Rosie

I don’t have any pictures.

Before I start:

I am not a “horse person” who lives for interactions with their equine counterparts. I do not have a horse. I used to have a small farm, and have found horses to be incredibly adept, socially intelligent animals, with their own way of seeing. Much like dogs, they view each of us as potential herdmates, until shown otherwise. It makes them incredibly loyal companions and inconveniently clingy friends. They (and dogs) are better at social than humans, and worse at individual.

Rosie was a rescue horse.

We got her from a sort of “halfway house” for rescue horses. She and her herd had been left on a small pasture lot; the size common to many suburban “farms”. The owners of the property just went away. I don’t why they had horses. But they left forty-four of them to starve.

By the time the horses were discovered, six of them had died; the rest were living off the wood of the fir trees — they had already eaten the bark, all the reachable branches, all the grass and shrubs, and the surface layer of dirt (while trying to eat roots). None had pushed out past the fence (it was electric).

When we finally heard, Rosie was the only one un-adopted. She had no teeth (worn away by the sandy soil), no mane and tail, and no body hair.

That’s not all the bad.

But it’s all the bad I’m going to talk about, for now. Rosie was the ugliest, most beautiful horse I have ever known. Her skin was scabby and brownish-reddish-blackish-gray, as if she were related to a hippopotamus. When I called her she would wag her tail. She could not eat hay or any normal food, so I would make her a mash of sugar beet pulp, molasses, oats, soy meal, and a few other goodies that she could gum down; but it always felt like she had lost the knack for it. I had to coax her, help her along. It worked best if I pretended to eat, too.

She was pastured with our other horses; a rag-tag band of Norwegian Fjord draft “ponies” and a couple Polish Arabs. She fit in. Hung out with the other “lead mare” (a thirty-nine year old Fjord named Rina) and generally did well, except for meals. She would not eat her “special” food if there was another animal who didn’t get any. She would move aside and let them eat it, or simply refuse to eat. I finally started making each of them their own meals. Nine horses, seven cows, four pigs, three terriers, and each of us humans all got their own special dish. Every morning. Every night. It was an odd time on the farm.

My two children were seven and eight. They loved Rosie, and she loved them. Eventually, once her hair grew back in (her mane and tail never grew back) and she regained some muscle, I would let them sit on her back and walk around the close pasture near the house.

Rosie seemed to live for those times. The girls would walk outside and she would perk up, squeal, and run (trot) for the house. If they rode one of the other horses (they had the Arabs for their own), Rosie would walk alongside. When they left to ride the schoolbus, she would watch in the pasture near the end of the driveway. She would herd the cows or nuzzle the pigs, or tease the neighbor’s dog, until she heard the bus; then she would stand at attention at the fence and wait. They were her kids. We were all her kids.

During the fall of that year, Rosie started to do less well. She ate less, and got the chills. She wore a blanket all the time, and stayed in a stall, away from everyone but the barn cats. She did not digest her food well, and no matter how “special” I made it for her, she would not eat much. The vet sat with her. The girls sat with her. I spent my nights in a cot next to her stall. We walked with her on sunny days, the girls and I, alone and with the other horses. The world seemed to be doing less well.

She eventually stopped eating completely. After much family discussion and many tears, we decided to let her go.

In the late afternoon a few days after Thanksgiving, I walked out to sit with Rosie. She nuzzled me, bumped me a little. Shivered. Her stall was well-heated from the cold; a little bit of early snow. We gave her the injection, the vet and I, then waited for the end. It didn’t take long.

I sat with her until midnight or so; cried a little, then cried a lot; dug her grave by hand over that whole, long night. It was cold and dark, and I was outraged that she had to die; that she had been abused; that the world just kept on.

We talk about Rosie.

I live in New England, now, in a small house in the country; the girls have scattered out to their own lives in the west. We talk to (or text) each other most days. When we need a little boost and want to remember our best times— sometimes around holidays, or when the world lets us down — we talk about Rosie.