My Diva

Often times when I am stressed to the max I find myself in desperate need of what I consider, "horse happiness". I have discussed before the ability of a horse to take away all my stress in under 3 minutes. Some days, I think my mare is equally as grateful for me as I am for her. Wednesday morning I walked into my barn and my mare hears my car and instantly comes up to the back gate to greet me. Her eyes are snotty from all the harvesting going on and they are somewhat tired...I can tell. I rub her forehead and slip her halter on to bring her in for a good groom down and to clean up her eyes. Shiloh seems to need attention. She is somewhat of a princess. She loves to be pampered and made pretty. I brush her and her bottom lip quivers. She also has a deeply satisfied look on her face when she is the soul focus of my attention. I stand in front of her and she rests her head on my chest, closes her eyes and breaths deeply into my breasts. We stand forehead to forehead like that for a long time...just taking each other in. This is when all my stress melts away. I can feel her stresses melt away too in her heavy sighs. I wonder what she may be stressed about...she doesn't outwardly show stress, but I can feel her whole body relaxing as she releases those heavy sighs...like her stress is also slipping away. Most often she is calm and quiet. Maybe she's stressed about the growing baby inside her belly and wondering what is going on with her body. I can remember being pregnant myself and feeling as though my body had been taken over by an alien. Do horses feel like this? I wonder. Today I was pressing on her belly where I thought the baby might be and felt a tiny push back. Shiloh turned her head and looked at me as if to say, "Ummmm...what are you doing? You are pushing and something is pushing back. Do you mind?" It was quite comical. The more time I spend with my diva, the more time I feel I need to spend with her. I miss seeing her everyday and I find myself wishing we could have our horses at home...on our own property, where I don't have to negotiate 3 hours of my day to go out and spend time with her.