As winter loosens its grip, the pastures start to drain of all the season’s rain. The grass is at its shortest height of the year. It is the best time to clear the ground of any detritus that has blown in from the surrounding area. As a group, everyone walks the pastures, back and forth, end to end and side to side. We search for anything that might injure the horses or the land.

It’s amazing what we find. So many plastic shopping bags float into the fields from passing cars and trucks, they end up all over the place. (That makes me even more dedicated to reusable bags for shopping.) We have to watch for even the smallest signs of them since many bags are buried just under the grass. Plastic is bad, but the thin bags used for shopping can really wreak havoc with a horse’s internal systems. You know, they’ll pick up anything that they find interesting.

We’ve found children’s toys, men’s shirts, plastic, glass, and aluminum containers, a grazing muzzle (lost last year), feed bags, cereal boxes, junk mail, and a number of things which used to be something, possibly, at one time. Once in awhile, there will be something wholly inappropriate and fairly unmentionable. Speculation immediately follows as to how said item ended up in the pasture when it should have been housed, discreetly, in someone’s bedroom endtable. We’ll never know.

The brother-in-law was hoping for a trebuchet. “The neighbors have one in their field. It flings pumpkins.”

Walking the pasture is a zen experience, much like meditation. Of course, we had to stop periodically to chat with a neighbor who drove by. That goes without saying. It’s what you do on a farm – walking meditation and chatting with the neighbors. Sometimes, they are exactly the same thing.