Wally in the Wind

It's a little after 4:00 a.m. and I am wide awake. As the weatherman predicted, the winds started howling just after midnight. I slept until the sound of palm tree fronds scraping against the side of my house woke me up. Regardless of how air-tight my house allegedly is, there was also an unmistakable, ever-so-slight whooshing sound creeping in around the windows. That woke me up, leaving me to lie in bed and wonder just what Mr. Wally was doing outside in his paddock. He's such a mischief maker and odds were he certainly wasn't asleep in the wind, either. The choices were:

A) He'd grabbed hold of his big orange caution cone and was obsessively flipping it up and down. He can do this for a good 30 minutes before boredom ensues.

B) He'd concentrated all of his mental powers on trying to figure out how to remove his tail bag... and succeeded.

C) Two words: Prison escape.

D) He was trying to find the one fence post cap that's not quite irrevocably glued in place and turn it into a small, frisbee-esque horse toy.

E) All of the above

Fortunately, when I went outside I found him innocently waiting for me. There's no sneaking up on this horse because he either hears the back door crack open or sees the kitchen light go on. Wally is a little too observant of my behavior. If I think about it too much, I become paranoid.

He was looking over the fence, his ears up, his eyes bright and eager for the new day to begin... even though it was 4:15 a.m. and very, very windy.
I mixed up his beet pulp, his joint supplement, his pellets and his psyllium, added a good measure of vegetable oil and poured the gruel into his feed bucket. That made him quite content.

Wally seems quite well adjusted to the wind, being a California horse and all. But I am a California native as well and I, quite frankly, simply cannot adapt. There are wildfires blazing both north and south of me (we're quite safe) and the early news has tales of horses being evacuated from areas ravaged by flames. That puts my little windy predicament in perspective. Perhaps I shouldn't be so troubled by a quick-witted horse and a windy, moonlit night.

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