….I had a lot of things on my mind (as the song by The Band goes).

This morning started at midnight when my alarm clock went off. Apparently we had a blip of a power outage last night and it set my alarm back to 12:00 a.m.

I—mercifully—got back to sleep without an allergy attack or a spinning-out-of-control thought.

Then at 5:30, I came out of a dream to the sound of whinnying.

You didn’t misread that.

Whinnying. Nonplussed whinnying.

Out of bed I bounded to find two of our three neighbor horses grazing by the lamb fence in the morning fog. If I hadn’t been so annoyed I’d have said, “ahhhh.” I won’t tell you what I said. Use your imagination.

Instead, I threw on a ragtag arrangement of clothes and boots and headed out the door to find the source of the non-stop whinnying—picturing a horse with a broken leg, or a horse rolled up in a tangle of broken electric fencing. This is the worst that my tired mind could imagine. In a few minutes stroll down the road I found Horse #3 standing in his own pasture (with an entire corner of destroyed fence where he, too, could’ve escaped) whinnying his displeasure that his two buddies had left him and wouldn’t come back. This horse was the tattle tale on the playground. The one yelling, “Hey they’re breaking the rules!!!” Poor thing.

Back in the kitchen I watched Rueger and Rosie, the naughty ones, move further from the lamb pasture and onto my lawn, sampling the various grasses and a few of my perennials. Oh well, fewer for me to deadhead.

It was now 5:45. Put on the kettle. Grab the camera. Wait for a godly hour to call my neighbor.