Ah, the glorious mornings of spring! My windows are open, fresh, crisp breezes are playing in the back yard, and the incessant hum of lawn mowers has begun. Whoever is mowing this particular lawn would be in serious trouble with my father, were s/he me because s/he is repeatedly mowing sticks, stones and other implements of blade-dulling capacity.

mmmmmm*thwack!*mmmmm

A small black dog just raced past my window.

I woke up this morning under the watchful guardianship of Riley, who had gone outside to fight off the squirrels. They apparently gained a little ground during the night: it required an hour of constant vigilance to re-draw the perimeter so it would hold. One squirrel in particular sat in the top of the six-inch forest and chattered angrily. I could hear his thoughts through the bed room window. *()&*#&$(*#&^ dogs anyway

I can't remember if I have shared this story or not. If I have, forgive me: it comes due every 3-4 months. Last December I was happily driving Nancy's car somewhere (because I am almost always the person driving Nancy's car) when a little thought poked its head through the music from the radio and I checked the mileage since the last time I had changed the oil.

Oops.

I was over. Not horribly, but Nancy is much more diligent about oil changes than I am and it is, after all,her car. So I went to the 15 Minute Oil Change place here in town and realized it was December 24th and the store was closed.

Suddenly I  HAD TO HAVE THE OIL CHANGED!

So I drove to Kalamazoo and visited Uncle Ernie. For an oil change.

Apparently Uncle Ernie is not a place where the terminally car-stupid and oil-guilty should just recklessly go. I ended up with nitrogen in my tires ("You know the air you breathe?" my mechanic said later, "the stuff just...hanging out there in the wind?" He gave me the percentage of nitrogen it holds) a new filter where I had no idea a filter had ever gone, an oil change, and I don't remember what else. The car was Ready to Go.

Bill: $165.

For an oil change.

I had to take the car in to my mechanic for an emergency check because it had begun leaking some sort of fluid on the garage floor.

Oil.

Because they can find filters I didn't even know I had at Uncle Ernie's, but they can't tighten the screw in the bottom of the oil pan.

So that pretty much brings the total cost of that oil change to right around $200.

Anyway. I need to change the oil again. (I/we really haven't driven the car all that much, lately.) 

The small black dog has returned to her position of meditation on the couch. She really hasn't barked that much this morning. When Nancy and I are both home, she is calmer. Except around mealtime. I have tried several approaches to the problem. One is putting her in her crate during mealtime. She can see us through the glass-less 'window' between the kitchen and the Conservatory, and she is usually calm. Another approach is to feed her in her Kong, so she has to chase the Kong all over the living room to get it to spill out her dinner. This extends her dinner time from about 15 seconds to sometimes as long as 5 minutes. Another method that works is to feed her tidbits of my dinner all through the meal. Very bad habit on both our parts, but it keeps the peace. I cannot figure out what there is about dinner time that just revs her engines. (Well, in part, it's early evening when everyone in the neighborhood decides to walk their kids and dogs past our house. I can hear the movement spread down the street: let's all walk past Cheryl's house and make her dogs bark...)

I have one dog I can't feed enough and one dog I can barely get to eat. To make matters worse, he dislikes eating while something is dervishly whirling around him and nothing makes Annie whirl like food. We've noticed she has stopped trying to actually eat his food, although clearly she would very much like to. But she does whirl around him, wriggling with all kinds of enthusiasm even for the thought that he is able to eat. Yeah, Riley! Isn't it great that you have food?  

And I have to be honest, here. The longer I have two dogs, the more I understand my mother. Bless her heart. So I have this little hyper-active (comparatively--yes, I know: I could have just gotten a border collie or a Jack Russell) dog that eats everything and anything, including bugs, grass and half of my potato chips and she is within one pound of what she weighed when she came here, and on the other hand I have this lovely semi-golden/lab/husky/chihuahua who (like me) can gain five pound by sniffing the neighbor's grill fumes. He is the 'firstborn' (I am the firstborn) and she is, every last black inch of her, a little sister. I do occasionally play favorites.

She'll eat anything. Apples. She loves apples. (We eat chunks of apples in our granola with a black dog conspicuously sitting at our sides. Look, Cheryl. I'm sitting. Cheryl. Cheryl. I really like apples, Cheryl. Here--I'll hang my chin on your thigh.) The only thing we've found that she won't eat is celery stalks. She will take them, trot away with them, but we usually find them later, tucked up against something just beyond our line of sight.

Someone is building something with a hammer. Something wooden, from the sound of it. Sound carries particularly well in the morning air. I love these mornings, sitting at my computer with the windows open, the breezes stirring, the sounds of my neighbors floating in through the screens. I even have a long-sleeved shirt on over my tank top. According to the back fence it's about 60 degrees outside (although I can't remember the last time I was happy barefoot with a single shirt on at sixty degrees.) It will warm up soon enough.

Oh, dear. The hammering got louder and now the dogs object.

Bark bark.

(I just sit here and quietly blog about it.)

Well, the world has gone directly to hell now. Nancy just learned that Sabra hummus has GMOs in it. It's made by Pepsi. Remember when soy products were God's answer to allergies, weight loss, trans fats and starvation worldwide? Well, it turns out soy isn't really all that good for you--particularly when it's GMO soy which, apparently, almost all soy is.

Come to America, visit our astonishing vistas, spends lots and lots of money...just don't eat our food.

By the way, ostriches really don't hide their heads in the sand. They run away. They kick.

Which, at this point in my life, is pretty much the difference between ostriches and me. 

I am burning sage because it is stronger than the smell of cat piss which my dear, departed Babycakes left for me to remember him by. He was old. He was sick. In these damp, warm days of spring it is almost impossible to forget him. I steam cleaned the carpets this weekend, which apparently only brought up new levels of odors. "Can you smell that?" Nancy checked with me because I have a remarkably poor sense of smell.

The dead could smell that.

I sprayed the entire house with Odorban . It worked for a good two and a half hours.

So while drifting through the garage, looking for things I own, never use and could live for eternity without, I found an old sage stick, bought undoubtedly at Festival, for lighting and waving, while vibrating emotionally in a gentle mental place, and I am inhaling it like a more controlled substance with a certain scent of burning leaves.

Someone somewhere within hearing distance of my window owns some small, yappie kick dog that is in high form today.

Because he/she/it is driven to attacks of barking, my little black dog--who is really trying to take a nap--has been roused from the couch and driven to barking expeditions to find the noise. Every time she comes up off the couch snapping and snarling and barking like a canine explosive, my nerves vault one step farther away from vibrating emotionally in a gentle mental place.

Okay. Momentary peace.

I went to writers group this morning and read a piece that really seemed to impress them. I hope so: I submitted it to The Smoking Poet, an e-zine. I've had a piece published there before. While I was listening to my fellow writer's read their pieces I was busy admiring one of the women's haircuts. I really like it. I also think--perhaps--my hair might actually do that. In fact it pretty much does right now, except the back isn't cut right. So after the meeting I asked a few of them what I would ask a hair-stylist for to get the back of my hair cut like Veronica's. They said I should asked for 'stacked'. (Which, if nothing else, explains why I've never managed to get that cut before. I had asked for 'layered'.) I need to do something with this stuff growing out of my head. It's becoming steadily more unruly right about the scalp level, and now that much of it is gray (nearly white, in places) it's thicker and strives toward a greater unruliness. I am sure that with my new haircut I will be virtually indistinguishable from Veronica, who is 40, vivacious and probably runs purely for the rush.

For those of you (should there be such people) who have never met me, this is a general map of my body shape:

O

I don't roll over in bed purely for the rush.

The kick dog shut up, or went inside, or is no longer being teased, tortured or gazed upon sideways. I am sure the ensuing peace is what prompted some other jerk to dash directly out in the yard to run a leaf blower/lawn mower/gasoline-powered-creator-of-a-high-earsplitting-whine.

Given the warmth and compassion I am vibrating at this moment, I should write a brief piece on the rewards of living with the elderly.

Yeah, you're right. Probably not.

I like Ilah (Nancy's mother.) At 95 she is self-sufficient in terms of dressing and feeding herself. Her life is wrapped around Tigers baseball, Red Wings hockey and theme-based word-search puzzles. (I had no idea word search puzzles were theme based.) She spends most of her time in her room because she requires considerably more heat than Nancy, the dogs or I. Occasionally she has guests. Most of her guests are caretakers or relatives of guests at the Bowman House, the assisted living facility down the street from us where she lived for eight years. She leaves her room for breakfast, lunch, dinner and Pepto-Bismol.

So there are three aging women living in this house designed for the weakly-kneed and short of wind in every possible way but one: we have one bathroom.

One stool.

Yes, I know. There are children starving in Africa and India. There are entire families without access to clean water and healthy outhouses. Our ancestors had to walk out the back door of their homes and off into the wilderness to visit the facilities and I am whining because I have to share the john. We are, all three, years past synchronized menses: now our bladders go off in unison. Where once we might have jumped up and dashed to the john, we now rise slowly, stretching everything that can possibly have stiffened during the break, and hop, hobble and creak along behind the walker toward one room in the entire house...

Annie is barking in the back yard. Something moved. Or thought about moving.

I don't know how to make her stop. I've called her inside and given her treats. I've sprayed her with water. I've rattled a tin can full of pennies at her. I've locked the dog door, I've been calm, I've lost it completely and screamed at her.
We keep the blinds closed so she can't see outside. I think part of it is boredom, but I can't take her to the dog park for exercise because she attacks other dogs. Not all of them, certainly. Enough. I have had this dog 8 months, we are in our fourth obedience class and we still keep telling ourselves, "I think she's going to be a very nice dog."

In the meantime she's sitting on the couch, boofing. a boof is half-way between a 'woof' and an outright attack of barking. A boof means, 'I know you don't want me to bark or anything, but--can you HEAR that? I think, you know, being a dog and all, the very least of my duties would be to let you know about THAT..."

It's peaceful. Quiet. I can hear traffic as far away as the highway..someone's brakes are squealing...there aren't even any birds chirping just now.

Any minute now Annie is going to report, WAKE UP, CHERYL, THE HOUSE IS ONE FIRE TIMMY'S IN THE WELL OH MY GOD, THE THING IN THE BACK YARD IS COMING THROUGH THE DOORTHE MAIL MAN IS SHOVING STUFF THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR, CHERYL 

THE END

IS

HERE

NO, WAIT 

IT'S JUST A POODLE.... 

It's okay, Cheryl, Relax.

You seem really jumpy.

   

 

For Christmas Nancy gave me a macro lens. (Gloat.  Gloat, gloat.) Today I took it outside to photograph dandelions and whatever else might be glowing for me in this beautiful morning sun. My activities were closely supervised by the dogs, who may or may not be the reason I can no longer find the lens bag. (It could be me, too. I should just hire a pack mule to follow me around because as soon as I lay something down it's lost.)

I came back in, looked at my photos...and immediately thought of more I wanted.

I could get in the car and drive all the way to Mottville, or I could venture into my neighbor's yard and photograph the trillium that grow next to his house.

So camera in hand I snuuuccckk discretely across the lawn's edge...

and met Sophie.

Sophie was on a string.

Then I met Stella.

Stella was not.

I am not afraid of Stella, I was worried about how close to the road she was simply because she'd come to inspect me, so I spoke to her, and a minute later her man can around the corner and ordered her back into his line of sight. I apologized, said I didn't come to lead his dog into a life of disobedience, I just wanted to photograph his trillium. He assured me I could go right ahead.

I snapped this, not a wonderful shot, but pretty much the one I had:

Yes it is. The chows next door. We hate them. (Actually, I think they're cute, and I know their guardian went to great lengths to rescue them. Annie hates them.) Sophie is pale, Stella is darker. (I think.)

This is the shot I went for:

And these are the shots I found along the way:

 Love that macro.

 

  

It's back.

(Of course it is: I cleaned the carpets yesterday.)

Last fall Nancy went to our pet food supplier and bought a bag of dog food and it turned out she had purchased exactly enough bags of dog food to earn a free one or a bonus. She took the bonus and turned it into two look-alike stuffed dog toys. Sturdy, rugged dog toys. The kind of dog toys a terrier cannot tear to shreds. (Allegedly.) She brough the toys home and gave them to the dogs. Thinking, like I thought, that the dogs would love their toys, play with their toys, and keep their toys inside the house.

Annie promptly dragged hers through the dog door and buried it outside.

It was fall. Damp. Muddy. Leaves were rotting in the corners of the yard. It was a thoroughly disgusting time of year from the vantage point of something buried.

We didn't see the toy until a particularly musty thaw, when it came into the house (through the dog door.) Decaying leaves, mud, gravel, all manner of outside things were stuck to it through the judicious use of ice and dog spit. Annie laid it proudly in middle of the living room floor, where it promptly soaked a mud ring into the carpet.

Nancy was not amused. The toy spent several weeks hung by its tail over the tub in the laundry room while it dripped mud and thawing ice and decaying leaves.

Eventually we threw the toy outside.

It disappeared.

Early this spring I happened to be walking through the yard and I saw something that looked much like a buried raccoon in the corner. I chose the mature solution: I ignored it.

Yesterday I cleaned the carpets.

This morning I glanced up and Annie was trotting over my freshly-cleaned (still damp, actually) carpet with a lovely leaf-covered, mud-soaked dead-looking something. She tried to bury it in the cushions in the living room couch. She tried to bury it in the cushions of the Conservatory couch. She must have trotted through the house six times with that mess in her mouth.

I opened the back door for her, thinking that odd one-wayness was working on the door again. Things can come in but can't get out. This applies to dogs as well as toys. Riley, for instance, was outside and someone forgot to remove the slide that prevents passage through and he tried to come in and hit his head. He's been worried about that door ever since. (Annie just blows through it, but the toy wouldn't go through.)  

She went out with the toy.

Came back in with the toy.

Ran the full circle of the house five times.

Went back outside.

I haven't seen the toy since. She discovered her favorite pastime, barking at people passing the house. We might just as well pitch a tent in Grand Central Station.

I have swept the kitchen floor, picked up debris on the toy's route through the house.

I'm not going outside to look for it.

I know where that toy has been. 

 

*'Snorty' is one of my nicknames for Annie Bannie Annabel Lee, aka Snorty McFee. 

   

I went to (I think) the second Women's Music Festival ever. It may have been the first. It was in Hesperia. I went alone. Drank a lot of wine. My tent was pitched out in a field on the other side of a small ditch, which caused me no serious problem when I went carried my stuff out there and which bushwhacked me big time when I headed for bed a bottle of wine later. (The ditch bushwhacked me.) I met a woman, had a good time.

I was always going to go  back.

Didn't for probably 20, maybe even 25 years.

I met Nancy. Nancy was a dedicated Festie goer.

A year after I met her she convinced me to go.

And to go to Festival, you need a beach chair.

I don't know if these instruments or torture are even around any more--I eventually stopped looking for them. The last year or so I went to Festival I took a regular chair and sat in the back. Screw being able to hear, I needed a chair I could get back out of.

But for a while there I bought a new beach chair (or three) every year so I could go to the music concerts and be 'comfortable'.

Beach chairs are designed for women smaller and sprier than I was. I was probably 50 then. Limped a little on the left side. Did not just 'pop'  up off the ground for anybody. I usually broke at least one of them and sometimes two in the course of 5 days. When they broke, I threw them in the trash: but when they were...less that completely reliable, or actually unbroken, I hauled them home and kept them for festival next year. And bought about two more as back-ups.

I don't remember exactly when I quit going to Festival. I missed one due to a scheduling conflict, and the next year it didn't seem as important. Nancy went for several years after I quit.

Neither of us use beach chairs, or even conventional lawn chairs, for recreation in our back yard (much less use them in public.) So this motley collection of portable lawn chairs migrated slowly to the back end of our shed.

This year Nancy decided to raise chickens, and she decided the best shelter for them would be the shed. Everything in the shed came out. And we had 15 folding lawn chairs neither one of us have used for a long time now.

"I'm going to put a 'free' sign on them and pile them in the front yard," Nancy planned. (She's devoted to recycling.)

She dispatched me to make the 'free' sign.

I did.

Affixed my letters, one to a sheet of paper, to the chairs with...those plastic things where the end goes through an eye at the other end...

I had barely made it into the house when Nancy said, "Your letters are blowing over the chair backs and hiding themselves."

So we went on a masking tape hunt (I won, found mine first) and she went out to tape the letters in place.

Never happened.

Two women in a station wagon drove by, stopped, said they were on their way to something and they were just wondering what they were going to sit on when *POOF* there was a very vast array of lawn chairs for FREE right there.

They said it must be a sign from God.

I did not tell them I suspect God has better things to do with his time that locate lawn chairs for people who do not plan ahead--I just helped them fold up the chairs. All 15 of them.

There is a tiny part of me that wonders how they'll feel about their free chairs when they get wherever they're going and someone tells them what the piano in the tree emblazoned on one of those chair actually means...I have had a little private fun imagining the conversations they may have with women who just show up out of nowhere, friendlier than you might expect...but who knows. Maybe God intended for that to happen, too.
     

   

Another beautiful, sunny spring morning in the land of green grass and flowing rivers. At long last the trees are bursting into leaf, the flowering trees are blooming...all of this is right on time, of course, but the past few years have allowed us to hope for early seasons and this particular spring held on to the erratic chill of winter (it seemed) too long. Nancy mowed the lawn last night on her refurbished hip. Proud, proud, proud.

Last night Nancy and I took Annie to her (second stint) of intermediate obedience. There were four dogs present in the class and none were eaten. In fact for the most part Annie paid attention to her lessons and behaved well. Okay, so the Great Dane puppy came gambolling up behind her and nose-goosed her and Annie considered removing her face, and the lab puppy got too close and Annie offered to teach him a short course in social manners--otherwise she was pretty good. And since we are repeating the class, we're nearly the class stars.

She really is less reactive around other dogs than she was in the first class. Even dogs we meet by accident in the store.

We did use a trick. We used the Gentle Leader. Annie hates the Gentle Leader. She spent a lot of time cuddling up against my leg in what appeared to be demonstrations of deep affection and which were in fact were prolonged attempts to rub off the Gentle Leader. At one point she threw herself on the ground and began digging at it with all four feet like a human two year-old throwing a tantrum. I don't expect we'll use it often: it was mostly to get her through meeting four new dogs in close quarters. (Well, actually she's met Blue before, and one dog missed the first class, so two new dogs.)

Nancy struggled last night with the same problems I've had in the class: it's harder to train us than it is the dog. Old  habits are deeply ingrained into both of us by now. And when my dog growls and starts lunging toward someone else's precious pet, my instincts are NOT to say sweetly, "Now Annie, look at this cute toy over here..." My instincts are to jerk the leash and drag her away from a dog fight. Nancy is hardwired to say, "Good Girl!" when Annie has completed a task (when she is actually supposed to 'release' the dog first.) So we both go around and around, repeating the same old mistake when we've been gently reminded by our trainer just minutes before to do something else entirely...

In the middle of all of this, the owner of the black dog is young and has a timid dog, so aggression is not foremost on her mind, and Nancy and I were distracted by the trainer or something else going on, and I became aware that Annie was stalking the black dog on a loose leash. Instead of panicking, I sat there and watched, at the ready: she sniffed him, he sniffed her, and I said, "good girl!" and she came back to us. We ARE making progress.

We were just practicing 'sit'. Our trainer uses a hand signal, and whenever I use it, she's always correcting me. I didn't think about it much--I've just always had a lazy 'sit' hand signal. I was trying to show Nancy this morning the 'proper' sit hand signal and it finally came home to me: I can't roll my thumb to a 45 degree angle from my hand and arch it with my fingers laid out flat. Hand won't do it.

*    *    *

I am working on a piece I found on my hard-drive. I love the beginning. Unfortunately that's all there is to the piece: the beginning. It just...stopped. It was one of those moment when a moody description of a state of mind wrote itself on my page, but I either did not know or was unwilling to admit where the story was going from there. Sometimes writing fiction is remarkably like psychotherapy.* Sometimes I can pick these pieces up later and weave them into something else, and sometimes they just lie there, dead-ended and wasted. We'll see. I have pieces I have worked on, abandoned, worked on again months or years later... And I have pieces I wrote all in one burst of ambition and have never touched since. But working with them again helps me remember what drove me to abandon my short story career that was flourishing a few years ago.

They were all exploring essentially the same theme; and I have at this point an arbitrary count of 26 and every one of them are either about women or dogs. (So I titled the working copy Women and Dogs.) Another element of each story is the sense of being out-of-sync. To the point that while the writing still impresses me and I am awed by the work...taken altogether, there is something sad about them. This isn't necessarily bad, but it's not what my reading audience (whoever those people may be) expects from me. (As if tailoring my writing for an imaginary audience would be at all useful, at this point in my life.)

Also there is that messy truth vs fiction mess that every writer (I assume) struggles with. I gave myself permission to use my life as the raw ingredients of realistic stories, and permission as well to elaborate, lie, embroider...expand... There is an observation made in one of my stories that I wrote in 2008 that stops me every time I read it. I think, that has to be true because I would never make that up, it's just not me and at the same time...I have NO memory of the reality of that. (And then I wonder, just how much of my life have I forgotten?)

 

*My favorite example of this is a piece published in Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs about doing the dishes. I have rarely fought so hard with a piece of writing as I did with that one. It was extremely personal and embarrassing to admit, and I remember at one point throwing something at the wall because of the tension I was fighting. the piece itself is funny and light-hearted, but it was excruciating to write.

 

Annie is balled up on the couch, napping while she waits for Nancy to go to work. Annie is becoming a work dog. When she stays home with me she barks frantically at every passing pedestrian. This has become so pronounced that last night we took Ilah out to dinner at a local restaurant and then drove around on the river tour, admiring the heights of our local rivers (not surprisingly there are three of them) and Nancy sat in the back seat and growled every time she saw a dog. "We hate those," she muttered under her breath. The dogs were both at home. Annie does not bark at work. I'm not sure what she does. Greets customers.  Discusses quantum physics with the cat.

Up until a minute ago Riley was outside, basking in the sunshine and delightful weather. He came in, probably to check on his breakfast. Annie wakes up, dashes outside, does her morning work and then goes directly to the laundry room to await her breakfast. We now feed her in various dispensers that require her to ramble around the house, nosing her dispensers into the walls and other barriers so she has to work for her food because if we put it in a dish she eats it in 30 seconds or less and comes back for more. For a while she would come looking for Riley's food, but it appears he found a way to discourage that.

And right about here I find myself thinking, The cat is...  I still miss the surly little bugger, not in a grieving, painful way, but out of habit. For almost twenty years the cat was always somewhere. I would not force him to return to a life that had become gradually intolerable as he aged and sickened, but I do miss that independent companionship.

Today not only am I a disillusioned and disgruntled writer, I appear to be growing a sty in my eye. I thought at first it had magically healed this morning, but, not so much. So I am both bitter and annoyed. Tonight we have our first obedience class, in which we will see if Annie can control herself around other dogs long enough to learn anything. We have been working with her. 

So. Another example of the unpublished and unappreciated works of the Unknown Writer. Short, SHORT fiction.

 

Sleep

 

            I was laying here in my bed last night—it must have been three o’clock in the morning—when I caught myself thinking about what an asshole you must be to treat your dog the way you do. I couldn’t sleep because your dog was howling. You dog howls every night. You probably think the entire neighborhood is just used to that sound. We have infinite patience with your training process which so far, by my rough calculations, has taken about three years.

 

            You would be wrong.

 

            I frankly don’t care what your dog has or hasn’t learned by now.

 

            What I care about is that he howls all night.

 

            You must have nerves of steel to ignore the anguish in that dog’s cries.

 

            I don’t.

 

            I don’t leave my dog outside all night for exactly that reason. I brought my dog inside. You probably don’t even know I have a dog. That’s because he doesn’t howl. He hardly ever barks. I trained my dog. Every household on your block has a dog: yours is the only one that howls. So frankly, none of us are all that impressed with you.

 

            We would steal your dog and give him to a new home with people who actually give a damn about a dog, but we’re afraid the silence would wake you up.

 

            But you know what? I’ve been lying here in this blessed silence for about an hour now and you haven’t even turned on a light.

 

            There are no police at my door.

 

            I’m beginning to think that by the time you realize your dog is gone, my brother is going to be half-way to Florida with his new dog. Which used to be your old dog. But you know what? My brother and I decided, about four-thirty this morning, that some people just don’t deserve to own a dog, and you’re one of them.

 

            My brother was going back to Florida anyway. He lives there.

 

            God, it’s quiet.

 

            A person could just drift off to sleep in a peaceful neighborhood like this.