Knee Deep in horse manure: Columnists Bob Miller and Callie Clark Miller visit a former horse farm.

Part III in an occasional series.

By Callie Clark Miller

"Wear rubber boots."

"But it's dry!"

"Wear rubber boots," my brother repeated.

"It's been there a year. It's old, petrified. We don't need boots," I insisted.

AARON EISENHAUER ~ aeisenhauer@semissourian.com Bob scoops up a shovel full of year-old manure.

We should have worn rubber boots.

You don't meet a lot of people who move to Southeast Missouri to escape the summer heat. Stuart and Mary Buchroeder did. In April, the couple traveled from Phoenix with little more than an air mattress and two canvas camp chairs to a home near Altenburg, Mo., that they purchased site-unseen to be closer to friends and family.

They're both semiretired Missouri natives who moved to Arizona 10 years ago. This spring, they came back to their roots -- and to a barn filled with horse manure.

That's where we come in. The previous owner had horses, sold sometime last year. The Buchroeders do not have livestock, and they needed the, er, remnants removed to allow for storage in the barn. I grew up on a farm and spent enough time in pastures to know that fresh manure holds a much bigger potential for disaster and foul smells than the stale variety. Shoveling old manure? Piece of cake.

AARON EISENHAUER ~ aeisenhauer@semissourian.com Callie shovels manure flanked by two neighborhood dogs that hung around all morning.

Except, it was a lot of manure. Stu had already hauled some away on a previous attempt to clean out the barn. There were still mounds of it up to a foot deep, which is where the rubber boots would have come in handy. Like a pen and paper for reporting, I begin to think boots and a good pair of gloves are necessary tools for our Knee Deep projects. Business-related tax deduction, do you reckon?

In the summer, Phoenix temperatures sometimes rise to 115, Stu informed us. But it's a dry heat. As if to underline the point, Mother Nature granted us a dew point around 75 that day. The humidity level, combined with a lack of air flow, made it feel like 115 in the metal building to me.

Bob started on one side of the barn, Stu and I worked on the other side, shoveling manure into 55-gallon trash bags to be hauled away and dumped in the woods (the manure, not the bags). Entertainment was provided in the form of Radar and Cheetoh, rat terrier brothers who belong to the Buchroeders' neighbors but tend to hang out with Stu during the day.

I don't know who was dirtier at the end of the job -- the dogs from rolling in the manure and digging for bugs (sorry, Radar and Cheetoh's owners) or us from shoveling the stuff. I quickly realized that while not as physically taxing, this job made me sweat more than our last Knee Deep attempt (the garbage pickup). I was wringing wet, my hair sopping, after an hour. Bob didn't look (or smell) much better. My tennis shoes were caked with manure, and my jeans were plastered with the stuff up to my knees. We were literally knee deep on this one. And just to complete this vision of loveliness: I broke out in a rash on my face, from heat or an allergy, I'm not sure which.

A couple of hours in, we hit a snag. The trash bags ran out, and it was too wet to haul the filled bags away to dump that day. We felt bad about not finishing the job, though we did leave about 30 bags filled with manure piled in the barn. There were several bags' worth of manure left on the ground, but it was a good start.

Several hours after we returned home and post-shower, I was still digging manure out from under my finger nails (not that there's much left of my nails, thanks to Knee Deep), despite the work gloves the Buchroeders provided. We got to the keep the gloves as a souvenir -- now all we need to buy are our boots, especially since our tennis shoes are most definitely done-for.