"Slow Life"

        “You are so lucky that you can just live a slow, relaxed life! I would love to make money spending all day with horses and picking strawberries!”

               Callie got those comments often, but they never were any less annoying. It was the kind of response she always got when people asked what she did, and she told them she ran a horse ranch and farmstead, with a stand out at the end of the driveway for people to buy produce from.

               “Slow life,” she mumbled sleepily as she woke up at 4:00 AM, at least an hour earlier than those office workers who thought their jobs were just so much harder than hers.

               “Slow life,” she growled furiously at 5:30 as she fixed the fence for the third time that week because Dakota was a menace of a pony and kept breaking it on purpose. She’d think it was accidental, if he didn’t wait until she was nearby before making eye contact with her and leaning on the fence until the board snapped.

               “Slow life,” she grumbled as she put ice on her bandaged arm at 7:00. It had been bleeding profusely for the past half hour, because the horse she was training for a client hated her and had bitten her when she tried to halter her to put her in the barn for breakfast. Stupid horse, that was the last time she took in another Haflinger. Freya was her breaking point. Then she’d still had to feed all the horses before getting a bandage, or else the horses would have been up in arms over not being fed immediately. Or rather, up in hooves.

               “Slow life,” she huffed as she threw bales of hay off the wagon and down onto the ground at 7:30. Once she finished that, she checked that all the pastures had water and put all the horses back out to pasture, as they’d finished their grain by then. After they were back out, she went back to the haphazard pile of hay and properly stacked it up.

               “Slow life,” she scoffed as she picked herself up off the ground at 10:00. Sassafras had thrown her again. This was why everyone preferred geldings over mares. Though it likely didn’t help that Sassafras was straight from the west, a true wild mustang. This was the first week she was being ridden, and she did not like it. But mustangs were looking to be all the rage for the next decade, so Callie wanted to be the first one locally selling mustang foals within a year or two, especially out of a well-trained mare. And to get a well-trained horse, you had to take a few falls along the way.

               “Slow life.” Speaking of foals, that $100,000 was turning out to be well spent. Two foals from American Pharoah, one due any day, the other just a few days old. Callie had a few clients that raced and were more than ecstatic at the idea of owning the offspring of American Pharoah. Callie was less ecstatic, given that she usually never spent more than $5,000 on buying a horse, but one foal from American Pharoah was ten times that. Callie smiled as she watched Pharoah’s Return trying to get his mother to play with him, before giving up and taking off around the pasture.

               “Slow life,” she panted under the blistering sun at 12:00 as she gathered her lunch from her garden. She wouldn’t get to eat for another hour or so, as she had rows of fruits and vegetables to harvest. She collected green beans, strawberries, and blueberries, then went inside at 1:00, covered in dirt and sweat, not looking forward to collecting the rest of the crops that afternoon.

               “Slow life.” After she had eaten last night’s leftover chicken and cooked up her green beans, she chopped up her strawberries and spent the next hour or so making a strawberry pie for her dessert for the next week. While she waited for it to bake, she was able to lay on the couch for a bit and browse through a magazine, finishing flipping through it just as the timer went off.

               “Slow life,” she hissed as she pulled herself up off the couch at 3:00, feeling all the cuts and bruises from the morning. Her whole left side was aching from where she hit the ground, and her arm looked like it needed the bandage changed, and it was developing a nasty bruise.

               “Slow life,” she cursed under her breath as she went to finish harvesting that day’s produce at 3:15, collecting it in her various baskets, and then picking the stray weeds and snatching bugs off her crops at every turn. Her skin was bright red by the time she was finished working out in the sun.

               “Slow life.” Callie refilled the produce stand and checked the cash box, where many neighbors had left their money, as her fresh food was far closer and cheaper than the old produce at the grocery store. She had been thanked many times for providing her surrounding neighbors with fresh food. One neighbor had told her that they hadn’t been to a grocery store for food in two years, between her produce and their livestock they raised.

               “Slow life,” she muttered as she lunged the two yearlings she had bought that spring at 6:30 and 7:00. They were getting used to the activity, put they still yanked on her arm constantly and she often wondered if yearlings weren’t more trouble than they were worth.

               “Slow life,” she yawned at 8:00 as she brought the horses in for dinner and put some of them back out for the night. She was glad she had made pie earlier, because she was too tired to make dinner now, and she had no leftovers left over for her to eat. Pie and ice cream it was.

               “Slow life,” Callie murmured with a smile as she sat on her porch and watched the sun set behind the trees while she ate her pie. She watched the hawk couple that raised hatchlings at the edge of her woods every year soar back to their nest for the night, calling to each other. She looked out at her horses as they grazed in the pasture, and listened to the other horses as they settled down for the night in the barn.

               Maybe they were right. Maybe Callie did get to enjoy the slow life. Sure, she had to get up long before any of the corporate workers, and yes, their idea of the slow life was that she just lazed around all day and did nothing but pet ponies and snack on strawberries. But she had more than most of them did. She had a job she loved with all her heart. She had the most beautiful farm that she got to witness the sun rise and set over every day. And she did something different every day. Even if she didn’t even if she did the exact same thing every day in a row, horses were almost more unpredictable than people, so she never knew what was going to happen next. She’d been thrown from more horses than any of those other people had even ridden, and she was always surprising people by how strong she really was from having to wrangle beasts ten times her size. She had grown into this life. Her dreams had been much different a decade ago. She thought she’d be a completely different person. A teacher, a wife, a mother. Then she lost the person she loved, and she decided to seclude herself. Work alone. Live alone. And she was okay with that. When the day arrived, she would join her beloved beyond just dreaming of him, but until then, she’d live out her days with horses and no one for company but the creatures and the leaves.

               Callie finished her pie with one last look at the darkening wilderness that surrounded her, then went back inside to put off dishes until the next day and read a book until she fell asleep. It may be fast paced, but it really was the slow life in the ways that mattered, and she went to bed every night with a smile on her face.