Just Your Average Tuesday (Plus Horse)

School was nothing remarkable.  It was a standard second day.  I'm starting to put a few names with faces.  We're finishing up the tedium of opening procedure.  Things continue to run smoothly.

At the end of the day, I had a knot between my shoulder blades that would have made the Gordian knot look like an amateur effort.  After standing almost thirty minutes of bus duty, I came in and put my aching head on my desk and closed my eyes for awhile.  I was just plain worn out.  Like any other major endeavor, it takes time to get back into the right physical condition for teaching all day.  As I have on many other days, I thought of the magic hands of that guy I knew at the Wesley at MSU and wished I could just sort of teleport him in to have him get that pain out of my neck and shoulders....

I came home at five and went to Mom and Dad's for supper, mostly wrapped in a zombie haze.  I came out of it some on the way home, which was a good thing as it turned out.  My day took a hard left turn about 7:00.

As I rounded the curve just after the one where a deer plowed into the side of my car so long ago, suddenly, there was a brown horse in the road frantically darting back and forth.  Of course, there was a truck in the other lane.  Both of us slowed and swerved on the wet pavement trying to avoid hitting the frightened animal, and we managed to get around it.  The truck kept going, but as the horse darted down a long road leading to a locked gate to somebody's property, I backed up and followed it, blocking it in.

Where I'm from, you don't just let somebody's stock animal run loose and hurt itself and other people if you can help it.  You try to prevent the injury to the animal the best you can.  You do it because it's right, right for the animal first of all, and also because it's right for others.  You also hope that if you happen to be a person with stock animals yourself that someone would do that for you if your own animals ever slipped the fence as they will inevitably at some point do.  Mississippi has some massively punitive laws about what people can do to you if they hit your livestock with their car because your cow or horse was somewhere it wasn't supposed to be.

I called Mom on my cellphone and told her what was going on and asked her to get a phone book and start finding out whose animal it was.  This took longer than you can imagine.  Everybody was either not home or didn't know.  Mom finally tracked down not the owner but somebody who could help us take care of it by driving to the owner's house and blowing the horn until somebody came, and they came with a key and opened a gate to get it back inside a fence.

In the interval, I just stood outside there in the gloaming with the horse watching it pull kudzu off the edges of the dirt tractor trail for an hour.  The horse was gentle and fairly small, thank God, but not very interested in me.  This was fine with me.  I just stayed near the car to expand the barrier I'd created with the PT Cruiser if I needed to and kept watch.

Sometime during the wait, Mom came back to let me know she'd found somebody, and a neighboring dog appeared, a big yellow lab.  He was SO HAPPY to see us ALL.  My first thought was overly enthusiastic dog + already nervous horse = disaster.  We managed to persuade happy dog to go away repeatedly until the people with the key could arrive, and thus a good time was had by all.

I finally got home about 8:00.  It felt wonderful to hit my couch.  Every fire ant and mosquito in the county has gnawed on me, but at least that poor horse has been fed and is no longer in danger of being struck by one of the road warriors racing the blacktop out front tonight.  Let no man say life in the country is dull until he has tried it for a little while.