize when needed for harvest. So much of this is not due to the labor of our hands, no matter how much we sweat and ache, but due to the great work of the Creator in His Creation.

Every hay bale I open spills forth His mercy, a reminder of how grateful I am for seed and sun and rain and a barn full of promises.

Despite the hard physical work, fifty years hasn’t changed how I love the smell of a soft muzzle, or seeing my reflection in their eyes.

When I lived in a city apartment so many years ago, I knew I would love to wake up every morning to take care of horses the rest of my life. 

And you know what?

That’s just what I’ve gone and done.

brothers
fathersonmoment

Peacing Each One Beautiful

barnstormingblog1 Comment

Like a fading piece of cloth
I am a failure

No longer do I cover tables filled with food and laughter
My seams are frayed my hems falling my strength no longer able
To hold the hot and cold

I wish for those first days
When just woven I could keep water
From seeping through
Repelled stains with the tightness of my weave
Dazzled the sunlight with my
Reflection

I grow old though pleased with my memories
The tasks I can no longer complete
Are balanced by the love of the tasks gone past

I offer no apology only
this plea:

When I am frayed and strained and drizzle at the end
Please someone cut a square and put me in a quilt
That I might keep some child warm

And some old person with no one else to talk to
Will hear my whispers

And cuddle
near
~Nikki Giovanni “Quilts”

“I make them warm to keep my family from freezing;
I make them beautiful to keep my heart from breaking.”
–From the journal of a prairie woman, 1870

To keep a husband and five children warm,
she quilts them covers thick as drifts against
the door. Through every fleshy square white threads
needle their almost invisible tracks; her hours
count each small suture that holds together
the raw-cut, uncolored edges of her life.
She pieces each one beautiful, and summer bright
to thaw her frozen soul. Under her fingers
the scraps grow to green birds and purple
improbable leaves; deeper than calico, her mid-winter
mind bursts into flowers. She watches them unfold
between the double stars, the wedding rings.
~Luci Shaw “Quiltmaker” from Polishing the Petoskey Stone: New and Selected Poems.

Perhaps the world was made this way:
piecemeal, the parts fitting together exactly
as if made for one another~
the unique, disparate and separate
coming together in a glorious harmony.

The point of its creation is
forever functional and full of love –
a blanket of warmth and security
for generations to come.

Our legacy is to preserve this
beauty arising from scraps,
this broken stitched to broken
in a tapestry holy and whole.

When I no longer have strength
or the usefulness to perform my daily tasks,
piece me up and sew me into a greater whole
along with pieces of others who are fading.

We are so much better together,
so much more colorful and bold,
becoming art and function in our fraying state.

Full of warmth and comfort
covering all who are sick
and sleep and love and cuddle,
and drift off to heaven as the last breath is breathed.

all quilts above are on display this week at the Northwest Washington Fair – to see previous year’s artwork:
2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2021, 2022, 2023 , 2024

Saying Fair Well…

barnstormingblog2 Comments

The Northwest Washington Fair in Lynden is underway this week and for the fourteenth year in a row, our Haflinger horses aren’t there on display, but who is counting?

I guess I am. 

I feel wistful as I wake up too early on a foggy summer morning, remembering the twenty years when I would gather up our sleepy children and their friends and head into the fairgrounds to clean stalls, walk the horses to exercise them and prepare for the day. 

As we are no long “doing” the fair as a farm, I indulge in a little sadness each August as I walk past the stalls we used at the fair.

Our farm, BriarCroft, had been a consistent presence for two decades, promoting the Haflinger breed in a well-decorated outdoor display, providing 24 hours-a-day coverage for the horses for the 6 days of the fair. We petitioned the Fair Board for 5 years in the late 1980s to allow us to display at the fair, and they finally said “okay, here’s the space, build it yourself,” so we did. We were not there for classes, competition, or ribbons. We were there because people enjoyed our Haflingers and we enjoyed the people.

But, as eventually happens in real life, our children grew up and moved away, so we no longer had help to “man” the horse stalls.
Over two decades, several dozen “kids” were recruited to help beyond just our family: their cousins, school friends, church kids, neighbors.
Now many of them have children of their own.

Between 1992 and 2012, we were there, sometimes sharing space and duties with other Haflinger farms (Rodenbergers and McKees), along with several brave young women (Kelsy Smith, Chesna Klimek and Emily Vander Haak) who did Haflinger “trick riding” as part of the fair’s daily Grandstand show. The older kids watched the younger kids, the in-between kids did most of the horse stall cleaning duty, and we adults sat and shot the breeze.

Our display created good will for the fair visitors who depended on us every year to be there with horses that they and their children could actually pet (and sit on), who enjoyed our braiding demonstrations, and our various Haflinger trivia contests with prizes.

Our golden horses came to represent what dreams are made of.

Countless times a day there would be a bright eyed child who approached our stalls, climbed up on the step stools and reached up to pet a Haflinger nose or neck and looked deep into those big brown Haflinger eyes, losing their heart forever to the breed. They will not forget that moment when a horse they had never met before loved them back. Haflingers are magic with children and we saw that over and over again.

So on this misty late summer morning, instead of heading to the fairgrounds to clean stalls, I’m going down to the barn to turn three aged dusty, unbathed Haflingers out in the field as usual. They don’t know all the excitement they are missing.

I do hope the fair-goers still remember the friendly golden horses with the big brown eyes, who helped make dreams come true.

Each passing year is a reminder – we all fared well at the fair.

1993 front page Bellingham Herald article featuring my braid job at the fair on our gelding, Milky Way
Trillium as a yearling with me at the fair 1993 – she passed away on our farm at age 30

Thank you to Lea Gibson Lozano, Emily Vander Haak, Kelsy Smith, and Chesna Klimek for their photos in this collection.

Pursuing an Authentic Mess

barnstormingblog1 Comment
front door
back door

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic—decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity
~Louise Erdrich “Advice to Myself”

I am a messy person, coming from a long line of messy people. My paternal grandmother never had a clear kitchen counter, or a dining room table without piles of books and papers, spilling over with knickknacks and half-completed craft projects everywhere. I loved the chaos of her house since the messes left behind by her grandchildren weren’t as noticeable. I always felt at home, as if I was not being constantly monitored as a potential mess about to happen.

The other morning, I noticed a good-sized dust bunny on the kitchen floor and bent down to pick it up to toss in the trash can. To my surprise, it leaped away from my fingers!

It kept jumping away and as my eyes finally focused in the early morning light, I realized it wasn’t an escaping dust bunny, but a tree frog covered in dust fuzz from my less than tidy floor. It must have come in the house from the perpetually open front door and hidden under a piece of furniture, being transformed into a furry froggy Frankenstein.

I caught it and carried it outside into the morning dawn, setting it free into the chaos of the world outside, rather than coping inside with my insufficient housekeeping. No, I didn’t think to get a photo. Oh, well. Some things you just have to take on faith.

After all, my heart leaps and rejoices anytime we have multi-generational family under one roof and whether the house is clean is simply a secondary concern.

It actually is not a concern at all.

This mama’s heart carries love with each heartbeat. My worth is not in what I own or how pristine I keep things, but in the depth of my commitment to those who I am given the privilege to know and love.

The Dimmer Switch

barnstormingblog2 Comments

Hours and hours of taffy pulled and stretched
to the furthest reaches of neighborhood lawns, universe
of grasses cool and tickling, cushions
for our bodies somersaulting and cartwheeling, tagging
you’re it, while somewhere above us

the dimmer switch of Heaven would be turning
down to lavender rose and deeper rose, and then
the voices of the mothers streaming in
through the darkening air
to come home, come home.
~Andrea Potos “Summer, Childhood” from Her Joy Becomes

Once when we were playing
hide-and-seek and it was time
to go home, the rest gave up
on the game before it was done
and forgot I was still hiding.
I remained hidden as a matter
of honor until the moon rose.
~Galway Kinnell “Hide-and-Seek 1933” from Strong Is Your Hold.

We all long for home.

As the day wanes, the sky dims to pastels, the breezes pick up, I want to be called home: to warmth, to a good evening meal, to hugs and cozy bed.

No matter what excitement exists outside the four walls of home, I am eager for the comfort of finding my way home.

In the villages and towns all across Japan, there is a traditional folk song played daily in the early evening over loudspeakers in the streets – a reminder to the children of the neighborhood that it is time to give up their games and head home. They stream out of the parks and streets, each to their own house or apartment.

The song that thousands of U.S. soccer fans belted out after the World Cup soccer games was “Take me home, country roads.”

Last night, as I left an evening meeting at our local homeless mission shelter, I passed through the huge room housing over a hundred sleeping people on cots and floor mattresses. The overhead lights had been dimmed, each person safe, warm, fed, and welcome – no longer invisible and hidden away in the woods or alleys.

May we all know how it is to be welcomed home, when overwhelming darkness comes, knowing the Light always returns.

Come home, come home;
you who are weary come home…

Photo of children running home in Basque, France by William Albert Allard

Making Me Better Than What I Am

barnstormingblog10 Comments

At dusk, everything blurs and softens.  
From here out over the long valley,
the fields and hills pull up
the first slight sheets of evening,
as, over the next hour,
heavier, darker ones will follow.

Quieted roads, predictable deer
browsing in a neighbor’s field, another’s
herd of heifers, the kitchen lights
starting in many windows. On horseback
I take it in, neither visitor
nor intruder, but kin passing, closer
and closer to night, its cold streams
rising in the sugarbush and hollow.

Half-aloud, I say to the horse,
or myself, or whoever: let fire not come
to this house, nor that barn,
nor lightning strike the cattle.
Let dogs not gain the gravid doe, let the lights
of the rooms convey what they seem to.

And who is to say it is useless
or foolish to ride out in the falling light
alone, wishing, or praying,
for particular good to particular beings,
on one small road in a huge world?

The horse bears me along, like grace,
making me better than what I am,
and what I think or say or see
is whole in these moments, is neither
small nor broken. For up, out of
the inscrutable earth, have come my body
and the separate body of the mare:
flawed and aching and wronged. Who then
is better made to say be well, be glad,

or who to long that we, as one,
might course over the entire valley,
over all valleys, as a bird in a great embrace
of flight, who presses against her breast,
in grief and tenderness,
the whole weeping body of the world?
~ Linda McCarriston, “Riding Out at Evening” from Talking Soft Dutch

photo by Emily Vander Haak

On this, my 72nd birthday,
I pray for this troubled world, reminding myself:
be well, be glad…

I’m still here
by the grace of God who carries
not just me on His back through each day,
but all earthly burdens.

I pray like a bird embracing the air which lifts its wings,
tenderly holding to its breast a soaring freedom
to transcend the weeping world.

I have seen so much goodness over 72 years,
sometimes through tears of sorrow.
I know there will be more joy
and sadness before I’m done.

I am grateful, so very grateful
to have lived all these years
seeing tears shed, then dried,
learning how love heals,
knowing the only thing to last forever
is God’s covenant promise
to always carry us home.

photo by Brandon Dieleman
photo by Brandon Dieleman
video by Peter Tamminga


Whilst the world is weeping, let us do our bit.
We have the time to sympathise, to listen and to sit.
No needless thoughts, of the things we cannot do.
But appreciate all the good bits and look at them anew.
 
The warmth and comfort of our homes, the food we have to eat.
The family and friends we have, although we cannot meet.
The village that we live in, and the community we share.
So precious to us right now, so sit and think and care.
 
Whilst the world is full of sadness, anxiety and pain,
It’s hard to imagine our lives ever carefree again.
But nothing lasts forever, the clouds will always clear.
Let’s heal the world with love, so the sunshine can appear.
~Sandra Rickman

Lyrics:
Drop, drop, slow tears, and bathe those beauteous feet,
which brought from heaven the news and Prince of Peace.
Cease not, wet eyes, his mercies to entreat;
to cry for vengeance sin doth never cease.
In your deep floods drown all my faults and fears;
nor let his eye see sin, but through my tears.

Just a Drink of Cool Water…

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

And on those hot afternoons in July,
when my father was out on the tractor
cultivating rows of corn, my mother
would send us out with a Mason jar
filled with ice and water, a dish towel
wrapped around it for insulation.

Like a rocket launched to an orbiting
planet, we would cut across the fields
in a trajectory calculated to intercept—
or, perhaps, even—surprise him
in his absorption with the row and the
turning always over earth beneath the blade.

He would look up and see us, throttle
down, stop, and step from the tractor
with the grace of a cowboy dismounting
his horse, and receive gratefully the jar
of water, ice cubes now melted into tiny
shards, drinking it down in a single gulp,
while we watched, mission accomplished.
~Joyce Sutphen “Carrying Water to the Field”

It was my special responsibility
to carry cold water out to my dad
when he was on the tractor doing field work. 

Yes, he could have carried a thermos along but then
he would not have seen his kid
walking carefully from the house over the fresh-turned dirt,
he would not have an excuse for a short break
to wipe the sweat from his face with his bright red kerchief,
nor sit and survey the straightness of his furrows.

He would not have lifted her up
to sit beside him on the tractor,
allowing her to “drive,”
steering down the rows,
curving around the killdeer nests
so their young are spared.

Indeed – it is a a special responsibility
to nurture someone at work
who doesn’t stop to refill themselves.
It happens rarely any more –
whether in the field or factory or home
or even – creating a daily blog like this.

What wondrous love to carry water to those who thirst.
What wondrous grace then fills our furrowed lives.

Thank you, faithful readers and supporters,
for you who carry water to me when I am dry and thirsty
convince me my work here is not in vain:
mission accomplished.

Once a year I ask my readers to fill out the feedback form at the bottom left of my blog home page, or this link to a feedback form

You can always directly email me at emilypgibson@gmail.com

Questions I hope you will answer to assist me in making Barnstorming worth your time:
*how long have you been following Barnstorming?
*how often do you share Barnstorming with others?
*what does Barnstorming content mean to you personally?
*what Barnstorming content do you most appreciate?
*do you have a favorite post, photo, or moment from the blog?
*what Barnstorming content would you rather see less often?
*do you listen to the music links at the end of posts?
*do you ever click on the links to sources for poems and quotes?
*how can I make your time on Barnstorming more worthwhile?

So It Goes

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

I spent seven hours yesterday at my daughter’s house
helping her expand their garden by at least ten times.
We dug up sod by the shovelful, shook off the dirt as
best we could; sod into the wheelbarrow and off to the
pile at the edge of the yard. Then all that over and over
again. Five hours total work-time, with time out for lunch
and supper. By the time I got home I knew all too well
that seventy-two is not thirty-five; I could barely move.

I got to quit earlier than Nadine. She told me I’d done
enough and that I should go get a beer and lie down on
the chaise lounge and cheer her on, which is what I did.

All this made me remember my father forty years ago
helping me with my garden. My father’s dead now, and
has been dead for many years, which is how I’ll be one
of these days too. And then Nadine will help her child,
who is not yet here, with her garden. Old Nadine, aching
and sore, will be in my empty shoes, cheering on her own.

So it goes. The wheel turns, generation after generation,
around and around. We ride for a little while, get off and
somebody else gets on. Over and over, again and again.
~David Budbill “Seventy-Two Is Not Thirty-Five” from Tumbling toward the End

The wheel turns, we cycle around again, get on and eventually get off.
This is a week of July birthdays in our family, for both old and young.

This hit me when we celebrated our grandson’s third birthday a few days ago in a suburban backyard where my daughter has continued the Gibson/Polis gardening tradition, using the compost we hauled in our truck from our farm several hours away.

Her peas were full and ripe and juicy, her greens lush and tasty – simple perfection thanks to her careful tending.

Meanwhile, our son gardens with his three boys in a very small urban backyard in Denver, teaching them what is weed and what will become a future meal.

I couldn’t help but get weepy, enjoying that special birthday feast.

…and knowing someday, our grandsons will plant and weed and harvest from the soil just as we and their parents did, over and over, again and again.

And this is why my eyes are closed
It’s just as well for all I’ve seen
And so it goes, and so it goes
And you’re the only one who knows
~Billy Joel

Those Quiet Brown Eyes

barnstormingblog4 Comments

Who loves the rain    
    And loves his home, 
And looks on life with quiet eyes,  
     Him will I follow through the storm;    
     And at his hearth-fire keep me warm;
Nor hell nor heaven shall that soul surprise,    
     Who loves the rain, 
     And loves his home, 
And looks on life with quiet eyes.
~Frances Shaw, “Who loves the rain” from Look To the Rainbow of Grace

Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
~Wendell Berry from “There is no going back”

What a wonder I was
when I was young, as I learn
by the stern privilege
of being old: how regardlessly
I stepped the rough pathways
of the hillside woods,
treaded hardly thinking
the tumbled stairways
of the steep streams, and worked
unaching hard days
thoughtful only of the work,
the passing light, the heat, the cool
water I gladly drank.
~Wendell Berry “VII” 2015 from Another Day

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only.
I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary…
~Margaret Atwood

I stop writing the poem
to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I’m still a woman.
I’ll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt 
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I’ll get back
to the poem. I’ll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there’s a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it’s done.
~Tess Gallagher “I Stop Writing the Poem”

For Dan’s 73rd birthday…

In this journey together,
we inhabit each other,
however long may be the road we travel;
you have become the air I breathe,
refreshing, renewing, restoring~~
you are that necessary to me,
and that beloved.

Each year, as we grow older together:
grayer, softer, gentler
with ourselves,
each other,
and the world.

I pause to say,
on this day you were born,
thank you, God, yet again
for bringing you to earth
so we could meet,
raise our three amazing children,
and now six grandchildren,
with another on the way,
walking life together
with faith and hope and dreams.

It was your quiet brown eyes I trusted first
and just knew
I’d follow you anywhere,
and I have…