Musings From The Farm Comfortable living in your own skin

My mother grew up loving horses and when we moved to the country we always had a barn full of horses. Horses were my best friends growing up and when I left home I worked at racetracks and breeding farms for the first three years on my own. It wasn’t until my children were almost grown that we ended up getting horses ourselves. We carefully searched and rode many horses before we decided on two that were not only beautiful but we deemed safe to ride and work around.

One of our horses, Sir Bay’s Fascination, (Facsi for short) has always had a bit of an attitude. Although she would never hurt people; she likes to have her own way if she can get away with it.  Mostly she argues about food. She lives for eating. Right now she lives with the goats because she bullied the last horse we had. We don’t dare put her together with our little pony Caddy, he thinks he is big and tough and would tell her, “make my day”(in horse speak of course). Fasci would not take kindly to being challenged and I’m afraid Caddy would get hurt.

But Fasci has always been kind to her goats.  She shares her hay with them and lets them push her around. So I was surprised to see her standing in the stall door with all the goats outside in the rain. The goats hate the rain. I can tell when it is starting to rain because there is a small stampede of goats headed to the barn.  It has been raining a lot lately. Today I watched Ruth (our most stubborn goat) trying to get past Fasci into the cover of the barn. Fasci was putting on her best mean face, ears back and shaking her head at the persistent goat. The goat slipped past her into the stall a few times. Fasci would turn around and disappear into the stall and Ruth would scoot back out. Fasci was right behind, resuming her post as door guard again. This happened several times. The goats were all crowded up against the side of the barn trying to escape the rain looking miserable. Finally Fasci gave up and went back out to the pasture. We are guessing she wanted to eat in the rain and was trying to make them come out and keep her company.

Fasci is 23 years old and not likely to change but I love her, even when she is ornery. Funny thing is her caring for our goats in a strange way is her caring for this great soap we make.

Do you have horses you love and a crazy story about one of them?

I have always had an artistic creative bent. I remember a picture I drew when I was about 4 of our dog. I showed it to my mom and she asked me what all the little dots were and I told her they were the fleas. When I married Dean I didn’t think he had a creative bone in his body. He was stuck at the stick figure stage of art that honestly weren’t as good as the dog I drew when I was 4. But over the years I have realized how wrong I was.  The director of the Handcrafted Soap and Cosmetic Guild had a tour of our shop and was so impressed with all of the inventions Dean had made she asked Dean to speak at their annual conference. When I looked at all the gadgets Dean had thought of to solve problems, that I thought were roadblocks to our growth, I realized just how creative he is. I had always thought of creative as making something pleasing to look at. But looking at a problem and visualizing a tool that you can put together in a way to make it work is way more creative than just looking pretty. Thank you Dean for being a visionary and always proving me wrong when I say it cannot be done.

Who is Creative?  I discovered much to my surprise that Dean is very creative!

Checkout the 3:45 min video of our soap making process.  It  shows many of Dean’s creations.