for Martin...I still remember
I looked out the window at the sky growing dark with storm clouds, and uneasily wondered why my husband wasn't home yet. I love storms, but this one had been called dangerous more than once on the weather forecasts, and the scenes of devastation it had left behind in the areas it had already gone through were frightening. The wind whistled through the trees next to the house, growing louder and louder every minute, starting to become almost a muted roar. I paced, watchful and worried, in front of the big picture window in the living room, chanting, "Come on, come on," like a mantra to to bring him home safely.
Finally, I saw headlights turn into our driveway at the far end. Relief washed over me, almost leaving me limp, and I went out on the back porch as he pulled his truck around to the back of the house. He came bounding up on the porch, soaking wet, and shaking the rain out of his hair.
"I'm glad you're home, I was beginning to get worried! We've got to get the horses in the barn before it gets any worse." I was almost having to shout over the wind howling through the massive oak trees behind the house.
"Okay, babe, give me just a second, and we'll go round them up."
I ducked back into the house, grabbing my oilskin, and then whistled up the dogs to help get the horses towards the barn. Our horses have never liked being cooped up, and I knew that with the weather as bad as it was they would be skittish, and hard to handle. I looked down at my australian shepherd, Taz, and pointed out towards the pasture, "Go get 'em!"
He took off like a shot, ears laid back against his head in the driving rain, and tail up like a flag behind him. Trixie, his female counterpart, took off after him, and I knew it was just a matter of time before I saw the horses topping the rise at the end of the pasture, relentlessly being driven towards the barn by the dogs.
Martin rejoined me on the back porch after grabbing his own oilskin, and we tugged the collars up around our necks as we ventured out into the forty-mile-an-hour winds, and the rain that was coming down so hard it stung when it hit my cheek. The huge pine trees behind the barn seemed to bend almost parallel to the ground, and I started to worry about one of them coming down on top of the old barn. I wordlessly pointed them out to Martin, knowing that my voice would be lost in the roar of the weather around us, and he nodded, but knew, like I did, that there was little we could do to prevent any damage this storm chose to inflict on us.
At the barn, the storm seemed to conspire against me as I struggled to open the small side door, and once I had it open, it was snatched from my grasp by a gust, and slammed back into the side of the structure. It was a little quieter in the barn, but it only served to highlight the creaks and groans wrung from the old building by the storm.
While Martin struggled to pull the door closed behind us, I made my way down the aisle of the barn to the sliding doors, intending on getting them open so the horses could easily come inside once the dogs had them headed this way. I slid the door to the side just in time to see the horses top the hill to the side of the barn at a gallop, head high, nostrils flared, and the two dogs nipping at their heels.
I stepped to the side as Taz and Trixie herded them inside, and turned to see that Martin had the stall doors open, and each horse had headed to it's own stall, snorting and blowing.
"They feel it, don't they?" I almost yelled at Martin as I watched my gelding, Striker, paw at the stall gate, tense muscles highlighted in his chesnut neck.
"I haven't seen it this bad in years!" he yelled back, busy throwing hay into each horse's stall, and checking to see that they all had water.
"Are you sure they'll be okay in here? What if one of those pines comes down on the barn?"
