A frolleague of mine in the horse barns laid her buddy horse to rest today. She was a sweet old mare who wasn’t likely to weather the winter well, but that doesn’t make it easier.
It’s my job at the barns to handle horse burial and we have had too many holes to dig in the last few years. Except for one of our sweet hairy friends, who was the worst kind of surprise, and a horse we barely knew who came to us sick, our funerals have all been for horses whose times had come. They’d all lived long spoiled lives being well-loved and doted on.
We’re the kind of barn that houses any number of horses who have outlived their “usefulness”. They retire and get fat and get brushed and loved and cleaned up after and just get to live their horsey lives being horsey until they just can’t anymore. My dad owns a blind horse who has been blind for more years than not at this point, and that horse is going to outlive us all.
But burial is my least favorite job on the farm. Nobody ever gets to watch me inter the bodies. There’s no dignified way to manage that and no one should have to see their horse go in the ground. It’s just me out there—once the animal has passed and everyone has cleared out—with a giant skid steer and a horse I loved, doing what needs to be done. I cry a lot. I talk to the no longer a horse. Sometimes I sing to them. 10,000 Maniacs “Verdi Cries” usually does the trick.
We usually try to have a bouquet of wild flowers from the farm for funerals, but today we were officially out of wildflower season in early November. So, I cut some green willow and made a Brigid’s cross and a wreath out of a number of different willow varieties so there would be some color in lieu of flowers. That might be what I do from here on out.
The horse who was laid to rest had a horse buddy out there to help her on her way. And the horse buddy tried a few times to nibble her willow wreath and cross. And then it felt like maybe I was giving the sweet mare a bit of an Egyptian farewell, providing her with a snack to munch on during her journey to eternally green fence-less pastures. That felt right.
I don’t know. There’s so much loss on the farm—beloved animals are the worst, but also crops taken by flood, even family-like staff who only move on to other work and other lives leaving huge holes behind them when they go—that it would be easy to just dwell on that.
But there’s so much life too. And the willows are a huge part of that for me. A crop filled with hope and growth and renewal. In a year of terrible floods—and too many—the willow have grown tall and happy. They are a promise of future making and creativity and a means to get lovely people down here to play with sticks and create community.
It was an honor to make things out of willow for my frolleague and her cherished horse today. Truth be told, though, it was also selfish—a distraction and a moment of quiet thinking and being in my body and weaving when things felt bleak.
When things get hard, there’s always willow. And I’ll never stop being grateful for that.
