Weekly Lesson Neep

[dancinghorse]

This morning started Too Freaking Early with Dobie poo on the carpet--second day in a row. She may have to start staying out at night and in during the day. She never poops in the house in the daytime.

Sigh.

Lessons started moderately early and went on for a while. GladysAnn came down from Phoenix to try a ride on a Lipizzan, had a longe lesson on Capria. She is doomed, I tell you. Doomed. Between Pooka seducing her with Pluto Love Vibes and Capria seducing her with the famous afterburners, well, it's all over there, I think. "I never rode a horse with such instant responses! You breathe, she acts! It's so amazing!" (Badger, she has a Morgan mare--little, black, must ask her to give me breeding names again. She's Very well bred.)

Ayup. Got a new victim there.

Keed, aged nine years, has completely changed his shape in the past week. He is now a Hatrack. This means growth phase, as in, we're not done yet, folks. He's headed up a smitch and out a lot, from the looks. Unlike previous periods of Hatrackitude, he hasn't ended up with too-short stifle ligaments, so can use his back end. This is good for his Teacher Torture, at which he did very well this morning, and he was quite pleased with himself.

Pooka was in spring mode, as he's been most of the time recently. He was wrapping himself around me during grooming and tacking up. Once turned loose, he had a lot of 'tude to work out. I called out, "Get the bucks out, Pook!" He's an obedient boy. He did exactly as I told him. Rodeo city. Even Joni, who has seen some of his more exciting moments, was wide-eyed. That boy has some buck in him. (Just ask my palette of bruises from last week.)

He was lovely for his ride, and we were working on me reverting to old bad habits as usual--letting go the outside rein, pulling on the inside rein, getting wild veers and Not Going Where I Want To Go. We were really getting it, really starting to figure it out, when...catch-stumble-CLUNK! Off came the second shoe in as many lesson days. This was my fault. I should have put bell boots on him. Bad, bad, bad.

As great good luck would have it, just after I came back from a very nice lunch at the City Grill, I looked out and there was a trailer in the yard, and a somewhat villainous-looking man leading my stallion toward it. It was Curt the Perfect Shoer, who had been hauling horses down to Rio Rico. He got my phone message and swung by, and put the shoe back on. He also volunteered to take the horse off my hands. Heh. Right, said I.

Curt said Pook pulled the shoe off in a really interesting way: reached around from behind and caught it in front and to the side. (Usually the back toe catches the heel of the front shoe and rips it off.) Consequence of horse whose back end is currently considerably bigger than his front, with a lot more rear-wheel drive than he knows what to do with, getting his legs tangled up and not getting his front feet out of the way in time. He'll grow out of it, and we can help. Meanwhile, boots. Yes.

Comments

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Actually, I get the feeling that baby Lipps do that all the time....

[christymarx.livejournal.com]

They are absolutely born knowning the Airs. I had the pleasure of visiting a huge Lipp farm in northern Illinois and watching their show program. For part of the show they brought out all their mares with foals and you should have seen those babies dance and levitate! It was amazing.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

I remember reading once that training a Lipp is merely encouraging it to do more of and even better what it was born to do.... And making sure it enjoys the class, of course.

[equesgal.livejournal.com]

Anyone here ever read "Airs Above the Ground" by Mary Stewart? There's that wonderful scene at night where a lone old horse begins to dance to music he can hear at a fair off in the distance.

Sue

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

I love that book! And that's my favorite scene.

That and Marguerite Henry's White Stallion of Lipizza were two of my favorite books when I was a kid. It blew my mind that this circus girl was riding a Lipizzan. I didn't think private citizens could.

All this really is hardwired. You can't keep the babies on the ground, and the adults can have a little trouble with it as well. They have this natural instinct to go UP. Just yesterday, Capria on the longe decided to have some fun, and started caprioling. She does that a lot. The other day Camilla got ticked that keed was Out and she was not, so started blowing up all over the turnout--huge explosions into the air. I've seen her do all the Airs in sequence: collected canter to canter pirouette to levade to courbette to capriole to collected canter to pirouette and repeat, several times, in case anyone was thinking the first sequence was accidental.

She'll stand still and you think she's a truck. Thick, short, massive. Huge butt. Great big feet. Then she moves and she has the latest and greatest in warp technology, with antigravity boosters.

[equesgal.livejournal.com]

Ah...some kids want to grow up to be firemen and movie stars. I wanted to grow up to be like Mary Stewart...or Victoria Holt.

[christymarx.livejournal.com]

She was one of the earliest and strongest influences on me as a writer.

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Mary Stewart, Mary Renault, and Rosemary Sutcliff for me.

Sutcliff's books about Roman Britain are wonderful. She did a marvelous dark Arthurian, too: Sword at Sunset.

[christymarx.livejournal.com]

I haven't heard of Sutcliff. I took a quick scan and by the ghods, she's written a lot of books! I've requested Sword at Sunset through the library, though. I'm tres curious.

I have one cat named while in the throes of reading Renault. A misnamed cat if ever there was one -- Theseus.

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

My favorite Sutcliff is The Eagle of the Ninth, though I'm also distinctly partial to The Mark of the Horse Lord (not for the reason you'd think--the hero is 'way cool). Also good: The Lantern-Bearers.

She's in the continuum with Renault and Stewart--the same sort of beautifully written, evocative historical prose, and about the same vintage. She was just a kid, university age or barely older, when she published Eagle, which I believe was her first novel. It came out in the mid-Fifties.

[equesgal.livejournal.com]

Ah...I had to go look it up again, just to share it with all us Stewart-lovers.

"I sat among the lengthening shadows of the lonely meadow, watching him, somehow infinitely touched...And then I realized that this was not the movement of a liberty horse. It was not dancing as the palominos had "danced"; this was a version, stiff but true, of the severely disciplined figures of the high school....then as I watched he broke into a form of the piaffe. It was a travesty, a sick old horse's travesty, of the standing trot which the Lipizzaner had performed with such precision and fire, but you could see it was a memory in him, still burning and alive, of the real thing perfectly executed. In the distance the music changed: the Lipizzaner down in the ring would be rising into the levade, the first of the "airs above the ground." And in the high Alpine meadow, with only me for audience, old Piebald settled his hind hoofs, arches his crest and tail, and, lame forefoot clear of the ground, lifted into and held the same royal and beautiful levade."

This still chokes me up....

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

That was bad enough before I had Lipizzans.

Now it makes me cry. I've seen in it here in the moonlight--white horses dancing.

Sniffle.

[christymarx.livejournal.com]

I devoured *everything* by Mary Stewart, and that was a particular favorite of mine. Such a heart-wrenching, magical, evocative scene.

[equesgal.livejournal.com]

Ah...some kids want to grow up to be firemen and movie stars. I wanted to grow up to be like Mary Stewart...or Victoria Holt.