Truth in Imagery…

So the fact of the matter is that the image that we used across the front page for the entire life of our newsletter (and now here across the top of this blog) hasn’t been representational of the farm’s actual appearance for over 11 years now. As you can see in the new photo on the left there are now, amongst many other physical changes, shed roofs on the Main Barn.  That was a necessary and common sense addition that was made perhaps less than year after the original photo was taken. That first winter (’97/’98) was spent having to shovel out all of the corrals, mostly by hand, every time it snowed more that 3 or 4 inches.  While that was sort of novel the first time or two it had definitely lost any lingering patina of romance by the time February 1st rolled around!

To give you a feel for how dated that original photo is: the 5 animals that are visible represented at least one half of the farm’s entire herd at the time. Though none of those females are with us any more, of trivial note is the fawn girl furthest to the right, Margarita. Her final cria here some years later was a young male born a day or two after the passing of the late, great, Johnny Cash. Guess that one worked out…

In any case that barn at the time housed everyone: females, crias, geldings, and any studs when they first started making an appearance. Since the construction of our Stud Barn though in 1999 and more importantly the Arena in ’02/’03, the Main Barn has served as the quarantine and transient barn where visiting females stay whenever they come to breed as well as the temporary home for our male and female show strings to decompress in (in a bio-security sense) before rejoining the home herd. It’s also where we house any of the Herdsires when they need extra TLC. SuperNova, for instance, went through what was essentially a 6 month hospice at the end of his life there: he had his own private pen and paddock, surrounded by visiting females and our show girls in adjoining pens, all while being doted on by his human caretakers. Not a bad way to go, no?

So why leave that original photo in place as the masthead image for the new blog? The most snarky answer of course is that it’s my blog and my photo but that’s not the true reason. It’s really because it harkens back to our significantly more humble beginnings and it’s always a nice reminder of where we have come from on several different fronts.  It still makes me smile when I remember that on that occasion one of us had to lift the other up in the bucket of the farm tractor in order to get the proper elevation and angle for the shot...and the photo was taken with an old Olympus camera shot on film. To put that in perspective, this morning I took the shot in this post with my IPhone from the window of my office!

For those of you that haven’t seen the farm in person recently (within the last 18 months) that is Jen’s Garden ‘o Plenty in the foreground above the stone wall. You can also see a white blur in the far background (to the left of the Main Barn) that is the Arena some 400+ yards further up the side of the mountain. All in all we could do far worse…