"Listen my children, and you shall hear..."

"...of the midnight ride of Paul Revere." -Longfellow

I was thinking about Paul Revere's ride last night as we galloped through the woods in the moonlight. I think that is the most alive I've ever felt. Fast horses. Sand underfoot. Clear skies. Good conversation. The wind in my hair. Sigh.

We are training (we being Lydia, Steve, and I--this is Emily) for a 100 mile ride over my spring break. It was Steve's idea, and he is known for his really good ideas. I just hope we can make it. 100 miles is a long way to go in 24 hours. Maybe this isn't positive enough thinking. Huh.

We had lots of fun putting out round bales, at least I thought it was fun. Kind of like mud-wrestling inanimate objects that weigh twenty times as much as I do. The method is that you put a tarp under the end of the trailer, roll the bale off onto it, then keep rolling the bale onto tarps moving them one in front of the other until you get to the hay cage or whatever it's called... The bales were soaked from the epic rains we've been getting and the mud was very sloshy, so it was a challenge. Jacob put garbage bags over his boots and tied them up like mukluks so they wouldn't get muddy but the mud pulled the bags right off. I though that was funny. There were loads of people there helping, which made it into a kind of party.

I took Rain-in-the-Face, a two year old colt, on a walk while I waited for everybody to get there to do the hay. The sky was, well--I'm not even going to try to describe what sunsets look like around here. It had rained hard all morning and had cleared up, so the whole world felt like it had been scrubbed clean. Ours were the first foot prints on the path after the storm. Rain is going to be a very nice horse when he is full grown, he quite a good-looker when he arches his little neck and spooks. I love my life.