L'hiver viendra, les gars, l'hiver viendra

Le jument de Michao, elle s'en repentira...

Right now, Bubba the Round is on turnout. Jean-Leo over at Percheron-International recently published a post about Breton draft horses. I think they look an awful lot like Bubba. (Or, rather, Bubba looks a lot like a Breton draft horse, particularly the rounder specimens.)

You can be the judge of Bubba's parentage. I found this lovely video of Bretons on youtube (you will also note the large numbers of people wearing white shirts and black vests):



The music in the video is a traditional Breton song called "Le Jument de Michao."

Here are the lyrics:

Et dans dix ans je m'en irai
J'entends le loup et le renard chanter
Et dans dix ans je m'en irai
J'entends le loup et le renard chanter

J'entends le loup, le renard et la belette
J'entends le loup et le renard chanter
J'entends le loup, le renard et la belette
J'entends le loup et le renard chanter

Et dans dix ans je m'en irai
Et dans dix ans je m'en irai

La jument de Michao et son petit poulain
Sont passés dans le pré, ont mangé tout le foin
La jument de Michao et son petit poulain
Sont passés dans le pré, ont mangé tout le foin

L'hiver viendra les gars, l'hiver viendra
La jument de Michao, elle s'en repentira
L'hiver viendra les gars, l'hiver viendra
La jument de Michao, elle s'en repentira

Translation:

In ten years I'm going to leave
I hear the wolf and the fox singing
In ten years I'm going to leave
I hear the wolf and the fox singing.

I hear the wolf, the fox, and the weasel
I hear the wolf and the fox singing
I hear the wolf, the fox, and the weasel
I hear the wolf and the fox singing

In ten years I'm going to leave
In ten years I'm going to leave

The mare of Michao and her little foal
Passed through the pasture and ate up all the hay
The mare of Michao and her little foal
Passed through the pasture and ate up all the hay

Winter is coming, boys, winter is coming
The mare of Michao is going to be sorry for it
Winter is coming, boys, winter is coming
The mare of Michao is going to be sorry for it.



Bubba spends all of his waking hours attempting to eat all the hay wherever he is.

This is the time of year when bad weather forces the carriage horses to either go on turnout or to stay in the barn. And it's when metaphorically we regret all the hay we ate in the field and didn't leave for the winter. A snow storm is coming in the next couple of days, so it looks like it's going to be at least Thursday before anyone does any work.

(Meanwhile, Bubba is out in Lancaster County eating so much hay that, if it's anything like last year, he won't be able to fit in the shafts come spring. If there's anything Bubba will repent for, it will be for getting so fat he'll have to go on a diet.)

On a tangentially related note:

We heard our own "wolf" Rinnie the German Shepherd singing yesterday afternoon when Noodle locked him in one of the stalls outside. I think Noodle was tired of Rinnie chasing him all the time.


Rinnie last year.

Some pics of Bubba from this summer:

Hotel des Invalides, The Fifth of May, 2000

HÔTEL DES INVALIDES, THE FIFTH OF MAY

Beneath the domed cage the Italian boy flutters
Crashing into me as he impatiently flaps
Trying to fly from this cold mausoleum

The man with the medals
From some lost colony
Looms overhead and commands the unwilling subordinate,
Young man, take off your hat,

Don’t you know you’re in a
Place where there is
Still a Napoleon?

And the Family flocks around
Beneath our feet
Laying wreaths at his feet
The man who would be minister is even there
High priest at the altar of bees and violets

His wife would like to leave
(She’s an agnostic, after all.)
But his gesture to bade her stay echoes,

Don’t you know
You’re in a place where
There is still a Napoleon?

And the trumpets echo their eternal refrain
And the drum rolls out its knell
And the echoes of the echoes
Repeat that War is Hell

For they know as they have known
As the centuries have passed
And funeral marches of tourists circling from their chariots
Cannot fathom the heroic mystery

Don’t they know they’re
In a place where there is still a
Napoleon?

And I smile through the Beethoven inside me
I am translating Shelley into French
Singing Mon nom est Ozymandias,

Roi des rois

Surveillez mes oeuvres, vous les puissants
Et désesperez-vous...

And the tourist-herd despairs me--
They do not know that this is also still a place
Where there is a Ferdinand Foch
Who, after the August guns had fallen silent
Four score ago, so trenchantly
Told him who loved War to

Rest
In
Peace

In
Æternum

For the world could do without that place
Where there has always been a Napoleon
Before which the Führer bowed
And still the leaders follow the Pied Piper’s fife and drum.

Outside
They wait in wheelchairs
For the Princess Napoleon
To annoint them with baubles legion

He would shake her hand
If he had one

In the last days of what was supposed to be the last war
He pulled the pin
But the innocents stayed his hand
And his humanity has mutilated him
He is far from the last in a long bleeding line
He is a coup de canon
That flattens me
And silences them all

Don’t you know
We’re in a world
Where there is still a Napoleon?

There you have it, folks...

IMG_1328
Originally uploaded by inaki_goni

A horse and carriage giving tours in Paris.

But wait, flickr reveals more...

IMG_3207
Originally uploaded by oxfraudm

Here's another image of the horse and carriage on the Champs du Mars... Looks like a Shire... and it DOES like look they're giving tours.

My sympathies are with the driver dealing with the bleak midwinter. She's just got to make it a few months, and then it will be April in Paris. Mmmmmmm...

Just too cool.

Mais, OUI!

Horse and carriage
Originally uploaded by FL370

I was surfing through pictures on flickr.com, and I did a double take just like the lady on the bench, here, but that carriage is absolutely. right. where. it. belongs.

I don't know who the people driving the carriage are, or what they're doing on the Champs de Mars, or whether this is one-time or regular thing, but I do hope it's a regular thing. It would be so nice to welcome more horses back into Paris. (And, it would be a positive thing to welcome carriages into the enlightened City of Light just as the PETA nuts are trying to ban them in NYC...)

I rather fondly remember studying abroad in Paris in 2000, and on the early mornings in the spring that I rode the 89 bus across town, getting stuck behind the ponies in the bus lane on the rue Vaugirard, on their way to work in the Luxembourg Gardens.

Eh, bon...

Un tour en caleche autour du tour Eiffel?

It's a horse world, after all

Yet another fantastic organization from our friends in France:

Equiterra

For those who don't read French (and the English-language version is done by Babelfish, and thus is largely unintelligible), suffice it to say that their gorgeous logo pretty much sums it up.

I'll have to translate their beautiful mission statement later. Or maybe I'll just have to email them and offer to translate their site for them.



A lovely photo of Bill the horse in Philadelphia traffic from katie.brothers on flickr.com.

An update, on many fronts...

It's been a while since I last updated my blog or my website (before Christmas! Egad!). In the interim, we were very busy at work with the holiday, then Peter and I headed home to Kentucky for a couple of weeks of R & R (and visiting our other equine friends at the Horsiest Place on Earth). Then, my laptop's hard-drive became terminally ill. So... Now I'm back (I still have to reload Dreamweaver on my computer...The hard-drive transplant wiped ALL of my programs and saved only my data).

Several months ago, I wrote about a fantastic blog by Jean-Leo Dugast, percheron-international.blogspot.com. More recently, I linked to an article about the use of urban horses in France. Percheron-International has a new post about Lasso-du-Jardin, a Breton cob gelding who collects recycling in Trouville-sur-Mer. You really must go to Percheron-International to see Jean-Leo's marvelous photos of Lasso in action.

For those who don't read French, here's a translation of the text from Percheron-International.

This title of "accrocheur" does not refer to Lasso-du-Jardin's age. At only nine years old and with two years of professional experience, one could say that Lasso is nothing but a neophyte.

If he "takes up the bottle," it is those bottles of the restaurants and cafes from the city of Trouville-sur-Mer in the Calvados. Seven years ago, the municipality put into place an empty-bottle collection service - Wednesdays for local residents and Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays for commercial establishments.

Lasso-du-Jardin is gradually replacing Festival-de-Mai (May Day), a 15-year-old Percheron gelding who inaugurated the service. Three people, Christelle, Pascal and Sebastien, supervise the four-legged municipal employees, and take turns on the recycling routes.

Trouville, like nearby Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives, is one of the cities spearheading the effort to use draft horses in an urban setting. Today, there are 70 cities in France that use horses for maintaining green spaces, collecting garbage and providing surveillance. This number is growing rapidly.

After only having year after year of hopes without concrete realization, the urban horse is finally taking off. Urban drafts, forestry drafts, agricultural drafts--draft horses give us a message of hope: hope of a world where one can "work differently to live better."

Jean-Leo Dugast, percheron-international.blogspot.com

France seeks to use more horses for transportation.

This can only be described as AWESOME.

"It's great for workers and the community to have contact with a living thing," Linot said.

"The civil servants are on strike now, but I tell you if they had their hands on a horse they'd be happier – I've never seen a driver kiss his truck."

Bring back the horse; go green; save the Earth.

As I tell small children who hold their noses and make faces walking past me and Chip in Philadelphia:

Horses smell better than diesel.

Odd Laws

According to the History Channel, it is apparently illegal to stare at the mayor of Paris.

But you can relax. It has been legal to stare at this guy since he left that post in 1995.

Well, duh...

I took one of those quizzes about "which city should you live in" based on multiple-choice questions, such as, "What do you put on your rear end before leaving for a party?" and "How did you spend New Years eve?"

My result:

What City Should You Live In?
	You should live in Paris. The city of lights will appeal to your appreciation of beauty and romance. You are a lover and a poet by nature, and Paris' sensitive charms will be a perfect match for yours.
Find Your Character @ BrainFall.com

Well, duh. I've lived in Paris. For nearly a year, all told (nearly 6 months in 2000, plus two summers in 2001 and 2004).

But really, I should live in Philly right now. Which is quite fortuitous, given that I do!

Yesterday, I spent half an hour sitting in traffic at 6 AM trying to cross the George Washington Bridge into New York City, with 6000 pounds of horses behind us (I cannot tell you how *thrilled* those Percherons were...). Bleh.

This is all just a rambling, roundabout way of saying "Thank you, New York, for reminding me why I'm glad I live in Philadelphia!"

Beautiful French Percherons

I was working on my links page for thedrafthorse.com, and I came across this blog. It belongs to French photojournalist Jean-Leo DUGAST. He's got some AMAZING photos of French Percherons, and now I really want his new book, "Sur les traces du cheval percheron" (On the Trail of the Percheron Horse).

Which reminds me, all of the Percherons on Dugast's page, as well as my Philadelphia colleagues--Teddy, Noodle, Lance, Carter, Rex, Prince, Trump, et al.--are all kissing cousins. All Percherons are descended from Jean le Blanc, a Percheron stallion foaled in the Perche in 1823.

Another interesting fact about Percherons in America: They were first imported to this country in 1839 by Edward Harris, of Moorestown, New Jersey. That's right across the Delaware from us in Philadelphia. So my horsie friends listed above are carrying on a long, proud tradition of Percherons in this part of the world.

Photo: Teddy modeling his Percheron-ness. This is my Percheron photojournalism--someday I'd like to take as nice photos as Dugast does.