Last week at the barn, my friend Lindsey and I were chatting as we groomed our horses in the crossties. Our voices were businesslike and earnest; the tone one adopts when deliberating on something of the utmost importance.

We were well into the conversation before it struck me that two mature, educated, adult women had spent the last 15 minutes keenly discussing horse poop.

Horse. Poop.

October is upon us and as I have learned, this means that the Humans celebrate cooler weather in some very strange ways.

While I am on board with flavoring every imaginable drink and dessert with pumpkins and apples (as long as the Biped shares), I must say as someone who has studied human psychology, I find the costume element all too predictable.

Anyone who has spent a lifetime around horses and horse shows has some great stories to tell. Many of them involve odd circumstances under which they competed. 

Like the year I went to the American Royal in Kansas City. It was a multi-discipline show with a huge number of entries (my number was 1210 if that tells you anything) and a small number of arenas.

It took me a lot of years to figure out that the main reason a relationship with a horsey girl is challenging is because you, our non-horsey significant others, don’t understand us.

For most of my training career with this Human, I have pretty much run our cross-country courses solo. How else can you look at it, when she has yet to keep from fainting somewhere between the start box and finish flags?

At long last however, I’ve begun convincing her to keep her eyes open as I step gingerly over the 2” by 4”s and half-decayed straw bales we typically encounter in the starter division, and we’re beginning to school over new types of questions.

Questions that are actually, you know, questions.