The Quiet Joy of Labor

Meditations on using your hands and tending to animals

Photo by Matthew Hacker on Unsplash

This isn’t quaint work. It’s smelly, sweaty labor that takes muscle and time. Mucking stalls and pastures, dumping wheelbarrows full of manure, pitching hay, scrubbing water troughs, mixing grain — this is the work of loving horses. It’s not easy. But somehow, it’s also rejuvenating.

When I’m done with the work there’s a glow of satisfaction in my face. My hands are dark with dirt, which I can never seem to get out from under my short fingernails. The smell of hay and horse lingers — we horse girls love that soft, musky scent of horses. It smells something like soil and sunshine and soul.

During childhood riding lessons I did not learn about the real labor of horses. I could saddle up and ride for hours, but the work remained behind-the-scenes; left for laborers paid to tend to the horses. Then I grew up and moved away from the suburban wealth of Southern California, to the rolling green valleys of Oregon where I got my first horse in my early twenties.

I paid a small fee to keep my mare in a nearby pasture. Other than the land she stood on, everything else was my responsibility: stocking the barn with hay for her to eat and feeding it to her every day, keeping a trough of fresh water clean and full, ensuring she was safe and healthy. The…