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Making Up GrainSeptember 04, 2005 This afternoon at the barn I was making up grain -- my usual is to get chores done first, then riding is like dessert. Not to mention, by then it's 4:30 or 5:00, cooler and more pleasant for riding than earlier in the day. Dark these days is well fallen by not long after 7:00, which leaves plenty of time. We make up supper and breakfast at the same time, so Ginny can feed, hay, clean stalls, and pick paddocks before she leaves for school. She teaches second grade, and the Vineyard goes back to school on Tuesday. There are five horses currently in residence; one of the two summer boarders leaves on the 14th, the other at the end of the month. The grain room is 10 or 12 feet long, and about half as wide, with a scarred window on one end overlooking Justin's and Allie's paddocks. After you've factored in the big metal cabinet, extra bags of grain, several bales of shavings, a worktable, the big enclosed bin that protects several open bags of pellets and crimped oats from mice and rats, the smaller square bin that holds mostly cat food, and a corner for brooms, pitchforks, and other implements, the floor space is not much, and most of it, being concrete, is occupied on hot days by Rhodry Malamutt at maximum sprawl. Rhodry was elsewhere when Black Kitty, the senior barn cat, entered and yowled. I finished scooping grain into red plastic paint buckets -- one per horse per meal, each labeled with the recipient's name -- and turned around. Black Kitty was calling my attention to the small rabbit he had just brought in, dead, as a present for Ginny. Black Kitty is about 13. We've been worrying lately about his skinniness and general health; he has reciprocated by upping his mouse and rabbit body count. He was puzzled when I scooped the dead bunny up with a pitchfork and bore it out to the manure pile. Humans, he was probably thinking, are strange and unappreciative. I hoped Rhodry wouldn't find the rabbit. Allie was wandering around loose. Ordinarily she and the other two mares, Dolci and Emma, all year-round residents, would have been in the back pasture, but the ring is being redone and the fenceline it shares with the back pasture is currently stacked up in boards and posts across the dirt driveway. Allie isn't prone to bolt, but the drought-parched grass is so crunchy and unappetizing that I kept an eye on her to see how far she would wander and in what direction. While putting canned cat food away in the storage cabinet, I was startled by a glimpse of someone else in the grain room. No one else was around; in a moment I realized it was myself, reflected in the huge mirrors that are mounted at one end of the ring. Several days ago Ginny and her husband moved them in here for safekeeping till the new footing arrived and the fence was re-erected. Unfortunately the move was not uneventful: the wind blew the mirrors over, and now the lower half of one is cracked in a bowtie-shaped pattern. I paused to gaze at myself: short curly brown hair liberally threaded with gray, face as tanned as it ever gets, Alley's Auto Sales T-shirt, black schooling tights with flashy rose, pink, and gray stripes down the sides. Not bad, I thought. The only times I see myself full-length is on horseback, in the mirrors when they're stationed at the end of the ring. The only two mirrors in my apartment are shoulders-up only, so I can see if my hair's in order and my face is clean. Probably many women would like their bodies better if they banished full-length mirrors from their homes, and avoided those three-paneled mirrors in department store dressing rooms, which are coupled with overhead lights guaranteed to make any woman look and feel ugly. (I buy nearly all my clothes mail-order. The main exception is the thrift shop, where you can try most things on in the aisles.) Sometimes I think I'm the only woman in the U.S. of A. who likes the way she looks and isn't on a diet -- and not, need I say, because I match the insurance company weight charts. I don't know what I weigh either, though I could probably guess within five pounds or so. Women's figures, wrote Kim Chernin more than two decades ago, in The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness, are the only things we're allowed to control. Think of all we could accomplish if we unleashed our bodies and devoted all that energy to changing the world. Chucking mirrors and scales could be the first step.
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