The novel is at that very delicate stage between inception and disillusionment. It always is. I am subject to obscure moodshifts and the occasional ribbon of ducks crossing my road. In my case–this week–a friend whose judgement I trust commented, “What is it the main character wants?”

Which is inadvertently The Kiss of Death. A few years ago I went to see Dennis Lehane speak at the Dogwood Festival in Dowagiac (it’s coming up May 10th, if anyone is interested) and he said the only thing a reader needs to know is…

what does the main character want?

In his example, the thing wanted needs be no more complex that a glass of water–readers will read an entire book just to see if he gets it–but they need to know what the character wants.

So if my friend, attuned to my writing, doesn’t know what the main character wants, I have slightly less than 200 pages of pointless rambling crap.

Also my writing group is struggling horribly with this mess. We read approximately 5 pages a week. I have ‘too many characters’. I either have too many tags or not enough tags, so they either never know who is talking or they are distracted by the tags. (Sometimes they’re both in the same section.) They don’t know where the story is going. They don’t know what it’s about. They can’t remember who did what from one week to the next and this week I just shook my head and brought them a piece that has nothing to do with the book. I’m just…frustrated, I think the word is, because either I have to stop listening to anyone else and finish the book or throw it in the trash. I’ve read it. I actually think it’s good. But then…I wrote it. And it has no audience. So now I have 2 1/2 books written for no audience.

In the meantime I am not building a reputation as a writer because I don’t do anything with the stuff I write. I save it in doc files on my computer. I have an entire collection of ‘Fat Girls’-like bits I finally just dropped, I have a collection of think pieces that I happen to think are fairly spectacular, but…what would I do with them?

Maybe I should just publish them here.

Here’s one. (This is from the abortive and unpublished humor book.)

 

The Trumpet Vine

 

            Many years ago I used to ride over with my Dad to visit his mother and then she and I would sit in lawn chairs in the back yard and sip iced tea while he mowed the lawn. I loved working with my Dad. I probably should have jumped up and helped him, but mowing my grandmother’s lawn was problematic. It had something to do with what he consistently referred to as “that (expletive deleted) trumpet vine.”

            My grandmother had a trumpet vine that grew on her fence row. I had no idea how old it was. Trumpet vines don’t really have ages, they have…regenerative properties. My grandmother’s trumpet vine had regenerated. At least as I recall there was a time when the fence row was clean and free of any vining material, and then eventually I happened to glance at the fence and it was in flower. Big reddish-orange trumpets bloomed the length of the fence, and considerably wider than its breadth.

            “That’s pretty,” I commented to my grandmother.

            “I like it,” my grandmother smiled at me.

            My father muttered under his breath and stalked off to find the mower.

            Apparently my aunt—my father’s big sister—happened to visit my grandmother (she lived less than a mile down the road) and she too admired the trumpet vine. “I’d like to have one of those someday,” she may have remarked.

            The trumpet vine apparently heard her.

            It popped up a volunteer about four feet away from the mother root. Here, the trumpet vine whispered to my grandmother, this is for Margaret.

            It is possible this is not exactly what the trumpet vine said. It may have said, this is for Meg. I venture this thought because I happened to write my aunt a note, perhaps ten years ago, and she sent me a reply and in the reply she mentioned, “I like to be called ‘Meg’.” My father’s older sister Margaret, who lived less than a mile down the road from my grandmother’s house (which was eleven miles from ours,) and whom I had known at that point for roughly fifty years, liked to be called ‘Meg’. Good to know. I love my family dearly, but we are not great communicators.

            So anyway, the trumpet vine popped up a starter vine and said to my grandmother, give this to your daughter. And my grandmother walked out into the yard, drove a small plastic marker into the ground next to the volunteer, and the next time my father showed up to mow the lawn she said, “Don’t mow the baby trumpet vine, I’m saving that for your sister, Margaret/Meg.”

            I was familiar with her plastic markers. My grandmother was exceptionally fond of tuberous begonias, which are like ordinary begonias except they grow pretty leaves and flowers and, as a plant group, die faster and more easily of more diseases, dissatisfactions and moods disorders than any other plants I have ever tried to grow. This comparison includes African violets (which she also loved) and tea roses. I am not sure exactly where tuberous begonias came from, but I suspect it may have been the floor of a tropical rain forest. They grow particularly well in the damp, mossy corners of professional greenhouses. My grandmother grew hers in the begonia garden on the north side of the house where they flowered to her satisfaction (“Come look, Princess Georgia Lee just bloomed, isn’t she lovely?”) They did not, however, grow particularly stout or hearty plants to support these blooms and so my grandmother staked them up with her plastic markers and festive nets of string. I grew up with this. I thought it was normal. Eventually I set up my own house and I found spindly plants to be something of a genetic inheritance and I asked my grandmother where she acquired all of those wonderful and ever-so-handy plastic markers.

            My grandparents had owned and operated a dairy farm.

            The plastic markers were the tubes through which apparently very agile men blew bull seeds into the wombs of dairy cows in order to artificially inseminate them. I have never been able to get this image out of my mind, of big, husky men in flannel shirts and jeans dancing around the backs of Guernseys while poofing bull sperm through plastic tubes. It had never occurred to me to wonder how that was done before.

            My father would fire up his mower and march back and forth across the lawn until he came to the plastic stick marking some calf’s future and his big sister’s designated volunteer and he would mow a-r-o-u-n-d the volunteer and then go on down his line. This might sound simple to a maintenance mower. My father was a professional groundskeeper. So while he did refrain from mowing the trumpet vine reserve to the ground, he did stop, lean over, and pluck away all of the long grasses sprouting up around it. He left a tidied vine as it curled affectionately around its artificial insemination tube.

            My aunt apparently was not one to rush into a commitment.

            My grandmother—bless her heart—was not one to keep one of something when twenty would do.

            I may have antagonized the situation myself, but I did this only because I was ill-informed. I may have said to my grandmother, “That’s pretty—I want one.”

            The trumpet vine heard me.

            POP! Another volunteer. This is for Cheryl.

            Someone drove by in their car, caught sight of her fence, and thought to themselves, ‘Nice vine’.

            POP! Another volunteer.

            My grandmother hobbled to the shed for her reserve of artificial insemination delivery devises.

            Her side yard began to look like a plastic tube garden.

            “Don’t mow those little vines,” my grandmother director my father, “I have people who want them.”

            My father began stroking his string trimmer affectionately as if they had secret assignation later in the day.

            “And who are these vines for, exactly?” my Dad would ask.

            “Well, there’s one for Margaret, and one for Cheryl…”

            The look on his face when he snapped his head to look at me nearly broke my heart. How could you? That look said to me.

            “I want a trumpet vine, Dad,” I said. “I want to plant it by my front porch …“

            “You don’t want a trumpet vine,” my father said.

            “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Bob, let her have a trumpet vine,” my grandmother said.

            “Maybe I should get two,” I planned with my grandmother, “I might accidentally kill one…”

            “You can’t kill a trumpet vine,” my father said. And he stalked off across the lawn.

            “What’s wrong with him?” I checked with my grandmother.

            “I don’t know,” she said with a heavy sigh, “he’s always been like that.”

            He came back with thirteen plastic bags and a shovel. He maneuvered his way through the forest of plastic tubes and began digging up clumps of earth and depositing them into plastic bags.

            “Now Bob, you know your sister wants one of those…”

            “She’s wanted a trumpet vine for six years now,” my father said, vengefully stabbing at something in the earth with his shovel, “does she ever come down here to get it? Hell no. In the meantime I get to mow around the things until hell freezes over—how many do you think she wants? Six? A dozen?” He casts a significant glance around the ever-growing collection of plastic markers in the lawn. “I’ll take it to her.”

            My father never talked much. Two consecutive sentences out of my father constituted a rant. This was an entire paragraph, and the vehemence with which he delivered it left me uncertain about exactly how to handle this outburst. This was my father. Communicating.

            “I’ll take two, Dad,” I said as gently as I could. In my tone I tried to convey the thought, we’ll get through this, really Dad. Mom’s not here and you know Gramma, so we know no one is going to make us talk about this…

            I got six.

            I never asked Margaret/Meg how many he brought her.

            My grandmother gave me a sad look, and began silently pulling artificial insemination tubes out of her lawn.

            He loaded up the bags of volunteer trumpet vines into his truck, and then he mowed that lawn. Clean. Flat. Not a plastic tube or a stick or an errant blade of grass sticking up anywhere.

            Since that day I have learned a few things. One of the things I have learned is that the thing he was vengefully stabbing at in the earth with his shovel was the root to the volunteer trumpet vine. I have no idea why scientists carry on about the tensile strength of spider webs and steel: clearly none of them have ever tried to sever the root of a trumpet vine. I have learned that you can’t kill a trumpet vine. I told my story about my dad, my aunt, my grandmother and the trumpet vine to a man I worked with—he grew up on a farm—and he told me he dug the vine out of a fence row once, stripped the roots naked, left them on a burn pile with no shelter, no water, and no nutrients for three weeks, then poured gasoline on them and set the burn pile on fire, and the next year the burn pile was covered with trumpet vine. An established trumpet vine runner will stop a mower blade cold. The vine itself will climb up the side of a house and start pulling down the porch, given half a chance. At the very least it will crawl in under the siding and pop off a section of fascia.

            And the gentle little baby volunteers my grandmother’s vine popped up for those of us who admired them? Everywhere. By the time the trumpet vine had established itself, I had volunteer trumpet vines popping up out of the ground fifteen and twenty feet away from the original plant. They grew faster than the grass. They were curled up lovingly against the foundation of the house, their tiny fingers feeling, feeling around for cracks to grow into…

            I really should have torn out that vine, but it was stronger than I was. Someone had told me once that I couldn’t kill it, and it seemed like a bad move politically to ask him to help me get rid of it.

            In the end it was easier to sell the house.

 

 

This morning Cheryl was detected wearing shoes (a sign!) carrying her camera bag/purse (a sign!) and holding keys in her hand (a double sign!)  and Annie dashed outside, shouting, Riley, she’s going! We get to go!

Omigod! Omigod! Riley rushed into the house, running sideways as often as he ran forward in his enthusiasm, we’re going, we’re going, we are go dogs and we are going with Cheryl! 

And we all got into the car and we went.

We went to the credit union, punched some buttons and stared intently at a machine that gave us some paper.

We did not get any treats.

Then we went to a store.

Omigod, a STORE! We’re going to a STORE! Holly lives in a store! We meet dogs in Holly’s store! This is just the best trip ever! 

Except Cheryl said that ugly word, that profanity that we would just as soon never hear again. And she said it more than once: she said, “No .”
And she went in alone.

And she stayed there.

And stayed there.

And stayed there.

And stayed there.

This happens to me all of the time, Riley said.

Well, Annie huffed, I don’t like it.

And then Cheryl came out of the store, got into the car, and we drove home.

Stopped in our own garage. Got out of the car. And we were home.

This is NOT the proper adventure of a go dog.

I can’t handle this, Riley said, I’m going outside.

It’s awful.

 

 

 

 

 

Annie and I went to her private class last night.

I walked in with my dog lunging and pulling against her leash to reach the counters with all of the smell-good things (our classes are in PetSmart) and confessed to my trainer that–best of intentions aside–I really haven’t done anything to advance Annie’s training since the last time we met because my knee hurts and I can barely walk and it’s hard to walk and active, poorly-trained, jerking, yanking, lunging dog when only one of your legs is reliable (and that is the ‘good’ leg, mostly in comparison to the bad one. It has its own moments.)

Our trainer has the patience of Job. I’m sure she was not all that impressed with me, but she smiled, put up a good front, and offered to work with Annie and a new trainee trainer. And as they walked out of the trainer center with my dog, I heard words that made my heart feel better: she said to the trainee trainer, “this is how a normal dog behaves.”

Annie is a normal dog.

I need to remember that: I tend to focus too strongly on her faults, anticipating problems even in places where there may not be any. In the hands of a trainee trainer and an experienced trainer, our Annie walked up to a strange dog, sat down and had a treat without so much as flickering her attention toward the alien. I can be done.

We’ll know soon enough if Cheryl can pass the test: our group class begins (again) next Wednesday.

Intermediate obedience. 

I am busy applying heat and healing ointments to my leg so I can actually participate in Annie’s class. (What is wrong with my knee? It‘s not aging well. I even take glucosamine chondroitin by the bottle, but I have asked an awful lot of this particular joint and it’s slowly falling apart.)

Did you mention your knee to your doctor? My Beloved asked.  

I had just returned from my annual physical. No, I said.

She gets that WTF? expression on her face and said, ‘Bertha’. Naming the wrong grandmother, but hey. My grandmother (Lucille) put concealer on the spot on her face she had identified as skin cancer whenever she went to the doctor. She diagnosed herself as diabetic and counteracted her disease by avoiding sugar for years until she nearly passed out in his office from hypoglycemia. She was the grandmother who would pressed her lips and shudder, inhaling through her teeth, whenever she had to move her leg because her repair on her broken hip ‘moved around in there’. She wore a bandage on her leg because it ‘seeps’. I said, “you have an infection in the bone and seeps through your skin?” and she agreed. She went to the doctor. When I saw her the next time, I asked her what he said about her leg and she said, “I never mentioned it.” And I said (lovingly) to her, “Then die from the damned thing, if that’s what you want, but don’t you ever whimper to me about the pain again.” (She went back to the doctor.)  Yeah. That grandmother.

 my doctor x-rayed my knee, showed me the x-rays and said, “You have moderate arthritis. As you know, the surgeon won’t do a knee replacement for someone of  your size…” 

It may be a while before I mention my knee to  my doctor again. So far I can hobble along on it. Last fall my partner had her hip replaced. Nancy is strong. Nancy is stubborn. Nancy hates being helpless and she eschews weakness of any kind.

I suspect I’ll hang in there until my knee hurts as much as it is as it would if they sawed it open, wrenched out the old joint and stuck in a new one before I seriously consider joint replacement.

It’s possible that attitude is hereditary.  

 

It is 8:50 am. Riley is outside barking, the disciplinary barks of an aggrieved older brother. The sun is almost shining, giving us reason to hope, although the sky is besmirched by a fluffy cloud cover. Could rain, could clear, could just stay the way it is all day.

Now THIS is a hardy plant. They are supposed to grow on the forest floor; in our yard, they grow under the volunteer bamboo stand, which allows them to bloom and settle in in the spring before the bamboo shades them all summer. They are hellebore, or helleborus, which right up until I posted this I thought was ‘helioborus’, having something to do with the sun. I had to look up the spelling, which allowed me to learn the following” “Any of a number of poisonous plants in the buttercup family…” I can see the buttercup resemblance immediately: I did not know they were poisonous. As I just told Nancy, I had hoped the have fried hellebore for dinner tonight and now…

We have never eaten our hellebore. We marvel every year that they have returned (for where there once was one, there are now multiple plants) since everything we know about them tells us they are not well-suited to live on the side of our lawn. Nonetheless, they do.

This is Helene’s gourd, and very likely the end of my current obsession with waves. The colors are not quite right in the photograph, but you have the general idea. The green is called ‘peridot’. The yellow is ‘Aztec gold’ and the white is actually beige. This is another aspect of painting gourds that occasionally comes into play–the color of the gourd skin affects the color you paint on it. I personally hand-inserted each of the individual beads into each individual hole. And having done that, spent several hours looking for the 314 fly-away beads that said, “No! I’m not going in there!” This is apparently something that practice enhances because I was walking across the WalMart parking lot a few hours later and found a stray bead on the pavement.

My writing is being punctuated by high-pitched puppy squeaks which sound for all the world like Riley is beating the bejayzits out of Annie. We have watched these transactions before: sometimes, for instance, he actually has her by the lip and is refusing all requests for mercy. For the most part, however, he may not even be in contact with her when she yips. She is going to work with Nancy today, so Riley will be able to rest.

This is from our visit to the dog park Sunday. Riley is playing with Aggie (the semi-greyhound) and Crusher, an 8 month-old great Dane puppy.

This is my current project. It’s a cannonball gourd (I love cannonball gourds) which, with any luck, will look like a field of crocus when I’m done. One of the side-effects of working with gourds is that after a lot of cutting, cleaning, sanding, burning, more sanding, everything tastes like gourd. It’s a sharp, bitter and…to my mind…green taste. I love the smell of burning them (which, due to my Michigan-born sinus system, I can smell for hours and sometimes days after I’ve done it) but the after-taste I really could do without. 

I’m not complaining. I am happy just to rummage through my paints, contemplating what I might apply them to…admiring just how far one small jar of acrylic paint will go… They fit in nicely with my colored pencil collection, my pastels collection and my watercolor collection. (My sister has a collection of colored markers. I remain envious.) I may not produce much with them, but I do really enjoy having them. My life has been a long, slow process of learning to let go of the ideal and allow myself to just play for the sheer pleasure of playing. My gourds are my effort to let go of having them and become more about the doing. I struggle in all aspects of my life with the concept of ‘enough’.

It does not appear the sun will be joining us any time soon. What little effort it made to assert its dominance has apparently extinguished the flame. On the other hand, it has to be 50 degrees outside already. The first of the leaves are breaking out. The grass is green instead of brown, there are buds on the six-inch forest.

It’s a good day.  

   

 

 

 Up until last week I have always used dyes on my gourds. I started out using shoe dyes, but they fade (with or without sun exposure) so I went to a Gourd Show (there are such things, all  over the country) and I found the dyes. Love my dyes. Right up until my dyes run, when I’m applying my finish coat, and smear over onto each other. Don’t love that. In the meantime I have been slowly amassing a collection of acrylic paints.

I paint the insides of the gourds with acrylics. Because it’s hardy, durable, easy to apply and it doesn’t run.

To be snobbishly honest, I have always associated acrylic paints with craft projects. (And here we go again with that whole craft vs fine art… Except I don’t belong to the Guild any more and I can paint my gourds any way I want to.

And then I discovered metallic acrylics.

And the fact that all acrylics have a gloss finish, rather than a matt, when you coat them with gloss varnish.

And acrylics don’t bleed.

So I decided to paint a gourd with little crocuses (croci?) all over it. To do this, I needed purple acrylic paint. So I went immediately to the store and stood in the acrylics aisle and studied the paints before me.

I avoid the ones that said ‘craft’. (They’re cheaper. Sometimes not very much cheaper. I have used craft quality acrylics on the INSIDES of my gourds. They worked fine.)

There is a blinding array of acrylic paints available. There is a line of acrylic paints for every budget. (And I have an email subscription to various artist supply stores, where the array is even more blinding.)

So, after much suffering and internal struggle I bought four little jars (and one tube) of acrylics paints home, and added them to my previous collection. And then I thought, I wonder what you do with these? 

And I started painting one of my wave gourds.

It looked like a fifth-grader had done it.

Now as it happens I have embraced the idiot-with-a-brush approach to ‘fine art’ because my actual exposure to skills and techniques is pretty much limited to buying how-to books. (Reading them would be a whole different step.) My painting technique is somewhere between the ‘it takes 10,000 hours to get good at anything’ (Gladwin, Gadwin, can’t remember the guy’s name) and ‘I don’t have 10,000 hours of patience, much less practice’. Really. I would like to find something I like to do that I can just sit right down and do well the first time.

However. Not all of those 10,000 hours, I suspect, absolutely have to be yours.

About a year and a half ago my Beloved came up with a wonderful (if slightly dark) plan that involved, in the beginning, my painting a woman’s head on an urn. I have limited skills and the limit is something short of women’s-head- on-urns painting. So I begged and pleaded and got my friend Bingaman to do it. And because she was doing me a personal favor with no immediate reward for doing so, I sat there and watched her do it. I remember several things from watching her. For instance, every now and then she dipped her brush in water. (?) And if she didn’t like what she had, she painted over it.

So after whining to Nancy that my gourd looked like the work of a fifth-grader (which isn’t true, actually; I’ve taught fifth-graders long enough ((three days)) to know they never underpaint: they bury their gourds in paint, then they paint themselves and then each other) I sat down with a glass of water and said to myself, I wonder what this does.

It renders the water undrinkable almost immediately.

It also thins the paint, which allows it to flow more smoothly, which renders are more even paint cover. Imagine that.

Along the same vein I remember watching someone paint something once and every now and again they would smudge it gently with a fingertip.

Tried that.

It wipes off still wet paint that has gone astray.

Anyway. It’s lunch time now. (I know this because Ilah appears in the doorway with her walker and announces, ‘Lunch time’.)

I need to go.

More painting lessons to come. (Yeah, right.) 

  

What’s wrong with this picture?

Well, other than the mis-shapen swirls, the erratic hole patterns, the fact that the dark color is done with a craft pen rather than a woodburner, the bad gourd cutting…it’s a prototype. What’s wrong with the picture? Some over-zealous gourd designer drilled 457 holes in a medium-sized gourd BEFORE she painted the inside.

I did an experiment this morning. (Because I did that same 101A Gourd-stupid thing twice:) I painted the inside of the second gourd, which has much, much smaller holes. (I should be able to tell you how much smaller, given than I own the drill bits that drilled them, but…they haven’t been in a box that measures their size in probably 7 years. But if you had such a box: I would say two or even three drill bits to the right.)

Note leakage of black paint through holes. 

To give you a sense of proportion:

The window seems particularly cloudy because last fall we covered it with plastic to keep out the cold and, living in Michigan, we are waiting for August to take it down because spring either come to Michigan in February or October.

The washtub just ran over. We (Nancy) bought this beautiful house in +/- 2000. We accidentally touched the stovetop, thereby leaving the prints of our fingers, and we were scolded for our bad behavior by the owner–this was just the first look-through. We assumed from this, this woman has a low tolerance for things that go wrong. And perhaps she did. The house was built in 1954. About…roughly, two years ago…the washing started coming out of the laundry tub really, really WET. I assumed the spin-dry was tired, but no–the water was refusing to leave the exterior tub, so when the machine spun out all of the water for some reason it immediatley begins to suck it back up. This became much clearer as the slow drain slowed even more and the washtub ran over, soaking the laundry room, the back hall, and pouring loudly like rain into the basement. So we moved our diagnosis from dying washer to badly-engineered  plumbing system. It is ‘air-starved’. This is caused by two problems: the design is poor, and the pipes are lead (or metal or they collect a lot of ‘stuff’ inside, narrowing the aisleway through which the water moves. This moves our diagnosis from clogged pipes to ‘replumb the entire house.’ Which is harder–and more expensive–that plumbing a brand new house. Recently we called a plumber to come help us. He bored out the pipes.

Worked for about 2 1/2 weeks.

This is the kind of gourdwork I like to do. I’m a little rusty–I haven’t turned on the burner for a year and a half.  The daisy (which is really some sort of wild sunflower) I stole from a photograph I took last fall. The center will eventually be brown (the yellow dye is still damp.)

There are ways around lack of talent, but they are slow and cumbersome. The one I have struggled hardest to achieve is the one my brother quotes all the time: “it is what it is.”

My goal, when I revved up my Dremel this time, was the create gourds with cutouts and contours and gouges missing.

I can do ‘gouges missing’.

Right now I don’t seem to be able to drill holes exactly where I want them, which makes me hesitate to dig out my gouging tools…

I can hear water running down the drain. These are not normal house sounds, I understand. We have come to appreciate them for the slow-moving music that they are.

Okay. I know Control Z. If I didn’t, you would have lost this post three times today. Now. Position your hands on your keyboard (assuming you still have a keyboard.) My right hand, which rests on the desk and pokes keys on the board, repeatedly (and accidentally) hits something on the lower right side of the keyboard that wipes out my entire blog entry. Anybody have a CLUE which key that is? 

I am dogless today. Nancy takes the dogs to work because I have been inspired, recently, to work on my gourds. (The dogs–particularly the busy little black dog–are distractions.) Just last night, after she came home from work with Nancy, Annie saved us from 7 home invasions, four viscious dogs, a stray cat, six people on bicycles and a passing hurricane. However, since she’s not here, I have my gourding stuff sprawled all over the Conservatory.

But now it’s lunchtime.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had a meltdown today. Or as I sometimes say to myself, “Eloise came out to play.”

Eloise was my mother. And she was a fine mother. I have whined extensively over my lifetime about the God awful, horrible things my mother did to me and I am pretty much accustomed to my friends gazing at me solemnly, listening to me wail on my tale of woe, until eventually they say, “She made your clothes for you?” or “you got to square dance?” or “your mother took five kids camping for a week all by herself?” Or my personal favorite, “Wow–all five of you lied to her about your little brother’s blood poisoning until you got to the campsite and she found out, a hundred miles from home with very little money and no credit card, and she was mad about that?” She was a wonderful mother. Funny. Unrelentingly loyal to her kids.

She did know how to throw a tantrum.

I studied at the feet of a master.

I was steam-cleaning the carpets in our house, which is not my favorite job (my favorite job is playing spider solitaire on the computer.) I was cleaning the carpets because we have one perfectly house-trained dog, one dead cat who suffered, at the end of his days, with renal failure, and our beloved little Annie, who is morally opposed to getting her tush cold. This leaves little gold spots on our green carpet and a scent we refer to as ‘eau de chat piss’. But the cat is dead, and the spots still appear. I have no idea how that happened. Annie is shocked. She has skills when it comes to making unauthorized and unwitnessed deposits. So I wasn’t really blaming the dog for my Saturday chores, but I was cognizant of what I was washing away.

Cleaning the carpet is not hard work, but I am not an athletic person and the machine is big and heavy and I have a number of bodily complaints, most of which are aggravated by standing up and pushing things. The steam-cleaner has about a 1 gallon capacity for water and it steams through a gallon of water in just about ten minutes. It has about a cup and a half capacity for soap and it steams through the soap in about 15 minutes. So they don’t even run out at the same time. Also–not matter how often you run the vacuum–the steamer accumulates wads of dead cat hair and sand which it throws at your feet. So you are either filling the water tank, the soap tanks or picking up wads of hair of the cat (who sheds at least as much dead as he did alive) ALL OF THE TIME. And the cord is short and gets stuck between my bare toes, wraps around one of my ankles or jerks free of the wall fairly regularly.

But I did it.

I was two-thirds done. I had sweat running off my forehead, I was breathing like a freight train and my back, my knee and my shoulder all ached, and I turned around to look over what I had done…

…and there were little black dog prints all over my still-wet, freshly-cleaned carpet.

Mud.

Thick, congealed mud in perfectly readable, distinctly dog prints. The kind of prints made not by a wandering dog, or an outside peeing as needed dog, but by a digging, dirt-wallowed,black mud to the knees dog.

Words of an anti-social and possibly blasphemous nature fell out of my mouth.

The dog ran like the wind for the dog door, threw herself outside and calmed herself by digging some more. 

I changed my steam water (again), waited patiently for the heater to do its work (again) and steamed-cleaned the muddy dog prints. Which ruined my cleaning water, incidentally, and taxed my soap supply.

And finally I was finished.

I turned off the machine.

Dumped the muddy water.

And listened to the familiar sound of…

…my dogs barking like fools because nothing will suit them until we are thrown out of the neighborhood for excessive noise.

And I went to the back door, and I called the dogs in, and Riley came in and I wiped all four of his paws and Annie piled in through the door behind him, saw the rag and said, You’re going to beat me, aren’t? 

And ran back out the door.

She would not come in.

She would not take a treat.

When she took the treat, she bolted off across the yard to the far corner to eat it.

She was so cold she started to shake (it was sleeting.)

“All I want to do was brush the dirt off your paws.” 

You’re going to kill me, she said. I heard you yell in the house–you’ve gone completely insane and you’re possessed by your dead mother and probably that damned cat. 

“You’ve lived with me since the end of August and I have never hurt you.”

That was then, Cheryl. Now you’re insane.

“Annie, come.”

I can’t, Cheryl–you’re possessed and you’ll kill me.

“Don’t tempt me, Annie–just come in the house.”

I’m going to stay out here and freeze now, Cheryl. Explain that to Nancy.

I explained it to Nancy when she came home. She  admired the little black dog prints all over my freshly-steamed carpet and I said, “We haven’t made any progress with that dog at all, she’s as crazy as she was the day we got her, she’s convinced I’m going to kill her, she’s lived with us since the end of August and she’s exactly the same as she was the day I bought her home! Riley learns things–this dog hasn’t learned a God-damned thing!”

My partner has lived with me for a long time now. She doesn’t even try to argue: she brings me chocolate.

So I was sitting at my deck, seething with frustration and fury, wondering if we will EVER teach this useless dog a single thing–forget trust, forget coming when called, forget ‘stop barking’, how about just ‘pee OUTSIDE’–and I was eating my chocolate–and something nudged me.

Something small and black, eternally hungry and muddy of foot.

Should I have some of that,Cheryl? Because it looks like you like it alot, and as you know, I am ALWAYS hungry  

I grabber her collar and she gazed up at me soulfully, one ear up and one ear down.

Because you and me, Cheryl, we’re buds, you know. What you eat, I eat.

“Aren’t you worried about your feet?”

And the dog sighs. What ARE you talking about, Cheryl?

“Six minutes ago you were scared to death of me.”

Did you have chocolate?*

 

*I do. I know, it’s very, very  bad. I usually tell her that while she eats it. I don’t give her a LOT of chocolate, but I do occasionally give her some. When she was scared to death of me I had dehydrated chicken treats, which I have been told by dogs both gold and black are the very best treats in the world. Riley forgets how the dog door works every night because if I have to come get him to bring him in I give him a chicken treat. He naps right up next to the door so he won’t accidentally miss me when I come. Riley learns.

I am dogless today.

The dogs went to work with Nancy. She planned to take Annie, but Annie is a brat, and as soon as she realized she was going, she ran outside and bounced in front of Riley and said, I get to go and you have to stay home with Cheryl, so Nah! 

So Riley dashed into the house and posed winsomely in front of Nancy and said, she got to go two days this week and I’ve had to stay home all that time and all I ever got to do was go to Walmart where I stayed in the car the whole time and that’s not fair.

Is too, is too, danced Annie.

I’m the best dog, Riley reminded Nancy, you both say so and I’m a go dog, Nancy–I need to go.

She like ME best now, Annie bragged.

Neither one of them like you, Riley told her, They plot at night how to make the other one spend the day with you. I’m the Good Dog. I bark now and keep them safe and stuff.

You only bark because I taught you how to bark–you never barked when I first came here. And I still growl better than you do.

They don’t like it when you growl.

Do too, do too

No they don’t and they talk to you about it.

But I have my string and my coat on and you don’t, so guess who gets to go today?

I translated some of this discussion for Nancy. It seemed only fair.

They like me better now because I’m small and cute and everybody likes me and nobody even notices you and besides I sleep with them every night.

They’re too hot.

Okay, we’re going now, so you just stand back and let me through…

It might have worked. Nancy forgot her keys. She can’t go anywhere without keys, so she came back.

Nobody loves me any more, Riley said. He hung his head.

And Nancy put his leash on and he went.

I am struggling.

I want a new laptop.

I have a laptop. I bought it in 2004, it runs Windows XP—very, very slowly–and I let someone else borrow it until she gets a new one, but that just cleverly disguises the fact that I have almost never used this laptop in the 9 years I’ve had it. For one, I have a desktop (two, actually.) I didn’t use the laptop I have because a.) I don’t like the keyboard, b.) I prefer a mouse to that whatever-it’s-called on a laptop and my mice kept dying, c.) I don’t really have a ‘lap’, d.) it’s slow, e.) I have a desktop that I’m used to. I used it when I went to Alabama. But not all that much. In the best of times I go to Alabama twice a year.

I was always going to go sit outside in the summer and use my laptop. Never did.

I love the whole idea of laptops. I just…don’t tend to use them.

I want a netbook because they’re small. All reviews assure me I won’t like a netbook because they’re a.) slow, b.) not very powerful, c.) going out of style.

They can’t multitask. I almost never multitask. My desktop multitasks, although it took me months to realize this because the computers I used when I learned computers threw their CPUs in the air and died if you tried to multitask.

They won’t play games. I play solitaire, Mahjong and spider solitaire. I don’t think those are the games they’re talking about.

How powerful does a computer have to be to run Word?

I was reading yet another get this/not that report this morning and it assured me an i3 computer would be too slow and drive me crazy. My desktop is an i3. It’s  speed demon compared to the last one.

This is what I do on my computer. I write documents on Word. I process photographs on Photoshop Elements. Occasionally (not often) I listen to music. I have about 427 other ways to access music. I play spider solitaire. I look at facebook, Xanga and my email. Occasionally I consult Wikipedia. That’s it. Oh: I like to put files on my flashdrives. I shop on Amazon.com. I download Kindle books. That’s it.

I also scan 35mm photo film, but I would do that on my desktop.

It used to be I would describe what I do on my computer and the salesman would assure me I need the bigger, better, more laptop. (That was also in 2004.)

In 2004 I had some vague idea what operating system, number of cores, what type of CPU and what kind of game card I was looking for: I don’t have a clue any more.

For a while I was looking for computers with optical drives: then I discovered you can buy an external optical drive for $8.96 on amazon. REALLY.

The bottom line is, I don’t need a laptop.

The bottom line is, I need a car.

Work done on the eaves.

A better dog fence.

A paid lobbyist in Washington to keep the legislature from reducing my Social Security benefits. And one in Lansing to keep my governor from cashing in my pension plan. With rising health costs, drug costs, costs of living and reducing social security, failing pensions, and the steady hits my meager investment funds keep taking, getting older is looking more and more like heaven on earth. I should have practiced living in a cardboard box when I was younger and my joints flexed more easily.

And now I need to go check on my collected balls of tin foil and string.*

*Does this make sense to anyone? My grandmother collected string (I believe she cashed in the tin foil balls during the war.) It has something to do with The Great Depression. All I know is that as the End of Times approaches, everyone will need balls of tin foil and string. And maybe some tires.

 

Shhh! Annie is sleeping.

I bought a book today to read for my reading group, Annie’s Ghost by Steve Luxenberg. I was pleasantly surprised to discover I think I’m really going to like it. (I have really liked most of the books the book group has selected, although almost none of them were books I would have picked out for myself.) My mind still makes profound distinctions between books I ‘want’ to read and books I ‘have’ to read.

Normally I spend most of my days in my chair at my computer.

I sat down on the couch with my book and began reading and The God Awful Creature Across the Street dragged 14 children out into his yard and began torturing them in FULL VIEW of Annie. TGACAS is a bulldog. We hate him.

Bark bark bark, Cheryl, bark bark. Do you SEE this? Bark bark.

I called her into the Conservatory. I said (this seems to work for Nancy) “We’ve got this, Annie, you can relax.”

Torture murder mayhem ritual decapitation ARE YOU LOOKING AT THIS? Bark bark.

I went outside with my book and sat on the box by the back door.

Cheryl, Riley greeted me, you came outside–is everything all right? Should you brush me now? Here, I’ll sit between your knees until you feel better.

Annie ran to the back gate. The postal Delivery Person from Hell is coming, Cheryl, run, grab Riley, let’s all get in the car and drive away now….

I went back inside. Sat on the couch. Read my book.

Oh, my God,he just ate a child and now I think he’s going to eat the mailman…

“I don’t remember why I thought I had to have you,” I said to Annie.

I don’t know how you managed to live long enough to find me, Annie said.

Fortunately, Nancy and I had just survived last evening.

Most evenings are the same, here. Nancy, Ilah and I have dinner together and then play a game while Riley throws himself with a sigh onto the floor and Annie runs to the dining room window to report passersby, dogs on ropes, wind gusts and all manner of intolerable social errors being committed in our front yard. We have taken up feeding her about this time. We now feed her using puzzle toys, which have significantly increased the amount of time it takes Annie to finish her dinner and gives her something to do (other that running to the dining room window to bark.) Then Nancy and I do the dishes, and then we go into the living room where Nancy and Annie crash on the couch and I sit in my chair.

Last night we went to the Conservatory. I had something I was doing on the computer, Nancy was reading a book.

Wrong.

Wrong wrong wrong WRONG WRONG.

Oh, my God the wrongness of it.

Stray postal delivery workers converged on our front yard with picket signs and hand granades. Annie ran around the house barking at everything that moved. Space Invaders! Huns! Godzilla!

Riley raised his head off the floor. Squinted. WTF?

He was too tired to deal.

We tried reason. We tried calming voices. We tried assuring her we ‘had it’.

Annie became more and more hysterical.

Finally we got up, walked to the living room, Nancy got on the couch I got into my chair, we turned on the TV and Annie collapsed, exhausted, on the couch.

We were safe at last.

Order had been restored.

And having learned from that experience, I got up off the couch, where I DO NOT belong, walked over to my desk chair and sat down where I DO BELONG, and Annie has been sound asleep on the couch ever since.

I think I may even be allowed to read over here.

We’ll see.