As you know, when the ground has white stuff all over it, there is no nice green grass, so the lady has to bring us dried grass in square boxes that she calls Hey! She used to drive the Hey! around in the back of the little green truck thing, but this year she is mostly dragging the Hey! to us on a little sled. We are thinking maybe this is because she has been looking kind of like a very short pony at the end of a very wet summer, so maybe she is too heavy for the green truck thing to carry around. But for Marco and his band, she takes the Hey! back to their storage shed on a little flat trailer that the little orange noisy machine pulls around. She doesn't do it that often because she takes enough Hey! for the ponies to eat for several days at a time. So yesterday she went back there with the little orange machine and the big pile of Hey!, drove across the fence tape that is around their extended pasture that they don't use when it is cold and drove to the gate where Marco and his band were waiting. They have done this a bunch of times before. When she opened the gate, Marco ran through the gate and the little ponies ran through behind him. The lady thought they would come back because she had Marco's dinner and there was all that yummy Hey!, but they didn't. The lady closed the gate on LaPerlita and then ran to grab the fence tape to pull it up, but she was too late, The ponies made a pony-line for the far end of the pasture and jumped right over that tape on the ground, so the lady was only able to keep one of them -- little Mat, inside. They were FREEE!!!!!! The ponies were so happy. Marco was flagging his tail in that Araby way that they have and boing-ing around the white field right next to us. Of course, we live right next to them so we know them and didn't get too excited, but we watched as they ran back and forth across the field and made the young ponies in the next pasture over run to their fence and yell at them. So the lady came hiking back up the hill to the barn where she got a bucket and a halter and she said things to the ponies that I should not repeat here. The free ponies were happy to be eating old grass under the white stuff in the field instead of Hey!, but they were okay with the lady walking over to them and putting the halter on Marco and taking him back to his pasture. The other ponies said "See ya!" and did not follow Marco, so the lady had to make several trips to lead each pony back to their regular pasture. Even my mom Tudi was happier to stay in the field eating old grass all by herself until the lady asked her to come home for dinner. So THAT was very exciting! And we are thinking the lady might be able to ride the little green truck thing again if she keeps up with that exercise.
