Yesterday the weather was beautiful, in the low 70's, with a clear sky and no wind. I'm pretty sure the Heavens opened up and were smiling on me since yesterday was the day Estee moved back to Mom and Bill's. Even if the weather had been crappy, I would have felt good. I love my horse almost as much as I love RockCrawlinChef and I feel better when she's home - even if home is 50 miles away.
I cut out of work early yesterday and Mom, Junior and I loaded up into the car to meet Bill at the Hall's place in Lyons. I didn't even bother changing out of my work clothes, I was so eager to see my girl, so off I went in bright pink scrub bottoms and an equally obnoxious scrub top in my new sneakers to get my girl. Heck, a little horse dirt never hurt any one and I have a washing machine. We called Bill to tell him we were on our way, but forgot to tell Ida. We pulled up at the Hall's place an hour ahead of schedule before any of us realized that we'd forgotten to tell Ida we were coming early. Oops. So Mom called Ida who was, luckily, just down the road and was kind enough to hop in her truck to meet us. She told us that Estes was in the back pasture and that we could head out there if we wanted to, so we did, only to find ourselves in a boggy cow pasture. Hmmm...ranch gates and lay-outs can be kind of confusing. Of course once Ida got there she hollered that we could just "come this way, it's drier". So off we trotted to meet up with her in a drier pasture and walked on back to Estes and her daughter Meeker, who is so heavily pregnant we mistook her for another of Ida's horses, Dutch. I feel bad that I didn't recognize Meeks from a distance; after all, she was the horse I leased from Ida before I bought Estes and I absolutely love Missy Meeker (but not as much as I love Estes).
Estes gave us a little attitude about being caught, but it still didn't take too terribly long - less than five minutes to get her caught and haltered. Though she's shaggy, she's still absolutely beautiful. Ida said that she'd intended to get Estes and Meeker curried out the day before, but didn't get around to it, which turned out to be perfect because there's a lot of cold and snow still up at the lodge and I want Estes to have as much of her coat as possible. We've got a storm moving in on Thursday (so they say) and we wanted Estee to get to acclimate for a day or two before it got really cold and snowy.
As we were crossing the cow pasture, Ida told us to hold up because her dad wanted to move one of the cows who was due to calf (calve? what's the verb for giving birth to a baby cow?). So we stood and waited while she and John moved just a handful of cows, then took Estes to the trailer. I had noticed that Bill was towing a two-horse, bumper-pull trailer rather than their three-horse gooseneck, but just assumed that he'd bought it for things like this. It's a Bill thing to do. Tired of hauling the gooseneck for just one or two horses? Tired of hauling the long gooseneck to the trail head? Buy a smaller, more compact trailer. It's what he does. So I thought nothing of it.
It took some persuading to get Estee to load into that small little trailer - she's been raised in stock trailers with lots of open space and that little two-horse jobbie with a middle divider didn't much appeal to her. But, the good horse she is, she loaded up (after some coaxing) and Mom, Thomas and I headed back around the Hall's to tell them goodbye. We weren't gone more than 15 minutes getting Estee loaded and settled, but when we got back around the house we saw Daddy Hall leaving the lean-to and Ida messing with a cow inside. We thought they were just getting the cow settled, but when Ida came out of the lean-to Mom took another look and asked if that was a baby in there. Turns out in the short time it took us to load Estes, she and John had moved the mommy cow into the lean-to and pulled the calf. As Daddy Hall said, "it's amazing what happens when you go around the house."
Bill headed up the hill with Estes in the new trailer when it dawned on me...wait...that wasn't his trailer! When I had commented on the new trailer Bill had replied, "it wouldn't be a surprise if we told you," but I was still in the it's Bill's new trailer thing and hadn't paid attention. Later, Mom said something about it needing a "Tinkerbell paint job", but I'd not paid attention to that either. It wasn't until we were in the car headed back to Fort Collins that it dawned on me...
"Hey, Mom. Is that our wedding present?"
Guess, what? It was! Yay!
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