My Uncle Raymond

My Uncle Raymond was the oldest of my mother's siblings. He loved horses and owned drafts which he used to twitch wood from his woodlot and he also competed at the pulling contests at the local fairs. He and my aunt had no children, his horses were like family to him. They would travel to different states and bought some really nice teams of horses and he was widely known in the horse world here in Maine. He used to whistle to his horses to get them to pull at the fairs and frowned on the use of electric wire shocks to get them to go. I lived an hour and a half from him, so didn't get to spend a huge amount of time with him, but always loved to go visit and see the horses. He was also known for being frugal, coonverting an old school bus into a horse trailer and doing many things himself, such as shoeing. He died at age 70 of a heart attack while shoeing one of his horses. That would be the way he would have wanted it.

I think of Uncle Raymond often when working with my horses, I got them after he died, and I so wish he were here still to give me advise and guidence. Sometimes I know things about a horse and don't know how I know them, and wonder if he IS still here, guiding me.

Anyways, the other day I went out to feed lunch, bundled up in my one-piece Carhartt suit with my light blue Mad Bomber hat with the gen-u-whine rabbit fur lining since the nice warm spring weather went into hiding! As I was slogging back across the paddock through the mud and puddles, a pick-up truck drove up my road and parked in my driveway. A man got out and the little puppy-doodles ran to greet him. When I reached him, he introduced himself as the neighbor that lives at the end our our main road, the house with all the heavy equipment and a few horses. Alan noticed the equipment, I knew the horses! Anyway, he offered his services when we were ready to clear some land and we got talking about this property and horses of course. He has a lot of daughters I learned from someone else, eight of them I was told! Some of them were into horses and one did really well in barrel racing, competing throughout the US and Canada. He also had drafts, so I asked him if he knew of my Uncle Raymond. Of course he did he said! He grew up around Raymond, his family owns a sawmill and milled much of his wood. Then he told me that he owns the remaining horse from my uncle's last team, a horse named Dick. Said he was a great horse and he had just used him to twitch wood the other day. How cool is that?!