Passing the time
| September 15, 2015 | Posted by Melinda under Uncategorized |
In honor of national dog day I posted this on my DVM facebook page, along with photos of Tess that I think would be fun to “redo” in a couple of years. And then I actually re-did a photo of Tess that I posted on her blog here.
(Whew, that was a lot of links. But I said all that to say this.)
I got to thinking of my horses and whether I could do something that honors the years they live with us and how we both change over time. Compared to the average lifespan of our dogs, our horses may live 2-3x longer as our companions, for at least several decades.
Growing up my mother would take birthday photos. Every year, taken in the same place. If we moved, then a location on the property was carefully selected as the new birthday photo.
A few are missing from this line up but you get the general idea.
One time my mother forgot…hence the swim suit in July “birthday” picture (I have a mid winter birthday). The last picture shown here was right after I ran my very first trail race (same Auburn New Year’s Race I ran in 2014!) and I’m proudly sporting my run T-shirt. I think I’m that’s my 16th or 17th birthday picture.
I’ve started taking selfies with Farley, especially on our “gotcha anniversary” and if time is good we will still be doing it in 10 years. There’s also the ride photos of course, but sometimes in an activity that is on an every day level a solo sport, I don’t want to wait to snap a photo chronicling a moment in time.
Matchy matchy
Magnificent skies.
Attempt at a group picture
What about ML on day 1?
ML likes selfies.
Practice makes perfect
But in the end, there’s Farley. The kindest and most talented horses I will probably every own. This is one of the several gotcha day photos (Thanksgiving) from last year. One of them was edited and is now my gravatar on the upper right hand side of the blog.
Life with animals is so fleeting and yet so enduring. Me and ML could potentially be still taking selfies together in THIRTY years – when my daughter is the same age as I am now. Farley potentially has as many years left as she has already lived, given some luck and good genetics. And yet, she has grown old(er) before my eyes and we are both different creatures then when we met almost 8 years ago, half her life time ago, even though we were both arguably fully grown adults.
How do you mark the passage of time with your non-human partners?
LOVE the photos of you growing up, what a great idea…the closest my family does to something like that is a yearly Xmas photo. I take photos all the damn time of the critters, so mostly it’s me digging through the archives to find similar ones taken on similar dates.
I’ve noticed you seem really good at getting pics of your animals AND you whether it’s riding or whatever. I take regular Confo and body condition pics but it’s different from them actually doing something. I’m thinking I need to enlist some help and get some real pics of me and my ponies regularly.