//------------------------------// // Afternoon // Story: Gardening with Rose // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// Gardening With Rose Afternoon Admiral Biscuit One thing that I really missed from Earth was bottled water. I knew that it was wasteful and usually tried to use public drinking fountains or bring my own water from home, but sometimes that just wasn't an option, and it was really convenient to be able to get a bottle of water practically anywhere. Ponies didn't have bottled water, and I was thirsty by the time we'd finished loading the wagon. Honey Dipper and I were both soaked with sweat, and I was starting to have fantasies of cooling off in the river, but that was unfortunately going to have to wait. “You've got water back at your house, right?” “Yeah. Green beer or water, whichever you prefer. We'll take a break before we unload the wagon.” “That's good.” Now I had more motivation, so I helped Honey Dipper with her harness so we could put the outhouse back where it belonged. Once it was back in place, I hitched her back to her wagon. “Do you need a bit of a push to get started?” I wasn't sure how heavy the wagon was now. It felt like we'd moved several tons of manure, but it probably wasn't actually all that much. She rolled her eyes. “I can get this.” She shifted on her hooves and dug in, and the wagon obediently followed along. ••• For once, I wasn't insulted that the few ponies we encountered got well out of our way. I couldn't blame them; no doubt they were constantly wondering if the wagon might somehow dump its contents all over the road and they didn't want to be anywhere near it if that happened. I could understand that; I’d always kept a little extra room between my car and trucks that looked like they were carrying particularly unpleasant or dangerous cargos. Did ponies ever get into accidents with their wagons? Were there pony traffic cops that wrote tickets for speeding with a wagon? I'd never seen one, but maybe I didn't know what to look for. Did Honey Dipper need some kind of special permit? Did some wagons have warning placards? The hardware store sold jugs of kerosene for lanterns, which I assumed were shipped in on trains. Maybe when they carried them from the station, they had to put a placard on the back of the wagon saying it was flammable. Then again, ponies didn't seem to go much for warning signs of any nature. In a small town, everyone might know what was in any given wagon. Hopefully none of the ponies ever got the bright idea of lawsuits. I was so lost in thought that I almost walked right past her house, and if she hadn’t turned into her yard, I might have. She went right back around to her row of compost piles and backed the wagon up, then twisted around and kicked the front of the wagon with a hind hoof. I heard a latch click open, and the entire load bed tipped back. That's really clever. Unfortunately, despite the dumping bed, not everything slid out. Honey Dipper turned for her harness, and I held up a hand to stop her. “I can get it. It'll only take a few minutes.” “Are you sure?” “Yeah.” I probably shouldn't have volunteered to go solo, but it was too late to turn back now. I drove myself on with the thought of finally getting a tall glass of cold water, and I did get the wagon emptied out fairly quickly. Long tasks get easier when the end is in sight. ••• After it was all into a pile, she tugged the wagon forward and then told me how to work the latch to fasten the bed back down. It wasn't actually very complicated and I probably could have figured it out on my own if I’d had to. “I'm going to go put the wagon away,” she said. “And get out of my harness. Then we'll have something to drink. If you want to work a full day, we’ll empty out the barrels we took from the pail houses and then turn the compost piles.” Since the option had been offered, I could have said that I'd had enough work for one day, take my half-day's pay, and then . . . and then probably never work for her again. Nobody wanted an employee who quit when the day’s work was only half-done. “I'll stick around,” I told her. “No sense in leaving things unfinished. Especially if you’ve got trouble finding help.” “I appreciate that. Everypony says that you’re a hard worker, you know.” I didn’t really know what to say to that without sounding full of myself, so I just nodded. Even though I didn’t have to, I followed her around to her shed, and when she’d backed in front of the doors, I unhitched the wagon and pushed it back into place for her, and then the two of us walked up towards her house. “Do you want any help getting out of your harness?” She flicked her tail and for a second I wondered if that was a bad pony pickup line at the bar. Who would wear a harness to the bar, though? “It's complicated,” she said. “How it comes off. You don’t have a harness, you won’t know how.” “Berry Black let me put his on and take it off,” I said. “That's not the same.” “I don’t really see how it would be different. His looked pretty much the same as yours, and—“ I paused for a second, mindful that I was potentially getting into dangerous territory. “Well, your bodies are similar.” She wrinkled her muzzle, and I wondered if that was an unintentional insult, despite my attempt to avoid one. “He’s a jack.” “Yeah, but.” I didn’t know what that was. “Okay, you’d know better than I do, but to my eye your harnesses look about the same.” She shook her head and then blew her forelock up. “Fine.” “I don't have to. It just seems like it would be easier.” “I suppose,” she admitted. “Plus your hands are really clever.” She chuckled. “And you're stronger than you look.” I ignored the barb; it surely wasn’t intentional. “How do you usually take it off? Slide it off the front, or the back?” If I’d known more about harnesses, I could have figured it out from seeing her half-dressed in the morning. “Um, off the back's easier for me. When you unclip it from the yoke, it'll all come off my rump in one piece, and then I can just slide the yoke up over my head.” “Huh. Berry Black preferred it the other way, because it was easier for him to put on the next day. If you’re doing it for yourself, I guess it would be different.” She flicked her tail again. “Yeah, but there’s—you’d. . . .” Her ears drooped. “I guess it is easier that way.” “Do you want me to unfasten the straps on the left side or the right?” I knew from helping Berry Black that there were lots of buckles that could stay fastened when the harness was loose enough to take off, and I imagined that each pony had a personal preference. Some of it might have come down to harness design, and some of it might have been if they were right-handed or left-handed. Or hooved, or mouthed—I didn’t really know for sure how that worked with ponies. “The left.” “Got it.” I reached under her belly and unfastened her breeching strap first, which made the whole harness loose. Next was the ring around her dock, which was probably the reason that she had first said that she wanted it to come off the other way. That was something I should have thought of sooner, especially since I already knew how Rose had initially reacted to me working with her tail. I really couldn’t blame Honey Dipper for being nervous about that. If our positions had been reversed . . . I tried to imagine her offering to help me take off my shorts. I’d have refused, even if I knew she didn’t have any kind of ulterior motive. Maybe it wasn’t the thought of me reaching under her tail; maybe it was the fact that she was soaked with sweat. Even the harness was damp, and while that didn’t bother me from the limited horse experience I had, I wondered if it was embarrassing for a mare to be sweaty. Just in case she had kicky feet, I kept off to her side and put my hand gently on the back strap. “Go ahead and lift your tail up.” It took a moment before she did, and I'm sure her eyes were on me the whole time. I focused instead on her back as I slid the ring past the end of her dock and then tugged her tail hair through it as well. Berry had been nervous about that the first time, too. After we’d worked together a little bit, it had become routine. “Let me slide it forward,” I said. “I can get the whole thing off at once, and you won't have to sit down and pull it over your head.” I made sure that nothing tangled as I got all the straps up to her collar, and from there it was pretty easy to gather the entire harness and pull it off. That was easier on her than it had been on Berry Black; ponies had smaller ears. “Where does it go?” “There's a hook,” she pointed to the wall. “I usually hang it up by the tiedown ring on the back of the yoke.” ••• I hadn’t been sure what she'd meant by green beer. I'd assumed that it was beer dyed green, or maybe made out of grass. Instead, it turned out to be a cross between actual beer and a soft drink. Fermented long enough that it got a little bit bubbly, but still with a really low alcohol content. Just the same, I only drank one, along with a few glasses of water. I didn’t know how alcohol worked for ponies, but I figured that beer would ultimately dehydrate me, and I really didn't want to get heat exhaustion and collapse on one of her compost piles. Unfortunately, she didn't have very much to offer for lunch that was edible human food, so I wound up with just two thick slices of bread and an apple. It tasted like there was hay in the bread. I should have bought a whole cruller from Pinkie Pie. Neither of us was in a real hurry to get back outside. I assumed that was because with my help, she was ahead of her normal schedule, and could afford to relax a bit, or else she was just decompressing from the discomfort of having my hands well into her personal space. There wasn't much to emptying the pails. I just used a mallet and pry bar to get the lids back off and dumped them on top of the pile. The first one, I made the mistake of having my head over it when I opened it and the smell was intense. I should have expected it: the barrels had been cooking in the sun all morning. After that, I leaned away and held my breath when I took the lids off and it wasn't so bad. The barrels didn't have to be scraped out—Honey Dipper filled them with water and let them sit for a couple of days to wash out the insides, and then used that water on the compost piles. We spent the rest of the day shoveling the piles, and she was right that her staggered arrangement was nicer for that. It gave me a chance to work more muscle groups and not always be twisting the same way. By the end of it, I was drenched with sweat once again, and so was she. At least that had kept anything from sticking to us. I'd decided that I was going to go to the river and get in with my clothes on; once I'd cooled off, I'd walk home with wet clothes, get something clean, and then go back to the river to wash off properly. Honey Dipper had a different idea. “Do you want to clean up at the spa? I've got an account there, I'd pay. Since you worked so hard.” “They . . . they'd let us in? Like this?” “They've got showers in back, for tradesponies.” “They do?” “You didn't know?” I shrugged. “It never came up.” I should have asked if Ponyville had showers for rent, but it wasn’t something I’d thought of. I’d discovered that ponies didn’t have YMCAs with locker rooms—that had been an option I’d considered. There was a hotel, but that cost more than I was willing to spend just for the use of a shower. “If you don’t use the spa, how do you get clean?” Her ears flicked. “If you don’t mind me asking.” “I wash up in the river. That's not a problem, is it?” She shook her head. “I've got a pond that I use sometimes, and I've also got a shower that I can rinse myself off with, but it's not as nice as having hot water. Especially in the winter time.” “Okay, yeah.” I was suddenly very interested. “You’ve convinced me.” I'd imagined that come the wintertime, my personal hygiene was going to be washing off as best I could in the washtub, using water that I heated on the stove, and I wasn't looking forward to that. If the spa had public showers that anybody could use, that was pretty tempting. “I'll have to stop off at home to get some clean clothes and a towel.” As hard as I’d tried, I hadn't entirely avoided getting manure on my pants or shoes. “They're got towels that you can use,” she said. “And—” “My house is sort of on the way. I can duck in real quick, leave my shoes and get the shorts I was wearing this morning and a clean pair of panties.” I paused for a minute, considering. “Speaking of that, do you want me to pick your hooves or anything? Just in case you missed something?” “I cleaned them already. I've got a brush on the back porch. Do you want to use it?” It wasn’t a bad idea, but I figured that the grass had wiped off my shoes reasonably well, and I’d be going to the spa barefoot anyway.