New Residents

The 2010 Census showed that Point Roberts had a population increase over ten years of 6 people, a pitiful .45%.  But what the census didn't even look at was the horse population.  It, too, had an increase of at least 6.  I know that because I met six new residents this afternoon.

Yesterday, driving down Benson, I passed the corral wherein six little donkeys are more or less securely held.  Next door, at the entrance to what had been the nursery, was a big grey horse.  A big, grey, commanding horse, standing right next to the fence.  I was taken aback at seeing there a horse where I had never before seen a horse, especially not such a good looking horse.  When I got home and tried to describe him to Ed, I felt like I wanted to say that he had had a feather headpiece, like the big horses at the circus, but that wasn't really true.  But it felt true.

I went back today and met him up close, as they say in TV, as well as his five horse colleagues and his owner.  She, too, is a new resident of Point Roberts and has come to provide a home for her rescued horse group.  Increasingly used to Icelandic ponies, I kept thinking how big these horses were.  The lovely grey horse, named Lance, is an Arabian, with a brown freckled coat (his mother was grey; his father was brown, but the freckles go away in the winter), and is elderly, 28(?), but doesn't look a day over 15.  As if I knew what age a horse looked.

All six of them are terrifically friendly, anxious to get close to you and see how you are doing.  They were having bad lives somewhere else, or at least difficult lives.  Now they have retired to Point Roberts and, like the rest of us here who are retirees, are living lives that are very different from our prior lives.  And, like the rest of us, need special papers to cross the border.