If any of you have horses living with you – you’ll relate…

But first, let me state that I’m not unappreciative of my horses efforts to warn me about impending weather issues.

I know – as outdoor animals – weather is important to them.  And I feel grateful that they feel the need to include me in the herd and make sure I am aware.

However, what they don’t know is that I do get the news/weather reports.  Or maybe they do know that I get the weather reports but most of the time, the horses are more right than the weathermen…

For example, last night… Yes, I had heard that there would be a 10% chance of a mild thunderstorm.  There.  The humans who are experts at these things had already warned me.  I didn’t need to be awakened at 2am to hear it from the horses.

Or so I thought…

THE PREAMBLE

You know how it goes… you are fast asleep and somehow the sound of pounding hooves is incorporated into your dream.  Mid lovely dream, you are in your car driving to a fabulous vacation home you just purchased and you you hear … the sound of thundering hooves.  Wha?  You switch the radio and hear… horses screaming while running.  Yuk.  So, you shuffle one more time, hoping to avoid what your sleepy brain is trying to tell you and then you hear… thundering hooves, screaming horses and banging gates.

OK, that’s it!  Time to get up.  And just like that, your lovely vacation dream is halted abruptly so you can pull on some stupid looking outfit and fall around outside to see what the heck is going on.

So, this very early morning as I stumbled outside in my PJ bottoms and a sweatshirt (carrying my dying flashlight) I walked up to each corral and saw the right number of greeny-blue eyeballs shining back at me.  OK, everyone is alive and no one is stuck on a gate.

Me:  “You’re fine, ”  I say with conviction.  “Everything is fine, now go to sleep.”

Them:  “Au Contraire, it is certainly not fine.”  They retort in their blowy way, “Can’t you smell the storm coming?!”

Me:  “Yes, I know the storm is coming.  It was all over the news.  But, don’t worry.  It will be a regular storm and you all have shelter so use it and relax. ”

Them:  “Nope, this is a baaaad one coming.  We are sure of it.  You need to come and save us all with food and grain.”

Me:  “Ahhhh, no.  Go to sleep and quit banging on the gates.”

THE STORM

I remember falling back to sleep only to acknowledge in the ridiculous but ‘makes sense at the time’ way of deep sleep, that a semi-truck must be rumbling down our one lane private, dead-end road.  The fact that a semi-truck wouldn’t even make the turn ONTO our road hadn’t quite gelled yet.

Then came a flash so bright I thought paparazzi were in my room.  OMG!  (FLASH AGAIN.)  OMG!  I felt as if I was lighting up like a cartoon character – my skeleton in the flash.  OMG!  Just then, the semi-truck turned into a freight train inside my laundry room.  In an instant, I was up and dressed and tripping over things.

The horses were right.

I don’t know how to describe to you the intensity of this storm.  All I can say is I was thinking, “You’ve got to be kidding me…”.  I felt as if I was in a theater with Sensurround Sound and I was watching a horror movie, “It was a dark and stormy night…”.  You know how you hear the thunder clap and the lightening crack and the pounding rain and you say to yourself, “OK, whatever, I get it, it is a really bad storm… now turn down the stupid effects because I can’t hear the actors.”  That was me, except this was real.  It was unbelievable, awesome and incredible.

I ran outside (stoopid move) to check on the horses.  It was raining, I could hear the tremendous thunder and I was standing right in the middle of it like a human lightening rod.  I ran down to the barn to make sure they were all OK.

The teenage horses looked at me and asked if I was going to feed them anything… The young horses were beside themselves with panic every time the locomotive rumbled through their pasture.  “OMGOMGOMG, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!”, they screamed at me as they did an all-fours-off-the-ground-look-all-ways-at-once kicky-bucky thing.  OMG!

The older horses looked at me and said, “Toldja.”

Since the young horses were riling up the teenagers, I decided to just give in and feed everyone a little bit of some kind of distraction hay.

Bad idea.  Well, it wasn’t a bad idea, just an unsafe idea…

I threw the barn horses some hay and they settled down immediately.  Even the young ones.  However, all the pasture horses are nickering their need for calming hay VERY LOUDLY so that I could hear them above the roar of our newfound train station.  So, I gather up some hay and head up to the upper pasture.  (There is a clue in that sentence…)

As I approached the upper pasture, I saw that Finn and BG were not in their upper usual places but they were down below in the lower end of the pasture.  Hmmmmm.  That’s odd, I said to my dull half-asleep brain.

And then it happened.  CRAAAAACKKKKKK!

Whoa holy mother of yard sales!  The shock and force of the inches away lightening strike sent my flakes of hay flying.  I ran, literally, back to the barn.  My brain was going a mile a minute… “Is the barn safer?  Are Finn and BG OK?  Will the new hay burn?  Gosh I’m an idiot!  Why did I go to the top of the ranch?  Idiot!

I peer out the back of the barn and see Finn and BG eating the hay.  OK.  They are OK.

I looked out the other end of the barn and lightening struck again!   I saw Bodhi and Remi in that bright white light that hurts your fillings.  They were standing under their big tree, in the pouring rain, looking right at me.  “We need calming hay, too.”

Oy.  So, I grabbed a flake and ran over to their pasture and threw it willy-nilly away from the tree and then ran like a deer back up to the house.  Each step, I was sure I would become a little pile of ash that my poor Hubby would come home and drive over when he returned on Friday.

THE AFTERMATH

But, I survived.  I made it into the house like I was cutting the red wire in any Bruce Willis movie.  The dogs were looking at me and wondering why in the heck I would go outside on a night like this.  Luckily, when I told them it is going to be alright, they believed me.

Silly dogs…

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