I consider it to be spring when the water and urine and poop and hay bits start flowing out of the horse enclosure. In the past, I took the shovel and rake and made pathways in the snow and ice for the outgoing slop. I spent hours doing this. Not this year.

I call the backed up flotsam, jetsam, and water Lake Raudi. It has never lasted long, at least until this year. For close to a month one-third of the enclosure was a literal pond. If the water was frozen and smooth, I could have skated on it. Not this year. It was soft and sloppy.

Today, on the drive home, I saw a stream of water running down Oceanview Drive – it detoured to the right, across the road at the point in which the road levels out before heading uphill. I thought two things. First of all, the road was getting washed out and again passing vehicles would go thunk when they hit the potholes, and secondly, oh my dog, the pipe that comes out of the pit that the water flows into must now be unfrozen.

I got out of the car at the base of the driveway and stepped out of the car, so as to open the gate. I swore as I stepped into the slip stream because this meant that my hiking boots would, upon drying, be stinky.

It was as I opened the gate that I saw that the pen was now really draining, for the water was flowing out of the pipe.

I drove up to the driveway, again got out of the car, walked down the driveway and took a close look at the plastic pipe’s exit. Yep, water was surging out. I looked into the enclosure and saw that not much water had drained out of the pen yet.

I went inside and grabbed a snack. When I finished, I headed down the driveway and saw that Pete, who must have arrived home moments after me, was making a new path for the water. I gave him a blank look, and he told me that he was doing this so that the water would flow down the side of the driveway and not break down the driveway.

I grabbed a trowel and helped him for a few minutes but only for a few minutes because the horses had to be tended to. They had elected to stand close by and were watching what we were doing. Hrimmi was pawing because this is what she does when she’s hungry.

Pete went back up to the house to make dinner. Now in the half hour that I was pen cleaning, the pond water level became negligible. This lead me to believe that the water had just started moving through the pipe before we got home.

There were, I noticed, bits of poop here and there, so I reckoned that the after dinner cleanup would not take very long.

I resumed pen cleaning at 9:45 p.m. It was overcast, but there was still plenty of light.

I thought it was a good way to spend the latter part of the day – focusing on pen cleaning particulars. For a while this enabled me to forget about my physical and mental whoas, of which there are two shopping bags full, which is far too many.

Next: 106. 4/18/26: Pulling my Thoughts Together