It’s late January. The days are lengthening, although
it’s still cold, and rainy.
You don’t think of late January as the beginning of
spring. We still have three months of possible snow, ice, and always, more
rain.
But, in these days of climate warming, the birds are
responding by starting to sing earlier. A house wren has been singing all week,
and yesterday I heard robins beginning to practice. A pair of Anna’s
hummingbirds coming to the feeder we put under a heat lamp on the back porch.
Hooray, spring!
But then, a single swipe of Raven’s hide makes me say, 'Damn
it. Spring already.'
Hair.
Raven is a registered Hanoverian Mammoth, if his coat is
any judge. The clip I gave him in October has fuzzed back in. The rest of him
is deep and woolly. If he had horns, he could be mistaken for a yak.
The scattered hairs that came off him today are only a
foretaste of what will soon become an ebony blizzard. Soon any grooming will be
not so much grooming as it is whacking through the undergrowth with a woefully
dull machete.
I foolishly will attempt to remove it with a shedding
blade (surely the most valuable tool in my grooming kit) by dragging it over my
beast. The hair comes off in swathes-but
not neatly. No, most of it goes onto my lips, or in my mouth, or my eyes. I’ve
learned to not wear anything that might bear a static charge (like nylon, or
wool, or polyester, or fleece) as then the hair clings to me. What hair can’t
find a spot on me begins to fall, scattering in the lightest current of air.
Huge clumps of it hit the floor, only to immediately skitter like dust bunnies
to every crack and crevice in the barn. Sweep? Pfft, sweeping merely breaks
clumps into a gazillion individual hairs and it artfully dodges any attempt to
corner it into a dustpan.
Add to that the fact that it’s not clean. It’s grungy
with a winter’s accumulation of dander, lanolin, dried sweat, dried manure that
won’t groom out, and plain ol’ dirt. Even when he’s been groomed daily and blanketed
all winter, somehow, the hair has accumulated schmutz. Don’t attempt to wash
the hairy horse. Oh, my, no, you will end up with a hairy horse that will NOT
dry and be up to your knees in wet, smelly hair. It will clog up the wash stall
drain and no matter how you try, you will not be able to get it all picked up.
For the next several months, wherever he goes, Raven will
have a light aura of airborne hairs surrounding him.
Blading him will remove an entire horse worth of hair
only to reveal: more hair. Why can’t it all come off at once, like when you
shear a sheep? Why can’t it come off a horse in one neat blanket?
Sometimes I’m tempted to clip it. I’d need a weed
whacker. My clippers would take one look at the job and quit. Clipping him would leave him cold, even under
a blanket, and would bugger up the new summer coat he’s growing underneath the
old one.
I often hear people wonder why their horse is shedding
when there is still snow on the ground.
It’s not the temperature that starts him shedding. It’s
the lengthening of daylight. We turned the solar corner in December.
I welcome the return of the sun.
I just wish it didn’t come with a hair coat.
