the color of my soul

husband's bestie has sold his place and is moving away at the end of the month. he's a truly lovely person, a retired pilot, and i will miss him because he's been a staple dinner guest at our house for over a decade, but husband will miss him even more. in fact, i'm a little worried about husband without him. a young couple has bought his place and the wife is apparently a fellow american. husband has briefly met them, but i haven't. they won't be the same, but if i've learned one thing, it's that things don't stay the same and you have to be open to what comes next. 

i've been reading a lot of new substacks of late and many are focused on the new years resolution genre. i guess it's just that time of year. a surprising number of them quote rumi. kind of weird how appropriated his work has been by the gratitude/self-help set. i can't decide if it's good that it pushes it to a wider audience or if it somehow cheapens it. maybe it's a bit of both. but anyway susan cain asks in the new year's edition of the quiet life, what color is your soul now? what color do you want it to be? which she doesn't attribute to rumi (though she does quote him in the stack), but marcus aurelius, "your soul takes on the color of your thoughts."

affected by the time of year, i think my soul is currently that wintery nordic greyish blue. it's not a terrible color for your soul to be. it's peaceful and quiet, if a little cold. it seems a little lighter and more tending towards the blue than the grey after yesterday's scream in the forest. it feels in tune with the slight slowly returning after the solstice. i think the color i want it to be is a sunny, bright yellow. and that will surely come with summer and the buzzing yellow of the canola fields. and it will no doubt pass through that brilliant light green of the first beech leaves as they unfurl in the spring on the way there. our souls aren't just one color, but the whole spectrum and that color can change with the season or even from day to day or minute to minute. but susan is right, that it's worth thinking about what you're feeding your soul. and currently, i want to feed mine light. 

cute cows

i'm fast becoming a bit enamored of cows. i spotted these scottish highlanders today.  i think i could have convinced this one to follow me home. i don't know what scottish highlanders are known for (beef? milk? their "wool?"), but i want one anyway.

saddle up

no idea why that twine is tied on there, but it doesn't appear to be holding the saddle together.

if i had a dollar (or even just a kroner) for every minute of energy i've wasted trying to figure out other people's motives, i'd never have to work again. there's pretty much nothing i waste more time on...wondering about why people do the things they do and trying to put it into some sort of logical framework that enables me to deal with it, if only in my own head. many times, this energy is completely wasted because ultimately, it's really hard to tell why people do the things they do. and sometimes even asking them (which would, i admit, save me a lot of wasted energy if i did it a bit more often) doesn't help.

case in point:  some months ago, when our horse was still stabled over at our neighbors' place, they offered that we could have a look at some of their old saddles and try them out and see if one would fit matilde. so recently, i went over and took a couple of the saddles to try. they were up on the highest pegs in the tack room, dusty and obviously unused for years, even a little bit musty-smelling. they're good brands and were very nice saddles when they were new, but both are, shall we say...well broken-in and probably at least 20 years old. i actually didn't mind, as they still have a lot of good left in them and i figured that it would mean that they would be in an affordable price range.

then, we went to a lot of trouble to have a saddle fitter come out and help us decide whether either of the saddles would work on matilde. she actually came out twice (the first time, she was called away halfway through because her own horse was colicking and she had to go home) and we tried the saddles, finally settling on one of them. it's not perfect, but the tree fits (that's difficult to change, so it's important) and with some extra padding and moving the cinch straps, it would be a good match for both sabin and matilde and we could use it for several years to come. thankfully, i had the wherewithal to ask the saddle fitter how much she thought the saddle should cost. i had a figure in my head of what i had seen similar saddles for in my research online and what i thought they would ask for it. the saddle fitter, who knows the market well and can tell by looking roughly how old a saddle is, told me not to pay more than a certain amount for such an old saddle - that amount was well below the amount in my head, so i was glad to have asked her.

then, i went back to the neighbor to report on how it had gone and what the saddle fitter had said and i asked them if they'd thought about a price. and the price they came back with was TWICE the price the saddle fitter said should be the most we should pay. and i have to admit that i feel really badly about this. first, i'm mad at myself for not asking them to name a price when i picked up the saddles (actually, i did, but they said they needed to think about it).  if i'd known what they wanted, i wouldn't have gone through the whole process with the saddle fitter - wasting her time and ours (not to mention her fee).

what's bothering me about it is that i can't figure out the neighbors' motives. did they not want to sell the saddle in the first place? (if so, why offer it? it wasn't as if this whole thing was my idea.) do they think we're stupid and would just blindly pay the price of a new saddle without looking into what the saddle might be worth? do they need money? or did they simply not know what their saddle was worth in the current market? if that was the case, why not come back with another price, when i thanked them for letting us try the saddles and expressed with some shock that it was double what the saddle fitter had advised we should pay - especially in light of having to spend another considerable sum making the changes necessary so it fits our horse?  i just can't make it make sense.

i actually saw a saddle online that's the same model but which was only 2 years old instead of 20, and in perfect shape - looking pretty much completely new, for which they wanted 1000DKK ($200) less than the neighbor was asking for their old saddle. i do realize that this just a WTF? moment and i should move on, but i have to admit that i'm having trouble with that. it has changed my whole perception of our neighbors and i'm not sure that i can get back to a place where i like them again. not that they were our best friends, but i liked them and thought they were really nice. now i'm not so sure. mistrust has definitely replaced the warm feelings i previously had.

is there some angle on this that i haven't considered in all of my obsessive turning it over in my mind? something which might make it ok?  (i should note that the saddle has never been to the olympics or been, to my knowledge, ridden in by a princess, so that can't be it.)  how can i wash this bad taste out of my mouth?

*  *  *

if you'd like something more inspiring than my long and petty story, watch this.

or read this little magical vignette.

one of these things is not like the others

i'd like to introduce you to some of our neighbors...

i met a most charming cow yesterday.

she told me her name was molly.

apologies to the real molly.

she had a friend named polly (apologies to the real polly).

and a couple more named dolly and madge.

and across the road? this guy. we'll call him will (with apologies to bill).
i do wonder, with all those cows around, whether he knows he's a camel.

have you met any of your neighbors lately?

all's well that ends well

last sunday, there was a strange vehicle parked in front of our house for a half an hour or so. it was strange because it had UK plates and i noticed it because i thought i saw a baby left alone in the vehicle and saw that the steering wheel was on the "wrong" side. (i know some of you consider "our" side to be the wrong side, but that's the stuff of another posting.) i realized quickly that there was a mom in the little silver SUV with the baby, so it wasn't a baby left alone, and i didn't really think any more about it.

i also heard our neighbor speaking english to someone. she's been having some landscaping work done in her garden and has had a number of different consultations with landscape architects and the like, so i didn't really think anything of it. 

she came by a little bit later and asked us if we'd seen the man she was talking to and whether we thought he looked trustworthy. we hadn't really seen him or paid that much attention, so we couldn't really say. she said he had offered to do some paving in her front yard for a very good price, but she didn't know what to think. she didn't really have the money for it and although it was just a smidge over half the price of what the other part of her garden had cost, she didn't think she would take him up on it.

we asked her if she'd received a written offer with all of the details outlined. she said she hadn't, but would ask for that before deciding. so, on monday morning at about 11, we were a little surprised to see a big yellow lorry pull up outside her house and 3 men jump down and get right to work tearing up her old paving slabs.

our neighbor ran out (luckily she happened to be home) and asked them what they were doing and demanded they stop, because she hadn't agreed to anything! the SUV guy pulled up and ended up giving an even better offer and sort of guilting her into the whole thing, as well as giving her a sort of written work order, so the work proceeded.

on monday, that 3-man team worked until nearly 10 p.m., doing all the hard work of tearing up old paving stones and throwing them into the lorry, digging and moving gravel and sand. all of it by hand, without gloves and without proper footwear and with worn-out looking equipment. all of them had extremely worn out shoes and clothing and two of the men looked quite old to be doing such physically-demanding work. none of them had that many of their original teeth left. in short, they were an extremely hard-working but sorry lot.

our neighbor has an extremely soft heart and this really began to bother her. she started to develop a bad feeling about the whole thing in the pit of her stomach. 

but, it wasn't until around 6 p.m. yesterday that that bad feeling proved true. suddenly, the young man came to the door and started in on some sob story as to how he needed her to pay him half of the money for the project, in cash, so that he could get the supplies to finish it the next day. 

that was never part of the original deal and when she said she couldn't possibly lay her hands on that cash at that time of day when the banks were closed, he got his boss on the phone. the ever-so-nice scottish gentleman from the silver SUV. he stopped being nice and lit into our neighbor, accusing her of all sort of totally absurd and ridiculous things...that she was a liar and wanted to cheat him. all of the accusations perfectly reflected what HE was doing to her! and because she is a kind and soft-hearted person, it was totally bewildering and very disturbing.

she came over and asked to talk to us about the whole thing. we talked it through with her. in the end, i made some dinner and we took it over and ate it together with her and stayed, talking the whole case through until nearly midnight. she clearly needed to talk it through.

we worked through all of the worst case scenarios. it was difficult to see what the trick was that this scottish guy is pulling. the guys, after all, were doing the work. our main thought was that he would get the guys to ask for half the money, then show up the next day and demand the whole amount, claiming to know nothing about his men having been paid.

the man completely refused to give a real name (he literally had so little imagination that he claimed his name was john smith, but we heard the workmen call him benny). after a little online research, i discovered that the phone numbers on the "invoice/offer" paper were prepaid phone card numbers and as such had no personal information. the company name on the paper doesn't exist. except for the fact that work is actually being done (and well, in actual fact), it would seem to be utterly and completely a scam.

we wondered if the three would show up this morning to finish the job. they did. and our neighbor agreed to pay the whole amount, in cash, to the workmen, once the job was finished. they said they'd be finished by noon. we agreed with our neighbor to come and witness the payment (since Mr. SUV also refused to provide a receipt), so that if he should claim he wasn't paid, there would be witnesses. we even enlisted our neighbors from the other side as witnesses--they're older and would look very good on the witness stand, should it ever come to that.

they weren't finished until almost dinner time. and we went over and witnessed the payment. our neighbor was able to convince the youngest of the workmen (who seemed to be in charge), to write, "paid in full" on the offer she had been given by Mr. SUV. she has some very well-done new paving in her front yard, at half the price it would normally cost and she has learned a valuable lesson about listening to that bad feeling in the pit of her stomach.

and, i think we foiled whatever scam Mr. SUV was trying to pull, tho' i'm still not clear what it was. i do pity anyone else who gives this man business, tho'. it's an awfully strange way to do business...leaving your wife and baby in the car while you go door to door in a foreign country and bully people into work they're not really sure they want done.

on the bright side, however, it brought us closer to our neighbor, who is really a very nice, very good-hearted person. we were happy to be there for her the past couple of days. so it's true what they say, all's well that ends well.