Fall Colors and Belgian Plow Horses

Autumn is in full swing - it's been dry here, but our trees are nearly glowing with color right now. The maples, and the burning bush as it's called, and sumac - and, the redbuds are yellow. My favorite light to view or photograph the trees is in the morning; at noon, the sunlight shoots straight down and the color is washed out. I suppose our afternoons have been somewhat less clear. Otherwise, the fall colors aren't bad in the afternoons - that light is almost as good as early light for highlighting colors.

The Amish go about their regular work - milking the cows and tending to the animals, going off to their jobs in construction and cabinet making. The women cook, pack lunches for the children, send them off to their segregated Amish schools, do the laundry and garden work, and care for big families. All dressed in their 'plain clothes' - their uniforms, which mean for the women no warm pants (they're in skirts) riding to town in horse-drawn buggies in the wintertime. It's quite a contrast to our way of life. Parallel society?

Prejudice and judgement works both ways. As there are 'English' folk who would call them backward, or hypocritical when they use cell phones and power tools, Amish have their judgements about the rest of us. We are in comparison unfocused, fixated on the superficial and discretionary, vain, greedy, badly dressed, unfaithful. We are lazy, undisciplined. Or so may they discuss amongst them

selves when they look at us. Chew on that.

But back to horses, as I said in my last blog. The previous post mentioned the beautiful draft horses that work in the fields - it's something about the Amish people I enjoy. These horses are dun, or palomino-colored. Blonde, like the Swedes they are, no?

There are also sorrels and chestnuts. These are colors of horses, and it's fun to read the descriptions used for the equine - not only colors but markings, for example. Written on horses' documents are words such as star, stripe, strip, and blaze - notations for facial white hair marks. Nowadays, a horse's papers sport a graphic image of the individual with the marks delineated. This used to be rendered on the paper by hand, accompanied by the word description.

I thought of this while reading about Amish horses for sale online, which have plenty of 'socks' and 'stockings' (white hair) on their legs, and descriptions such as flaxen and dappled. Amish horses go for several hundred dollars into the thousands - seems about like any other horses out there. Not that I'm in the market. As for you, why not drive through northern Indiana in early October, and look at the autumn colors and flaxen-maned horses yourself. Thanks for reading.