The Last Horse at Oaklette
Several years ago my husband was under the house insulating and found a horse shoe, left in the perfect imprint of a horse's hoof.
Our land used to be a working farm. When Granddaddy bought the place, the farmer insisted that he take the 'worthless land over there, where the wind knocks down every crop.' That piece is worth a mint now. A beautiful point of land jutting out into the Elizabeth River in SE Virginia.
That hoof print, it seems clear, belonged to a horse used to plow and till the soil. A farm horse.
There have been horses on this land for a long time. More than a century. Probably much longer than that given that colonizers arrived here with horses in the 1600s.
Oaklette is the name of our suburban neighborhood. It grew up around this farm, which may still be the largest pecan orchard in the state.
As the area grew more and more suburban, noise became louder and louder, traffic got heavier, houses popped up in every vacant lot, and people forgot about how to care for neighbors and animals, livestock in particular.
The 'Self' has become more important than the collective to most, or at least very many, suburban residents.
Last year on New Year's Eve, as I have been repeatedly reminded in my Facebook memories, Payday sustained an eye injury. In my opinion, that injury ended up killing him. He was old and arthritic but still feisty and ready to patrol the perimeter of his kingdom until December 31st, 2021.
Losing that eye took a lot of his confidence, and a fall while anesthetized hurt him to the point where he lost some of the use of his right hand side -- the injury, plus the loss of his vision, meant he never moved in a straight line again.
All because someone... several someones... shot off a huge 50 caliber gun and a million firecrackers, and a few hundred small guns, some AKs, and one, tiny cannon. Because: New Years! and who cares about dogs or veterans with PTSD or horses? We have our rights! We will do what we want! We laugh at terrified animals!
It took 11 1/2 months to get there, but that injury eventually killed my horse.
And those shots in the darkness of midnight on January 1st 2021 and 2022 brought about the end of an era.
Today we are headed to Georgia with Annie, the last horse at Oaklette.
I don't think she will be back.
I don't think horses are safe there any longer.
Over the last few years we have found people who we do not know and in spite of No Trespassing signs on every gate: giving our horses beer; riding them; taking their children into the pasture and giving them bareback rides on our loose horses; feeding them loaf bread; and smoking cigarettes in the hay barn.
If you don't know why these things would be a problem that's okay. You're normal. But please don't do them.
I always knew this day would come, like we always know certain things are going to occur in our lives, the end of this particular era seemed inevitable. And here we are.
I'm both heartbroken and thrilled.
I don't have to do any more barn chores! No more feeding, scrubbing water tubs, cleaning stalls, picking hooves, grooming...no more mornings of absolute presence in the moment, no more smelling the sweetest smell in the world which is the hair just behind a horse's ear, no more hay in my pockets (I was 45 before I realized that not everyone had that), no more nickers of greeting, no more horses pricking their ears up and galloping to meet me at the gate.
Maybe I'm more heartbroken than thrilled. Being a horse person has been such a part of my self-definition and now I'm not that any more.
Sure, I'll swing my leg over another horse at a barn in the mountains and take a trail ride that I pay too much for. But I don't think I'll swing my leg over my own horse ever again.
It's sad. I'm sad. The center of my chest feels like spoonbread, soft and buttery and a little jiggly.
Horses have always been on the land where my family has grown roots 5 generations deep. Now they are no more.
The horses are no longer safe on our land for no other reason than the way the world has grown around them.
Progress? Is that what this is? It feels a lot to me like hardening into a world more and more devoid of compassion, caring, and community.
Someday 100 years from now maybe someone will find a perfect hoofprint with one, double ought aluminum horse shoe in it and will wonder about the horse it came off. Maybe it was a Hershey bar bay gelding. Maybe it was a palomino mare we call The Little Yellow Rocket. Or maybe it came off the Mighty Whitey back in his 4H days. I don't think there will be any more horses leaving tracks for us to follow back in time at Oaklette.
