Part II, Day 20: Sweet Return

The best part of going away is coming home again, coming home to clean sheets on our own bed, a home-cooked meal with local farm foods, and best of all, the joy of the dog, who runs in circles and shakes up the already beheaded and disemboweled stuffed bear to celebrate the sweet reunion.

Then it's the car ride to the usual place in the field.  Everything looks spring-green and new.

We follow the familiar path to the water.

How many times have we made this drive?  Gone on this walk?  And with how many different casts of characters, both human and canine?

Sometimes we hear geese overhead, and sometimes, like today, we hear the girls' softball team cheering each other on, even as they get creamed.

And is there a sweeter sight in the world than the dog we love running toward us?

Neitzsche  once wrote:

When we observe how some people know how to manage their experiences--their insignificant, everyday experiences--so that they become an arable soil that bears fruit three times a year, while other--and how many there are!--are driven through surging waves of destiny, the most multifarious currents of the times and the nations, and yet always remain on top, bobbing like a cork, then we are in the end tempted to divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much.

I hope that Zoe will be patient and continue to do her best to convert me to the minority, to help me love what I have and see what I think we have already seen.

Let's go!

Hellooooo!

Part II, Day 13: On Rest

Why are there weeks when we can go non-stop all day, every day, and feel nimble as acrobats and clear-headed as accountants and then one long day or two in a row just undoes the whole balancing act, splat? 

It's like what people tell me about their injured backs: it's not that five-state-drive, the slabs moved to make the patio, the ill-timed Michael Jackson doing "Thriller" imitation that takes you to your personal frontier, but that innocent morning a few days later when you reach up in the cupboard for your favorite mug and pain grabs you like a bouncer saying, "You're outa here, buddy, now!"  Here: that continuum you rode without incident for so long, that sleek elevator of okay, sure, I can do that too, why not?

Chilled for no reason, trembling like my dog in a thunder storm, my right eye pulsing like a "vacancy" sign for the kind of hotel I'd be scared to go in, I carry my heavy head out to the yard to consider the afternoon ahead.

The dog and I stare at the river's edge and sigh in unison.  Sometimes she knows just what to do.  She has found an old bone and grunts at it like it's a mouse; it's a game she has taught me.  She moves it around, chews it, then tosses it aside. As she leans her head against my leg, my heart could burst. 

The sky unfurls like a flag.  Blue banners, gauze-white strips.  Then some coils of smaller clouds in little piles like pencil shavings.

I wish the clouds inside my pulsing head made me think of pencils.  Maybe then I could work.

If I could bring this feeling of outside in--April at noon, the dog and me, the wild grass that smells like onion, the river, the clouds, her head against me, my full heart--I would push words around and around for hours in bliss.

Deadlines--external, real, and internal, just as pressing--can't quite out bench-press the pressure in my head today.  But for this moment, nothing matters.  All that I need is this river bank, the dog's sweet face, the way she rolls now on her back and offers me her white belly, the fur growing back where the cardiologist shaved her to take a picture of her heart--and that dirty, chewed up old beef marrow bone that once glistened with fat and sinew and flesh.

We are an accumulation of these moments, the dog and I. 

This stillness steadies me.

Gentle reader, even as our lives rush along like this river that has its own deadlines, an appointment around every bend, we still can make moments that last and last and last.

Even as those clouds keep changing, Rorschach tests that tell us who we are and what we think we  need:

Do they look like foam from the kind of caffeinated drink that might make us move fast again?

Or do they look more like goose down, feathers of that soft pillow calling us back inside for an hour of delicious rest?

Part II, Day 12: Our Descendants

My sister and I used to joke that we were raised by wolves.  I guess that made us wolf pups, and gives us license now to masticate our food for our own young, and to howl a lot, as we do, in our own ways.

from a blog on endangered Oregon wolves, http://howlingforjustice.wordpress.com/tag/endangered-species-act/

Last week in Boston, when we attended Cheryl Strayed's reading from her new memoir, Wild, I was touched by something she said in the Q and A about parenting.

She had just done a reading in Seattle, and a young man in the first row, who was only 22, the same age she was when she lost her mother, asked her for some advice on how to live now that his mother was gone.  He was going down a bad path, he confessed.  His grief was making him self-destructive.  She was walking a dangerous path herself at his age until she took a 1,100-mile hike along the Pacific Crest trail, a journey that broke her down and built her up again.  But when you read her memoir you understand that the hike was influential, but in the long haul her apprenticeship to art, and to love, and eventually, to family life were what saved her.  These experiences didn't change her so much as reacquaint her with her best self, the self she'd been as a child that had been there all along and had never really deserted her: that bright and loving person her mother had nurtured and believed in.

"I told him something my mother always said," she told the audience.  (This is not an exact quote, gentle reader.  I wasn't taking notes.)  "My mother always said the best thing she made in her life was her children.  She gave up a lot to be a good mother to us.  And I felt that I owed it to her memory to become the person she thought I could be.  I would be letting her down, letting down all she lived for, if I didn't take a good path."

I'm sure I'm not the only one in that audience who was on the verge of tears when she said this.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who thought about her own mother too.

It was a miracle that I was able to reconcile with my mother before she died.  I owe this incredible gift to my sister, who never completely broke the ties between them.  The day before our mother died, my mother told me that my sister and I were her most beautiful creations, and giving birth to us was the best thing she ever did.

Even when we ran from her in terror, she hung onto this vision of us as beautiful, talented, and good.

I think again about the quote I discussed yesterday, on inheritance, from Thich Nhat Hanh:

We contain all the beautiful qualities and actions of our ancestors, and also the painful qualities.  Knowing this, we can try our best to continue what is good and beautiful in our ancestors, and we will practice to transform the violence and pain passed down to us from so many generations.  We know that we practice peace not only for ourselves, but for the benefit of all our descendants.

If I'm lucky, and I've inherited the longevity genes from some of my ancestors, I'm in the autumn of my life.  It's not December yet, and bright leaves are still on the trees.  But still, that's not a lot of time to practice peace, and to continue cultivating all that is good and beautiful that I culled from my ancestors.  I've been trying lately to catch up.

My family tree ends with my sister and me, at least when it comes to our genetic makeup.  My sister has helped raise her husband's two talented, lovely, loving girls, and I helped raise my husband's two talented, lovely, charismatic and fascinating boys.  But we won't be birthin' no babies.

I can brag about my step-descendants here because they didn't inherit their talents and intelligence from me.

Science Boy just won a prestigious grant that nearly a hundred people around the world applied for.  I wish I could explain what he's cooking up in the lab in Cambridge, England on his post-doc, but I didn't get past Bio for Poets, which I took pass/fail.

Art Boy has a solo show, his first, in the Midwest next week.  His paintings are too gorgeous for me to find words for-- the way he uses color, the way his canvases contain optical illusions and expand and contract depending on where you stand--so I'll have to cobble together something for you from the program and his craft talk after I head to the show.

I don't know what aspects of me they will remember, what they will wish to keep alive in their own stories and habits.  I've never really thought about this until I started writing this post.

Just as I don't know what my students will remember from our classes together: I hope there will be something useful in the mix about literature, and not just odd aspects of my personality, like how I tend to accidentally steal people's pens, and how I never wear a watch to class, and how I like to drink a scary health drink (Kombucha, usually) while I teach and that I usually learn names quickly, but there's always one person who gets called by his or her friend's name, and vice versa, and the two of them, like my sister and me when we were with our aging grandmother, have to learn to answer to both names.

(A memory is intruding here, not letting me stay too solemn for too long.  I'm thinking of my high school physics class with Carl Locke.  I don't remember what we did on the bunsen burners, but I remember when he said, "Don't touch those rubbers!  You don't know where they've been!"  He was speaking about rain shoes, not contraception, but that line lived on in our teen parlance for years.  It was up there as the thing to say that was applicable to almost any situation, along with what our art teacher said about the color magenta, "Some people like it, some people think it's kind of wild!")

Which brings me back to the subject of wolves and wolf pups.

My dog, Zoe should be in her autumn too, but now, I suppose, it's her winter, and hence the name, "Winter with Zoe."

Her mother was an Australian shepherd mix, her father a golden retriever mix, but the guy who was working at the pound that day said, "She's also part wolf."

How I wish Zoe could have had the chance to breed.  I understand why the humane society sterilizes its dogs, but I dream sometimes at night that I'm surrounded by a pack of mini-Zoes.

I wish I could have met her mother.  The story I heard from the volunteers at the humane society was that the bitch's people refused to get her fixed.  That they let her have litter after litter, then dropped her latest descendants at the pound.

photo by Lettie Stratton; I love the wolfy look Lettie captured here

Since I can't locate the dogs that share Zoe's DNA, I just take a lot of pictures and write these posts, hoping to get the most out of every day we have together.

Maybe the stories we tell about our lives and each other and our ancestors are our true descendants.

When I think of life and time that way, I hope every day I can find the right words to make a certain little wolf pup live on.

Not everyone likes to write.  Some people like it, and some people think it's kind of wild.

My wish for all of you, gentle readers, is that the stories you choose to tell will be among your finest descendants, and that sharing them will give you and the ones who will come after you peace.

Part II, Day 10: Errand

I used to squeeze errands into the beginning or end of a work day, and I rarely got to savor them.  The long line at the post office would make me worry I would be late for class, and the even longer line at the grocery store would make me grumpy about how late dinner was going to be.

Sometimes I'd pack all of my errands into a Saturday, and then I'd rush through them so that I'd have more time to grade papers and exercise and, if I was lucky, write a page or two.

Writing was the transgressive thing I would wake up at 5 AM to do before the day's demands took me hostage.

Now that writing is my job all day, running an errand is a sweet escape.  It's so lovely to take a break from the search for words. 

Today I set out in the rain to deliver our tax materials to our accountant.  The sky is blurry and gray like a big rheumy eye, and it's hard to believe that the shiny, brown not-planted-yet fields will bloom in a matter of weeks.   

My accountant lives on a country road around the way from a diner named Mom's.  It's an old-fashioned country diner with an ice cream cone drawing on its sign, and I promise myself that next time I drive out here, I'll stop in the diner and have a snack.  That old adage, you should never eat at a place called Mom's, is one of those axioms I love to prove wrong. 

At the house, my accountant's three huge German shepherds bark and jump and try to break through the door.  If I were scared of dogs, I would surely be scared of them, but I just say, "Hi sweeties, I love you," and they do eventually back off.  It helps when their male person, my accountant's husband, pops his head through the door to thank me for the package.  "I think they think there are bones in there for them," I say, and he laughs.

When Zoe was younger and I brought her everywhere I went--I explained to civilians that this was her much-needed socialization, but it was really separation anxiety: mine--I once asked my accountant if I could bring her to our appointment.  The first time, when she was a puppy, I left her in the car.  But one time she came in the house with me, and I thought my accountant was going to cry.  "That's Maggie," she said, her voice trembling with emotion.

Then I looked at the photo above the desk, in her office.  A Zoe-clone.  We got talking and realized that her dog, Maggie, had to have been one of Zoe's litter mates.  It was the same story.  Puppies brought to the Postdam Humane Society in May of 2003.  Eight puppies from the same litter.  Some looked like golden retrievers.  The others were tri-color, wolfy dogs, mostly black with white bellies and brown highlights.

"Maggie was the best dog we ever had," she said.  "She was so nice.  So peaceful.  So easy to train.  Just a good, calm presence."  But then the dog got out one day and ran into the road and was hit by a car.  She was only about two.

"I knew I couldn't live without dogs in my life," she said.  "But I wouldn't allow myself to try to replace her.  There could be no replacement.  So I go out of my way to find difficult dogs now.  My dogs--let's face it--are jerks."

When she told me this story, I assumed Zoe would live to 16.  I vowed never to let her near a busy road.  That was always my worst fear--that she would get hit.  More than once, she had sprinted out of our house to chase dogs she spotted across the street--I think it was the herding instinct gone wayward--and once a car screeched to a halt an inch from her body, but we were always so lucky.

Zoe isn't with me today.  I still bring her on many of my errands, but never to my accountant's.

Next stop is the pet supply section of Agway.  My friend Rebecca read my post about bunnies from Sunday, and found out that I can buy rabbit in a can.  I'm excited at the prospect.

Inside, there are too many cans and bags to choose from.  It's all so overwhelming.  So I meet with the pet food expert at the store.  He tells me that it's hard to source rabbit in the states, that you can't trust where it comes from.  He's vehement that he doesn't want to sell pet food that comes from outside the U.S. and Canada.  But he knows one supplier that he trusts, and he's on the phone to order it for me.  I'm going to be bringing Zoe her bunny next week.  Not in a can, but in a carcass, as raw meat.  I'm so happy.  On this errand list, I'm two for two.

Just before I leave, the heavens open.  The steady rain becomes a violent downpour and the sound, over the plant annex's greenhouse ceiling, is like marbles spilling on tile.  It's such a rich, wonderful sound, of life and freshness and change, and the air is electric from it.  I take a stroll around the annuals that have just come in: my favorite flower pot varieties, peonies, are in force.  The room is perfumed with so many flowers that I feel a little giddy.  I could stay here listening to the rain and taking in all these colors--violet, scarlet, pink, orange, and yellow--for hours. 

And then I see something I've never come across in my life.  I've been to flower shows and greenhouses and rain forests and I've never seen these fuzzy pink flowers that look like caterpillars on steroids looming before me.

"What is this?" I ask the woman.  "I've never seen a plant like this."

She looks at me like I'm half-witted.  I can't tell if it's my excitement--Hey, I want to say, I'm running errands, isn't that the greatest thing, ever?--or that I don't know the name of this flower.

"Chenille," she says, and when I ask her to she spells it for me.

I must confess I snagged this photo from the web page from one of my favorite plant stores in the North Country, White's.  I hope they will forgive my theft if it brings them customers.  Don't you want one of these?

Next stop is the Potsdam co-op.  The co-op is one of my favorite places to run errands.  I love their homemade soup and their sandwich wraps and their bakery's baguettes and their customers.  I often run into my friend Anne, the historian/gardener, near the vegetable section of the co-op.  This is where we were when we talked about blogs for the first time, and now she's got her own, about gardening, and it's a wondrous thing.  (Go to this link to read it, and today you will learn more about composting.)

It's 2 PM and I forgot to eat lunch.  The soup today is tomato blue cheese, and I dig in as soon as I arrive, which gives me time to wander around and see what's new.  More new brands of coffee, more kinds of cheese, more local meats, and the thing I need for tonight's dinner with my husband, who is slow-roasting his signature ribs: collard greens.

Next stop is Purple Rice, a few doors down, the Asian grocery.  When I walk in the woman who works there looks at me and says, "You're going to be disappointed."  Because every time I go in there, I buy baby bok choy, but sometimes she runs out.

Today, though, I'm on such a good streak that I won't let this set me back.  "What do you think I should try instead?" I say.  "Something that's good with duck.  For tomorrow."

"I know just the thing," she says, and she sells me a bag of yu choy.  "It's a cross between spinach and bok choy," she says.  "I hope you like it."

"I know I will, because I like everything," I say.

I think about this as I drive home.  Do I really like everything?  Well, of course not.  I won't trouble you with the predictable list of things I loathe: war, cruelty, bigotry, reality TV, organ meats, chocolate malted milk balls (only because I overdosed on them when I was ten and got sick), bad music from the 1970s.

The rain lightens up when I get home and Zoe is very happy to see me.  She doesn't care that it's raining.  It's time for our walk.  I tell her she's going to eat bunny soon.  Not bunny in a can, but bunny that looks like bunny, and was frozen in a slab.  I tell her that if I don't owe the government a lot of money, I'll buy her another plush toy.  And I tell her that we'll have a box garden soon for her to lounge beneath on the deck, full of scarlet and violet peonies, but probably not the chenille flowers that for now I will admire from a distance.

Part II: Day Five: Wild Things

During Zoe's and my visit with my sister, Mira Bartok, her husband, Doug Plavin, and their dog, Sadie, I'm reading a terrific new memoir: Wild, by Cheryl Strayed.  It's about Strayed's 1,100 mile solo hike across the Pacific Crest Trail when she was reeling from the death of her mother, the end of her marriage, the breakup of her family, and her own dissolution and descent into self-destructive behavior.  Her losses have made her lose her bearings, and the anguish and sorrow she depicts, with such mastery and control, is, in its fierce candor and tenderness, unexpectedly uplifting.  She takes us deep inside the self, a self that has lost everything, and then takes us deep into the natural world, depicting the landscape and the people she meets with lyricism, wisdom, and humor.  She is a funny writer as much as she is a moving and vivid one, and the hike she takes us on--across a gorgeous, rugged Western landscape, and into her own psyche--is wildly exhilarating.

Mira blurbed this gorgeous memoir, evoking Thoreau.  She writes:

"While reading Cheryl Strayed’s stunning book about her arduous solo journey along the Pacific Crest Trail, I kept asking myself—what would I do if I were stripped bare of everything—money, job, community, even family and love? Thoreau once said, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” For Strayed, it is clear that in wildness was the preservation of her soul. She reminds us, in her lyrical and courageous memoir Wild, of what it means to be fully alive, even in the face of catastrophe, physical and psychic hardship and loss."
Mira Bartok, author of The Memory Palace

"In wildness is the preservation of the world."  My students and I have chewed on that statement for years, through reading Walden together, and Thoreau's other essays and journals; on nature hikes we've taken together; and in our own lives.  In wildness is the preservation of the word, I think, as well, because American nature writing is one of our nation's unique literary offerings to the global literary community.

Were it not for Emerson and Thoreau and Muir (who were influenced by the great British romantic poets, Coleridge and Shelley and Keats, and were also directly influenced by Indian sacred texts, by both Hinduism and Buddhism) we would not have developed this distinctly American sound, this distinctly American voice that starts from place, from landscape, from concrete language, from the poetry of trees (by species, region, biosphere) that opens into a larger call of the wild, on behalf of the wild: the song of the human spirit set loose on the land.  These writers are the literary grandparents of Aldo Leopold, E.B. White, Edward Abbey, Gretel Ehrlich, John Daniel, Annie Dillard, Bill McKibben, Janisse Ray, Terry Tempest Williams, and too many other amazing nature writers for me to name here, but now we can add Cheryl Strayed to the list.

But that's my teacher-self talking to you, and I'm writing today about something else.  I'm writing about how loss, and the anticipation of loss, makes us wild, but how that wildness has a beauty and grace that has much to teach us about what it means to be alive.  In a body.  On this earth.  Right now.

During the visit, I'm also working on my novel.  I realized before I began this revision that I needed to get wilder.  My characters had to face their edges, their limits.  They needed, in their own way, to howl like coyotes.  With control and precise language, I am trying to get deeper into raw emotion.

And so, reading Wild is inspiring me both as a writer and as a human being trying to come to terms with things. 

We go to Boston to see Cheryl Strayed read from the new memoir in a bookstore in Brookline, and then go out for drinks with a small group of people afterwards.  She is a funny and warm and engaging writer and human, and it's lovely to meet her, even if the conversation is fleeting.

It's a two-hour drive, and we have to leave Sadie and Zoe alone from 5 PM until nearly midnight.

Photo of Sadie, in front, and Zoe, by Doug Plavin

Ever since Zoe was diagnosed with cancer, I have avoided being away from her for more than a few hours at a time.  It's so hard to say good-bye.  It was actually a difficult decision for me to go to Boston when a big part of me wanted to stay home and just love up my dog.

When we return to the house, Zoe and Sadie run to greet us like we are the best thing that ever happened. Their joy is contagious.  We sit down with them and look into their wolfy eyes, our hearts beating in synch with their tails thumping against the floor.

Sadie runs outside to bark madly and ward off coyotes.  Her preemptive shouts are the equivalent of the very loud whistle Cheryl Strayed carries on her 1,100-mile solo hike to ward off bears or human predators.

My husband and I wore bells on our wrists, and sang really loudly, and off-key, to scare off bears when we hiked in Glacier National Park.

Sadie is licking her chops; Photo by Doug Plavin

Our dogs are as domesticated as any dogs can be, but what we love about their company is the wildness in their eyes when they play.  When we roll around with them on the ground, when they nip each other and grunt or howl, when we get to be part of their world, we feel like wolves in the den.

Living with the knowledge that Zoe's days are numbered is another way to engage with the wild.  It is tremendously sad and isn't something I would wish on anyone, but I am here to say that we have much joy in our lives these days, and we never take it for granted.  We can't sleepwalk through a single minute.  There's no time to waste.  No time to obsess about petty things.  As Zoe's human pack members, we have to stay alert, awake to her with our animal senses.  We love more fiercely, more completely.  We are attentive to each subtle shift in mood or energy.  We are here.

I was here, but not fully here, not fully present, for years of my life.  Meeting and falling in love with my dog woke me up.  And now, more than ever, it feels like a great gift to encounter people and books and animals that remind me to love with everything I've got because all we have is now.

Tender.  Fierce.  Open.  Certain books are portals to these ways of being in the world and in the wild. Gentle reader, I urge you to buy Wild today.  Click here to read the rave review by the New York Times.

Tender.  Fierce.  Open.  The animals we love teach us how to be all these things, and more.

Zoe and I live in a house with beds and couches and a refrigerator and steel bowls.  Although we walk in the woods every single day, my dog and I have never spent a night outside together, just the two of us, under the stars.  But we are kindred, and we are wild.

Namaste.

photo by Doug Plavin

photo by Doug Plavin

I took this picture of Zoe provoking Sadie to chase her; Zoe has the chirping toy fox.

Zoe instinctively goes to the porch or deck of any house so she can watch over everyone.  She tells the dogs roaming around that they need permission to enter the property.  She yells at the UPS guy too.  But I think if she saw an actual pack of wolves or coyotes or foxes, she'd run and hide.

Part II, Day Four: Sadie and Zoe, the Love Story

Is there anything more euphoria-inducing than coming home and seeing your dog run toward you with joy? 

For me, the closest thing to that rush is to watch Zoe greet others in that ecstatic way: to witness her reaction when family comes to the door, or when we arrive at her home away from home.

Sadie waits patiently to get her toy fox back

She's been whining for the last hour. When I rolled down her window, she smelled the air and said, Hey, I know that smell.  I know those burnished leaves, that river, that lake, those road signs, that tint of sky.

Are we there yet?

We pull up to the house, and out comes Sadie, the saucy herding dog cousin with her big, pointy ears, and Sadie's people: my sister, Mira Bartok, and her husband, Dougie Pee.

Zoe charges into the house and finds the Amish basket I gave Mira for her birthday one year, where Sadie's plush toys live.  Out comes the octopus, the piglet, the chirping little fox, the black and white polar bear, but not plush burger, who is carefully hidden from Zoe when she comes, or perhaps it's not there because Zoe demolished it on another visit and I've conveniently forgotten.

Zoe runs around the house showing her cousin that she can help herself to what she wants, and Sadie promptly bites her in the butt, or tries to trip her.  Now that Zoe has three legs, Sadie finds new advantages where she can.

Zoe in front of the barn

Sadie has a great smil

Then they submit to their people's immature games.  We like to get them to wrestle.  Not, like, for money.  They don't have stage names.  They don't wear tights or capes.  And they don't hurt each other.  But for our version of pup pile-up, we get them to kiss (touch snouts), roll on their backs, mouth, and growl and grunt like wild beasts.  We could watch this all day and never be bored.

And then it's time for the afternoon walk.  First Zoe takes one of Sadie's indoor toys, the plush volleyball, and tries to get Sadie to chase her into the barn, the infamous barn where the music played on Mira and Doug's wedding day, and in front of which Zoe had to be bathed by her person, in a story that has become legend in these parts.  (See "Squeamish No More: Dog Bath at my Sister's Wedding.)  They swoop around the yard, circling each other, peeing competitively.

Then down the driveway, up the road a little, and into the woods.  For a short while Zoe has to be watched, because there's no guarantee she won't run down to the nearby farm to kill the chickens.  (Zoe has never killed a chicken, but dogs can turn into chicken-killers just like that, and we don't want to give her the taste for blood.  And now that I know, as of yesterday's visit to the integrative vet in Vermont, that chicken makes her too yang, well, there's an extra incentive, beyond being neighborly.)

They look most alike when they are begging for treats.

I love the companionable stroll

Who will shake more water on us, faster?

Sadie could herd horses, if she needed employment

We pass that patch of woods without trouble, and then head further along, to the stream.  Both dogs go down for a swim and a drink, then bound up again.  It's a beautiful spring day, but not very warm.  I'm just glad that it's too early for tick season.

Zoe waits several yards away for the horse visit to end

And eventually we visit the horse farm.  Sadie is excited to meet more four-legged creatures, and she runs over to tell the horses that she is queen of the hill.  Zoe, for all her alpha behavior with her cousin, hits the road.  She sees a lot of Amish horses where we live, and was once charged by a group of irate horses and donkeys who didn't appreciate the way Zoe had herded their friends, the migrating ducks, so she keeps her distance.

What I love most about these visits is how easily these dogs fall into their routines together, and how their routines become the structure for our days.  Meals.  Walks.  Dogs outside.  Dogs back in.  Dogs chasing each other for plush toys.  Dogs submitting to pup pile-up rituals, which means every creature on the floor to a sound track of wolfy grunting and sometimes keening.  We know the dogs love each other, and long to be close: they mouth and nip, and are wolf pups together.  And we know they compete for love, although there is no limit to the love we have on tap.  The dogs structure our days, and when we focus on them completely, time stops.

The story continues tomorrow.

Namaste.

Day 108: The Way There and the Way Back

Part I: Hair Piece

On Wednesday when I took Zoe to her oncologist's appointment I decided to do something other than loiter in a nearby coffee shop for seven hours and then lurk in the waiting room, making people nervous.  I drove downtown to the Byward Market and got my hair cut.

The last time I had my hair cut was in early December, a week into this project of meditating and posting every day for 108 days.  So until this Wednesday I could measure the passage of time not just in posts written, words accumulated, but in hair.  It was getting rather straggly and dried out at the ends.

On the way to my hair appointment in December, I had stopped at a little store that sold clothing made of organic cotton and other fair trade products. There, I came upon a human/canine duo that made my heart sing.  A woman with blond dreadlocks was behind the cash register; her little gray poodle, Java, whose hair was long and curly and not fashioned in the usual poodle way, was in a basket beside her.   The two were clearly soul mates, and they exuded so much peace that I found myself hanging about and buying something just so I could bask in the goodness.  I also wanted to find out how Java came into her life, and it is an inspiring story.   To read this post on human/canine soul mates you can go to the hyper-link, here.

So now it was this Wednesday, March 21, the beginning of spring, and I was walking along a busy street on my way to get my hair cut.  I had parked my car in a garage near the market, and I was trying to remember where that organic clothing store was so that I could maybe pop in and visit Java and her person.  I was thinking about this duo, and then . . . there they were!  Walking toward me.  The blond woman with her dog on the lead.  I would have knocked right into them if I hadn't moved out of the way.

Just as Java is a sweet, shy little dog, her person is shy too.  And this person writing the post is a little bit shy as well.  Or was, once upon a time, before she began pouring her heart out every day into the cyber-world.  I said hello, told her that I doubted she would remember me, but that I'd been in the store in December, and so on.  When I told her that I'd been on my way to get my hair cut, she remembered.

I told her about the blog, and how to find it on google, just typing "winter with zoe" and that her story had moved and inspired me, and she said she would look it up.

Then I walked away and thought, Whoa, what am I doing?  What if she thinks it's really corny and dumb?  Or what if she doesn't like what I said about the dog having dreads too?  Will she misunderstand my comment about how she and the cute dog look alike, and think that I think poodles (and humans too) should be über-groomed?  And then I just laughed at myself.   The fact that I was thinking about her, and there she was, that we were put right in one another's path by happy accident had to be a good sign.

Just the day before I'd been working on my novel, and I decided to change the name of a minor character from Jasmine to Jessica.  As I made that change, I pictured a former student of mine named Jessica, a lovely writer (and person) who grew up on a farm in Vermont and now has a farm in the Champlain Valley of Upstate New York.  The moment I typed the new name, "Jessica," I saw that I had a facebook message.  Usually I use the "freedom" program when I'm writing to disconnect from the internet, but I hadn't that day and I was glad.  When I went to my wall, I saw that this same Jessica had read that day's post and pressed the "like" button.  So when she popped into my mind, she was actually really there, reading my post of the day.  Jessica and I have not been in touch at all since we reconnected on Facebook about a year ago.  We're both busy, and we never have a chance to talk, and I think that was the only time she's ever sent me a message in response to my link.

 I love when things like that happen.

I love it when all the paths of my life seem to intersect: writing, teaching, tending to my dog, and on Wednesday, getting a haircut while my dog was getting her check-up.  Then I feel like I'm on "the path," that is, that I'm doing what I should be doing, work and play and even errands that suit my true nature.  When the forces align in this way, it feels like the world is smaller, more manageable, and that the people in it are all plugged into the same electric power grid.  (Except that I'm pretty sure Jessica lives off the grid, and that Java's person would too, if she could, and I may be moving that way myself one day, but I think you get the picture.)

And sometimes, in my life, it's just about hair.

Part II  A Relapse, a Gentle Reminder

I knew I needed to meditate every day and not sporadically when I caught myself doing really careless slapstick stuff that was funny but potentially costly.  I've written in early posts about the time I left my purse on the top of my car and drove off, and how when I returned, two people, strangers to each other, had teamed up to rescue my credit cards, lipsticks, checkbook, and more that had flown into the street, en route to the river.  And how the dented garage door serves as a daily reminder to me of the time I was in such a hurry to get to work that I forgot that I actually had to open the garage before I sped out.

Another signal that something had to change happened on my last sabbatical, seven years ago.  Mikie was working on our house, building the kitchen and upstairs bedroom out so we could have a better view of the river, and I told him and my husband I would drive to the co-op in Potsdam and bring back some good bread and cheeses for lunch.  I was thinking about my writing project, my head was in the clouds, and I drove out of town the wrong way.  Main Street, in our town, turns into Route 11, which takes us to Potsdam, and that's where I meant to go.  But on the other side of town it becomes Route 68, which leads to Ogdensburg and the bridge to Canada.  That fall day all those years ago I drove almost to Ogdensburg, a 20-minute drive, twice the distance it takes to go to Potsdam, passing Amish buggies and farm stands, landmarks you don't see on the way to Potsdam, before I realized my mistake.

Yesterday, it happened again.  Seven years later, like a retrovirus waking up again.  I just couldn't believe it.  It was a real relapse.  Falling off the wagon.  A falling away from mindfulness, which has been so much the theme of this blog.  It was a very humbling experience, and a good reminder.

I had had a lovely lunch with my friend Rebecca, and our conversation had really moved me.  So I was thinking about what we'd discussed and, as ever, thinking about Zoe, and about how precious life is and there isn't a moment to waste, when I realized I was already at the turn-off, the shortcut on Route 68 that we take when we're heading to Canada.

I forgot she wasn't in the car with me.  It has become so automatic, driving Zoe to the oncologist in Canada, that my body seems to think this is what we do in the car.  When actually my mission was to go to Potsdam to buy some delicious goat cheese brie and other snacks for a meeting at my house with a wonderful student who is writing an honors thesis on her childhood in Kazakhstan and South Africa.

The way back I looked out at the Amish horses and buggies and farm stands and signs for alfalfa seeds and the bare trees and green grass and I really saw them this time.  On the way there, I could have been anywhere: I was in my head.  I had a good laugh with myself, not at myself, and realized that we keep teaching ourselves what we need to learn, again and again.  And that's why it's good to build new habits.  That's why I needed this project.  To meditate and post every day.

I think for the rest of my life when I am in a car, I will imagine that Zoe is in the back seat looking out the window as we go.  She watches with keen interest the landscape flitting by on the way there, but on the way back she sits up even taller and stares out, rapt, because she knows she is going home.

III  The Trail

After I got back from Potsdam I took Zoe on a walk.

We were out in the woods, maybe a mile in.  It had been unseasonably warm all afternoon, but now the sky was mottled with clouds and I put on the sweater I'd carried.

I was preoccupied because I'd been expecting an important fed ex package with Zoe's medical records.  I'm leaving for Vermont this weekend to take her to her appointment with the holistic vet on Monday.  But the fed ex guy hadn't delivered the package because it was the kind of delivery I had to sign for, and I'd been out having lunch with my friend when it arrived.  The slip on my door said that they wouldn't come back with the package until Monday, and that would be too late. 

I called the 800-number and begged them to come back. The slip was signed now, on the door.  I didn't have a lot of hope, though.

At 4:10, a woman called and said if I could get to the drop-off box on Main Street by 4:30 with the signed slip and some ID, the guy doing the rounds in my area would give me the package today.

So I had twenty minutes.  It had taken 20 minutes to walk to where we were on the trail, Zoe and me.  But I had to make it back to the car in less than 10, and then get to my house, and into town.  And I'm not a runner.

I told the woman I would be at that box.

I said to Zoe, very calmly, "We have to run a mile, as fast as we can, to Mommy's car." (I'm a bit like Bob Dole with my dog; I speak of myself in the third person.)  "Can we do that?"

She agreed.  Not only did we run straight to the car in seven minutes, never breaking stride, but she heeled, even though she was off the lead.  She stayed right beside me the entire time and headed straight up the hill to the car without jumping in the river as she usually does on warm walking days.

We made it just before 4:30, and then the Fed Ex woman called again.  "I'm sorry, but I was wrong about the time.  It'll be 5, or sometime after that, before he arrives."

My dog and I were standing there on the busy street, both of us still panting from the run and the heat and all the excitement, but I said okay, and I laughed, and then I told her the story, and she laughed too.

So now I have the medical records, and my dog and I are ready to head off into a new chapter.  Of her life, of my life, and of "Winter with Zoe" which will continue, even though it's spring.

And now Zoe and I will have a new spring activity to do together.  I think we're going to take up jogging.

Namaste, gentle readers.  Please return tomorrow, for Day 109's reflections: an ending and a beginning, where the way there and the way back and the way onward intersect.

Day 104: Familiarity Does not Breed Contempt--Gertrude Stein and the Dog Agree

We like to think of our escape to the South in March as a human-friendly dog vacation at a human-friendly dog hotel, but I'm pretty sure Zoe only likes it because we've been here before, and therefore, it's a bit like being at home--another home.  What she likes is that it's familiar.  She knows these beachy smells now.  She likes the sound of the ocean.  But if she could tell us directly, I am sure she would say that the Carolina coast has nothing on the North Country, where we live, and where she can preside over another balcony overlooking another body of water, the Grasse River.

We were on the second day driving home and had crossed from Pennsylvania into New York when Zoe really perked up in the car. 

I watched her watching the landscape intently.

In North Carolina, we had seen dolphins and pink sunrises and trees ablaze with white buds.

We had run through salt water and watched seagulls and terns swoop down for fish.

But what excited Zoe was a return to the familiar.

This is what dogs teach us. That our home, wherever it is, is where we create our lives in every way imaginable.  Anyone can love a sunrise beach walk in mild weather.  But to love the place where we live in every season, even the monochrome ones, requires a subtle kind of knowing.  After a while, certain storm-scarred trees and shrubs become as recognizable and distinct as people and other creatures.  We know where the swimming holes are.  We know where to find berries in late summer and trillium in May.  If we can see this beauty a few paces from where we live, if we learn how to see and appreciate that place from moment to moment, we are truly alive.

The North Country has its share of poverty and extreme weather.  There is no ocean, and the river valley where we live is fairly flat.  When others might focus on the trailers we just passed, Zoe watches the sky and sees the branches bend in the wind. 

When others see farms that could be anywhere else in the U.S., Zoe smells the ones she knows.

And she is always thrilled to see critters out enjoying the sun. 
How I wish I had a photo--it was on the driver's side--of the happy, shirtless, Buddha-bellied farmer sitting in the grass with about thirty of his goats.  And then there are the Amish farms, the horses and buggies that she sometimes yells at for driving too fast.


While others might see these fields as monochrome, she sees the tall grass and knows what it feels like to run through it.

When others might see merciless rocks that the first farmers here had to remove with oxen, that miners later made into talcum powder, Zoe sees landmarks that tell her she's close. 

And then it's our street. She stands now at the car window, her face rapt.

And here is our yard.  Where did winter go?  It is warmer here than it was in North Carolina.  She runs up to the house to make sure all is as it should be.  She hugs her favorite carpet.  And later, she runs back outside to see the river again, her old friend.

And then on Monday, when it's near-summer weather, she takes her normal warm weather position under the deck.  She likes the cool leaves in her little fort down there, and she's so content to be back doing her job, watching the house, that she curls up her paws as she does when she's getting her belly rubbed.

Having a dog, going through a decade of one's life--more if we are lucky--with a dog helps us see what is around us anew every day, after every trip.

Gertrude Stein wrote in Paris, France: 

“Familiarity does not breed contempt. On the contrary the more familiar it is the more rare and beautiful it is. Take the quarter in which one lives, it is lovely, it is a place rare and beautiful and to leave it is awful.”

 My dog would agree, and as her person I have come to understand that it is wisdom to know this.

Day 94: Packing in Secret

All of you dog people out there know that it's not a good idea to get the suitcase out too soon.  For spring break, I've been packing in secret.  When I do laundry, I leave some things folded on the table in the laundry room and yesterday, I hauled the red suitcase out of its hidey-hole and set it up there as well.  Zoe would never think to look here.  She avoids the laundry room.  It smells like soap, and bleach.  And when the machines rumble, they remind her of storms.

The next step is to gather the books and audio-books and electronic devices in a relaxed way, as though we're just cleaning up, and to set them on the dining room table without bagging them up.  Any container arouses suspicion.

While I was walking Zoe, my husband bagged up some road snacks and wine for our trip.  It was a good stealthy move.  He's a master at this.

While he does the morning walk in his car, I'll put our luggage in mine. 

Pillows and dog blankets, her bowls and food, they won't hit the car until she's in it and knows for sure she won't be left behind.

And once that happens, she has on her eager road trip face.  We will listen to mysteries, snack, watch winter morph into full-on intoxicating spring in a measly few hours, smell spring flowers, and we'll arrive at the beach, Zoe's favorite human-friendly dog hotel in the whole world.  

All the secrecy, the borderline lying will be worth it.

Day 92: Spring Melt

While I was a cave-dweller in a sick daze our world heated up.  The temperature rose 40 degrees in so many hours.
  

photo by Tara Freeman

Zoe likes a change if she's in the story, preferably as the protagonist if needles and drugs are not involved.  So my return to the studio to write becomes her return to the balcony to survey the back yard and make sure it's safe from encroaching groundhogs.

I write with a pen today in a notebook in one of my timed speed-writes to break through something that's been cold a while and needs to thaw.  When I play this game I go through the dictionary first with my eyes closed and point to a few random words I have to use without over-thinking them.  One of those words made me laugh when I found it.  Samizdat?  Really?  Okay.

I actually find a really handy use of this Russian word I didn't know before.  Sam means self, and izdatelstvo means publishing; the word refers to clandestine self-published pamphlets and other forms of literature produced following the death of Stalin as a revolt against restrictions on freedom of expression of dissident Soviet authors.  It actually has a purpose in the chapter I'm writing.  Who knew?  My character is Russian and the semi-WASP family she's visiting, in 1988, are fascinated with her ethnicity.  And the characters are all playing a game of Risk.

Maybe blogs are the samizdat of a different kind of self-publishing craze, but hardly clandestine.  I read a Joyce Carol Oates story once in which some artists are on a trip to Eastern Europe in the Cold War, and her narrator makes a case that trying to write what will sell, what will be commercially viable, creates another kind of censorship.  The characters under Soviet rule are not convinced.

photo by Tara Freeman

When the meditation timer goes off I'm still blazing away and I go for another half hour without lifting the pen off the paper except to turn the page.  It's a good day.  Then I hear Zoe hunker down closer to the sliding door of the balcony.  She's peering inside but doesn't want to disturb me.  And when I bring her in, she rolls around on the Indian rug and says she's glad that things are on an upswing.

Outside, on our walk, the earth makes a squishing sound.  We track through slush, mud, and rivulet, and everything that could be green is revealing itself to us, although much is still brown and greyish-white.  We walk for an hour but Zoe would like more of this, please.  Tomorrow, I promise, I'll be up for something longer.  As a compromise, I put her on the tie-up outside so she can tell off all the dogs parading past our house without a permit.

But still, before we give in to the changes we humans think we are due--and I think now of a pink-skinned girl I saw running down Main Street in shorts--I see that my conservative dog is in no hurry for a new season.  She finds every patch of snow left and walks with her head bent low, jaw scraping the ground to taste every last bite of winter with each step.

Day 90: Squeamish No More, or Dog Bath at My Sister's Wedding

Not long after we took Zoe home from the pound I heard a story about an acquaintance of ours, very reserved and proper, the kind of person who wears beautiful jewelery just to walk the dog.  She was worried that her dog might have a urinary tract infection so she was told by her vet to bring in a urine sample.  There she was, in her nice jeans and lovely silver and turquoise necklace, chasing the dog around the yard with a bowl to slip under her when she peed.  This woman was one of the last people I could imagine in this scenario, and I felt a kind of tenderness for her afterward.

I think it's fair to say that if you are one of those people who is a little squeamish about bodily functions, you probably shouldn't get a dog.

You probably shouldn't get a cat either.  In his failing years, our cat Arnold gave up on the litter box and even years after he had passed away we would still find his "mark" on some of the throw pillows on the couch.  This was not very convenient when company was coming over--or they were already there.

And while we're at it, you probably shouldn't have babies.  My friend with twins told me the other day that one of her girls went into the closet and pooped in one of her shoes.  She was just having a little fun, I guess.

One of the things I've always loved about where I teach is that the weather is so intense in the winter--well, it was, before climate change took hold--that it is pretty near impossible to hold forth in an arrogant fashion up here.  Not when you're wearing big, fleece-lined muck-lucks and one of those lined hats with flaps.

And since Zoe came into my life and a lot of students have come to know her (some only visit me in my office when they know she will be there; they call ahead) I have another way to keep my intellectual side from taking over.  During the semester, students join me on my dog walk at least once a week.  As we talk about their work, their writing, and what they're reading, at some point they'll have to wait for me to scoop Zoe's poop before I can finish a sentence.  Then we go back to the conversation.

When my sister got married, Zoe had a terrible case of the runs.  She has a tendency to get diarrhea when she's stressed (which is why I was so worried about her new course of cancer drugs, since diarrhea is one of the main side effects) and she's also a shy dog, so being at an outdoor wedding reception with a couple hundred people dancing and clapping--even though it was at Mira and Doug's home, which is her home away from home--was a challenge for her.  To make things worse, she had just broken a toe the day before on one of her mad zooms around the yard with Sadie, my sister's dog whom we think of as Zoe's saucy cousin.  The pain was stressing her too.

My sister's memoir, The Memory Palace, was about to come out, and her literary agent was at the wedding.  She is an old friend of ours and Mira and I just adore her.  She is also stunningly beautiful.  She and I were just about to sit down together on a couch in the barn to listen to the band and I happened to get a look at Zoe as she came running over to say hello to us.  Zoe was just about to do her version of a hug, what I call "the lean-in," which takes multiple forms, but in this case it was the dog-rump-against-human-leg lean-in: against this lovely woman who was dressed in her summer wedding best.  It's a good thing I was paying attention: Zoe's whole rear end was covered with moist feces.

I said, "I'll be right back.  I think I need to get Zoe her dinner," and I escorted Zoe out of the barn and onto the lawn.  A few minutes later, I was back outside with a bucket and soap, washing my sweet dog's ass.

I'm so used to this sort of thing by now that I didn't think it was necessary to clean her up away from the masses.  Hey, the band was playing.  My sister's talented musician husband, Doug Plavin, had performed a song for Mira a while earlier, and I didn't want to risk missing anything.

So Zoe and I just plonked ourselves down in full view of everyone near the entrance to the barn, and I lifted her tail and scrubbed her down.

Later, my sister came up to me, laughing hysterically.  "I'm afraid some people misinterpreted what you were doing with that bucket," she said.  "The word's getting around that you've had a little too much to drink."

There was nothing to do about it but laugh.  Zoe enjoyed the sight of the two of us having a hearty guffaw, and she would have been content if her toe wasn't broken and her insides weren't in a tumble.

Sadie

Mira Bartok and Zoe

So I just continued what I was doing with that bucket.  I finished  shampooing Zoe's butt, and then brushed her down.  We sat out on the lawn like this for a long time before we went back into the barn to join the others.  That's just the way it goes when you have a dog.