The Christmas season has a feel. Springtime has a feel. You know, like Saturday or Sunday carry a certain vibe with them? I suppose every unique season or day has its own feel. Generally speaking, when I consider the feel that a time of year puts out, it’s mostly a good feel.
September is different. For me, September carries a distinctive feel, but it’s more a blanket of melancholy than an eager anticipation of the changing of the seasons. It may well be a holdover emotion from my childhood, when I had to leave the comfortable embrace of home and head back to school, but September often seems to be a weighty reminder of missed opportunities and the heavy, dull burden of unfinished chores.
To be sure, it’s not all bad, what with harvest season just getting serious and the impending fall gather, but it always takes me a few days to appreciate the rewards that eventually come with September’s sacrifices. And so it was with this year’s iteration of September.
I was just getting my legs back under me after 10 days of county fair and a subsequent week of catching up on everything that had been semi-neglected during fair week. Though the early mornings carried a hint of fall, the brief morning cool quickly gave way to the brutality of cloudless 95ºF days. The flies were getting sticky, and they somehow always manage to find a way in the house in September. We were needing to make a big push with the cows on the mountain, and I had half a dozen horses in dire need of having their shoes reset before several days of rock climbing in the rough, dry terrain of the foothills. As much as I wished otherwise, it was no time for idleness.
It’s a pretty tight window on late-summer mornings where there’s sufficient early light to see well enough to drive a nail in a shoe before the sun in the bright September sky unleashes its ruthless heat and the flies start to really pester the horses. I’m not a professional farrier, and I usually need about an hour to go around all fours of a horse I’m familiar with. The shade of my shoeing tree only holds out so long, so if all goes well, I can get a couple horses done in a morning. Any amateur mathematician or part-time meteorologist can easily deduce that I’d need three trouble-free mornings to get six horses shod.
For some reason, the mental preparation for shoeing my horses saps the positivity from my being. The thoughts of coaxing the little grulla mare to lift up her hind leg or how the big bay gelding leans on me are about as pleasant to me as what the small-town freshmen boys feel on the first week of football practice with the varsity. Just as peculiar, though, is what happens once the job has commenced.
My horse shoeing has become my therapy. As long as I’m not dealing with colts, I prefer to be alone with the ponies when I shoe. As exhausting as the work may be, it’s oddly soothing, and as long as I don’t skewer my finger bending a nail over, it often turns into a time of meditative reflection. It seems to be the best way I know to recalibrate my internal emotional and spiritual gyroscope.
As I picked up the second foot of horse number two one morning, I couldn’t help but notice another rip in the cheap-made shoeing chaps that covered my leg. I bought them online for $50 a year earlier when my youngest son sent me a link he’d found to some outfit out of the Midwest. They were advertised as “sturdy leather chaps.” The ad didn’t mention that the only leather was on the leg pads and pockets. Otherwise, it was constructed of some sort of inferior plastic canvas. I used them anyway and just hoped nobody stopped by while I had them on. It’s akin to the dude who wears a straw hat in January.
I switched hammers and grabbed the one I’d left soaking in a bucket of water overnight so the handle would swell enough to hold the head on while I worked – another little annoyance brought on by the dry September heat. Both of my hammers were Christmas and Father’s Day gifts from two different kids, each thoughtful enough to find a meaningful, useful, practical gift they knew their dad would appreciate.
The nails and box of shoes came from the ranch supply store where my dad likes to shop on Tuesdays because they offer a 10% senior discount. Every spring he takes my horseshoe order, always mindful to grab a few sets of “ones” to go with all the “aughts” I use for most of the horses. As I finished tacking each shoe on, I’d set the foot up on the stand my ag teacher daughter-in-law built for me as a surprise gift, after she’d seen me rasping and shaping hooves while my knee served as a stand.
I keep my clinchers and rasps in an old 5-gallon hydraulic oil bucket my wife retrieved for me from her garden when, years ago, she noticed what an unorganized mess my tools were. My best nippers were given to me by a dear friend who cut his teeth in the cowboy world when he worked for me as an intern on a ranch I ran when I was fresh out of college.
As I finished and turned horse number six out, my September therapy session complete, I felt a lump in my throat and maybe a touch of a tear in my eye as I gathered my tools and watched him lope to the west end of the pasture to join his compadres. It dawned on me that September’s superficial sadness nearly always rebounds to an understated yet overwhelming gratitude for all the good and intangible things and the good and dear people who give true value to my life’s efforts.
