Discover Top Posts Tagged with #queer equestrian

summer flower baby

#equine tumblr #horse blog #horsblr #horse #paint horse #flowers #outside #halter #painthorses #queer equestrian

001: Back in the Saddle Again

After years of severe chronic illness, last week I got back on a horse for the first time in over a decade. I found riding to be more doable than I was expecting; it wasn’t easy by any meaning of the word, but it also wasn’t impossible, and even though those seven minutes in the saddle pushed my body to the limit, I would have been able to ride more later in the day if I had had a long enough break.

A brief history of my health before I get too ahead of myself:

I’ve been chronically ill since late 2016, when I started working and began needing to sleep upwards of 16 to 18 hours a day to feel rested at all. Over the years I progressively got worse, until summer of 2019 when I had to call out of work more than I could go in and I was either in bed, in the bathroom, or at work. When covid hit in 2020, I went from being able to leave bed for work to only being able to leave bed for the bathroom and the occasional doctor’s appointment, but due to the pandemic, even my appointments stopped before I had any sort of diagnosis besides fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue.

In November 2020 I had a near-death experience that resulted in getting my first ever blood transfusion; then I moved back home to my parents’ farm at the beginning of 2021. At the time it was an admission of defeat, but with the help of my parents, my health has slowly improved over the last two and a half years that I’ve spent on the farm, to the point where not only am I spending all day almost every day anywhere but my bed, I’ve able to leave the house upwards of three times a week and drive myself the majority of those times to boot.

As I’ve improved, I’ve experimented with doing more activity both physical and mental. For the first two years, physical activity was next to impossible and mental activity was all I could handle on a regular basis. Then I was blessed enough to get the first of two gender-affirming surgeries in December 2022, and since then I’ve been finding that while I’m now more physically capable, my mental energy has become unreliable.

While it’s of course a bit of a pain to be unable to read or write consistently, I’ve enjoyed the increased ability to bake, do canning, and get back to playing a musical instrument. This past spring I even planted a garden of pumpkins while learning to find adaptations for the various activities I have an interest in, and next year I’m hoping to plant more than just pumpkins!

I’ve spent the last eight months slowly but surely building up my physical activity to the point where when I had my second surgery in June, I was able to get back to my life with relative ease by mid-July. At this point in time, as long as I’m sitting down I can do whatever I’d like to, within reason, and if I need to walk somewhere, as long as I have my cane and take breaks every five to ten minutes, I can get where I need to go.

And how does this all come back to getting back in the saddle?

I had grown up going to a local stable with my siblings while our mom took lessons and cleaned stalls. My sisters and I were always more into riding than my brothers were, and once I hit puberty I stopped riding altogether as it, like most of my childhood passions, was too much for my dysphoria. Eventually, my sisters also stopped riding, though my mom continued on for years until she and my dad could afford to build a barn behind our house and bring her horses home. Since then, she’s slowly stopped riding as often as my dad’s health declined and our farm grew to include chickens, goats, and geese, but the horses have stayed a part of the daily chores all the while.

After stumbling across the International Gay Rodeo Association (a story for another time), and after realising that I am significantly more physically capable if I just have the right accommodations, I decided it was time to try riding again, just to see if I could do it. My mom was game to help me saddle up, so all we had to do was wait for the weather to cooperate.

I was able to borrow my mom’s tack and her old helmet, and with the help of an overturned bucket, I was up on top of the gentle giant Tiny Tim, a half-draft who gets along with everyone and everything. It’s been a while since he was last ridden; as such he was just as out of shape as I was, and I managed to last longer in our ride than he did!

We walked around the edge of the arena, first in one direction, then the other. My mom made a point to ask who was leading, me or Tim, and unfortunately my answer was a resounding “Tim is!” Then she asked us to do a serpentine across the arena, and I had such difficulty with that that she had to come out to walk with us. By then Tim was ready to be done and I was ready for a break, so I dismounted and led him back to the barn.

All in all, those seven minutes were some of the most wonderful I’ve had in a long time. Going forward, I hope to ride at least once a week for however long I can, and my only goal is to be able to go on trail rides in the future, no matter how long it takes.

May you have a peaceful day.

#of-canes-and-manes #queer equestrian #text post #first post #new blog

If I only had the money to buy this horse I’d be the happiest person ever. Never met such a saint of a horse, especially for a 4 year old.

#me #baby horse #queer equestrian #girlswholikegirls

My aesthetic.

#mare #flowers #landscape #trees #spring #horses #horseblr #equestrian #bay horse #dark bay #western #western saddle #snaffle bit

Sunrise drives out to the barn give me life.

#barn life #queer equestrian #farmer lesbian #sunrise #country #rural queer #michigan

just a couple of softies.

#flower power #apha #horseblr #equestrian #paint horse #horse lovers #my horse #queer #queer equestrian #trans

003: Cleaning Saddles Ten Minutes at a Time

Now that I’ve been riding consistently for a few weeks, it became time to properly clean and condition the tack I’ve been borrowing from my mom.

Her tack, a beautiful Circle Y all-purpose Western saddle and a Western bridle sized to fit our half-draft Tim, had been sitting in the barn for ages, gathering dust and only getting used a handful of times a year. With how little she’s been able to ride and how much she works, my mom just wasn’t able to take care of her tack at all over the years. Luckily I have a fondness for cleaning and working with leather, and I had the spare time and energy to take on this monumental task.

I set up the saddle stand on the back porch, put on the next episode of the Gunsmoke radio program, dug out the leather cleaning soap, and got to work, taking breaks to rest every ten minutes or so. My mom had warned me that if done properly, cleaning a saddle should take hours. It sure did take hours, but a good half of that time was spent resting, and I loved every minute of it.

By the time I finished scrubbing out every nook and cranny, I had spent more time actively cleaning that saddle than I usually spend driving to, attending, and driving home from doctor appointments. In the interest of preserving my energy, I opted to let the saddle dry overnight and come back the following day to condition it. That seemed to do the trick, and I then spent the week working conditioner into the leather on a daily basis until it was time to ride again.

I applied the same routine to cleaning Tim’s bridle; I deep cleaned it the first day, then conditioned it once daily over the following days. The bridle wasn’t nearly as dusty or dry as the saddle had been, but it still benefited greatly from the TLC it received. And even my hands benefited from the daily conditioning routine: I get dry and cracked skin on my hands year-round, though it’s usually better in the summer, and after a week of working on the tack my hands were softer than they’ve been in years!

Now that the saddle and bridle have been finished, I’ll only need to worry about conditioning them once or twice a month, and I won’t need to do another deep clean until they get dirty again. In the meantime, my mom requested that I clean her other saddle too, another Circle Y that she’s been borrowing from her former trainer. I agreed without any hesitation at all.

First I had to find it, and when I did, there was a clear quarter inch of dust covering the whole thing. It took me a good thirty minutes of dry brushing over the course of two days to get it dust-free enough to start cleaning.

But once I got to the cleaning, this saddle wasn’t so bad; I used an oil soap instead of the cake soap I had used before, and with a little elbow grease I was able to clean it up in a matter of hours, even with breaks. I also chose to split the cleaning into multiple days, where I cleaned the whole saddle on the first day, then scrubbed out the nooks and crannies the next. That decision saved me a lot of energy, for sure! Then I did the same daily conditioning routine as before, and though it still needs a good bit more work, it’s really cleaning up nicely.

This level of deep cleaning wouldn’t have been possible only a few months ago, and I’m awful grateful to have been able to do it. If it weren’t for those frequent breaks I took, I might not have gotten through the work at all. I’ve spent the last few months learning how to pace more effectively and to take breaks before I need them, and that seems to have made all the difference. Five to ten minutes of work at a time may not seem long enough to accomplish anything, but it sure does add up quickly!

I’ve got some photos of the first saddle and the bridle all cleaned at the bottom of this post. It didn’t occur to me to take before pictures until I got to the second saddle, so unfortunately the only before and after comparison I have is of that second saddle.