Oct. 10 /2016
Beating down rain outside. Tail of a hurricane they call Matthew. I'm not sure how they spelled it, I have only heard it on the radio. I have lots to do besides recording my dismal life for all to see but I ma not motivated to do anything else.
Nick's daughter Alexa is here with her husband and I have no idea how he is out there cutting wood for us to burn this winter in this weather. Nick is supposed to be helping but I hear his voice downstairs from time to time and I hear the tractor outside. The horses are inside and I remember we ran out of hay last night. Nick had called our hay guy, a dairy farmer who lives eight or ten miles away and who sells us the large rolls of hay or silage and who likes Nick partly because he is funny and charming but mostly I think because he is easy-going and will buy whatever he has left over from his cattle.
Nick and I met over seven years ago. He found me on Plenty of Fish, a popular internet dating site, sent me his picture and we met for coffee four days later. It was love at first sight for me, both with the picture and in person. He was funny, charming and also very intelligent. Very good-looking, in excellent physical shape and he had an awesome body. I am not 'picky' about physical features but I do look for someone who is funny and intelligent. Nick also speaks perfect French and better English than I do, although French is his first language. I found this to be the icing on the cake, and his muscles didn't detract much from him either.
We both fell in hopelessly in love and within several months we were spending every night together and most days when we could. He mentioned one day he would like to 'raise horses again someday after he retires' and so here we are today. Seemed like a dream come true for me. And for him, he says, until I started having an affair with the next door neighbour.
It is alleged to have started sometime before he went away for work in October of our second year here. We had moved on the first weekend of June. Two horses were purchased from the previous owners and we drove to Ontario three weeks later to pick up two more, which were yearlings, from a Mennonite fellow near Kitchener. We had purchased four in total so the plan was to make two trips. But we ended up buying a fifth horse from him, this one a three-year old gelding who could be broken and trained to ride the next summer. The yearlings would have to be four before they were 'started' and Nick wanted a horse he could ride sooner than that. So we hired a guy the Mennonite fellow put us in touch with to bring down the remaining three horses for us and that made seven. Our eighth horse was an awesome black colt born on the same Mennonite farm we had purchased the other horses from, and Nick drove up in November to bring him here when he was weaned from his mother at eight months of age. By the end of February we had eleven.
I had tried to get the couple of days off that Nick was going to be away but my co-worker also needed those two days off because her husband also had to be away and because she has two small children under four, I took the shifts while at the same time wondering how I was going to manage all those horses by myself and work the eleven-hour shifts each day plus the one hour commute each way. Early mornings and late nights. It wouldn't kill me. So I thought then. If I had only known then what I know now. What a cliché but how well it describes the next two years.
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