I am going to have lunch with my sister and her husband today. They live in North Carolina, are here for a long weekend to watch my niece graduate from high school and touch noses with the family.I’m looking forward to it.

I am sitting here in a heavier shirt, jeans and a denim jacket. I have no idea what the temperature is, but the burst of 80s weather we were having apparently blew away in the rainstorms yesterday. I steam-cleaned the carpets yesterday to evict the eau-de-dog (not to mention the chocolate dog tracks on what is essentially a mint green carpet) and now I live in a greenhouse. Between the humidity and the damp carpets, everything feels damp.

Annie’s classes are going well. We learned a new command this week, ‘park it’, and once again it felt as if Annie already knew it, she was just waiting for us to learn. (That, or she’s really, really smart, which is entirely possible.) However the great Dane puppy returned to class and storms were brewing in the wind and all of the dogs were excitable. Annie really, really wanted to school the Dane. At one point  they engaged in a little across-the-aisle name-calling. It takes everything I have not to tense up and jerk her away from other dogs as soon as I see one because I don’t have sufficient faith in my own abilities to read my dog and her reactions.  So while we are doing well with our commands, we could improve following commands with distractions, and we are really taking our classes to socialize and crowd/stranger-proof ourselves, and while we are making progress, we are not there yet. So we’ve decided to take intermediate obedience again. Perhaps we’ll just spend our shared lives going to intermediate obedience classes once a week. 

I’ve closed the windows. It’s not even 60 degrees on the back fence (which is a climate zone all of its own.) I still need to put on socks, although I did comb my hair.

Speaking of hair. Most of my front hair is white (I understand the back is more mixed. I can’t see it.) My white hair is thicker, sproingier, and–this is taking some adaptation–dryer than my brown hair was. So it appears that I have more of it, frothing like sea-foam all over my head. And some time has passed and it’s morphed from its original shape and it occurred to me about a week ago that…it’s not really short, any more. It’s not long: it’s just not…neatly trimmed. I can feel it on the back of my neck.

My one girly girl passion, lifelong, has been for long hair. I am, unfortunately, not blessed with the kind of hair that looks good long. I would need more extensions than nature-given hair to pull that off–but every once in a while I feel obliged to try again.

Yesterday I steam-cleaned the carpets. It was in the high seventies. Steam-cleaning is humid work, even when there isn’t a thunderstorm gathering around you. I glanced in the mirror and I had this haystack of wild half-curls teeming all over my head, it was crawling down my neck, hanging in my eyes, and I thought (once more:)

There’s a reason why cut this stuff off. 

But, I don’t have time right now. Need to meet my sister.

While wearing shoes.

I found this among my neglected photo files.

I have an obscure fascination with cows, which I believe I’ve been boring about before. I like cows. Grazing. In fields surrounded by secure fencing. I have no particular fondness for cows in any shared spaces. These cows live in Alabama between Haleyville and Russellville. It was hot. They were cooling their bellies. This is as far into a discussion of cow water as I choose to go.

Today I am putting off cleaning carpet because a.) I cleaned carpet yesterday an something small and black came home, ran outside to dig somewhere, coated her paws with black mud and then trotted (repeatedly) through my still-damp carpetting. This has become something of a habit, between the two of us. I could touch that up, and then I could actually finish the job I started.

I also like goats. (Same conditions.)

  I should crop the top off that photograph and probably will. I forgot, just now. These goats live in Haleyville, just around the corner from my Dad.

My father is in his hospital in Florence, right now. He has a UTI. He also has a brain tumor, but the doctors seem to feel it’s fairly irrelevant. Perhaps we all have them and just don’t notice them. My mother noticed hers, which is why when I appraised my siblings of his health, I tried to go carefully. DON’T PANIC! EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL, BUT… He was having difficulty walking, which could stem from any number of problems. He had a stroke several years ago that affected one side of his body more than the other. Now he has this benign little tumor the size of a quarter (I have no idea how they know it’s ‘benign’ since they’ve only photographed it with a MRI, but…it’s not the problem.) He has some heart problems. He has some residual stroke damage. He has replacement valves in his heart with expired warranties. He has prostate cancer. He is 87. His penalty for going to the hospital and bothering everyone is a sentence of re-newed physical therapy to work on his walking, since the diagnosis seems to be…you have to do it.

Like everything else, the more you do it the better you are.

I wish the very best of luck to whatever bright-eyed optomistic physical therapist gets to deliver that message to my Dad because…he’s not going to like it.

I don’t like it much myself. 

This is Allie Upside Down. She was a toddler here. She’s..give or take, six now. She’s a girly girl. My grandmother would have loved her: if you put all three of her grandchildren into a blender and ran it for an hour, you wouldn’t have as much attention to fashion and accessories as she could have had with Allie. She’s a little dress-up doll.

I have reunited with Flickr. I have a page, myownfineself49093 where I have posted a hodge-podge of photographs (76: one was there from 2008, and the rest I loaded yesterday.)

It is so damp today it’s hard to tell if it’s raining or just hanging in the air. Great day to clean carpets.  (On the other side of that argument, it’s a great deal to baste in the barn-smell of a shared life with animals, which the steam cleaner temporarily removes.)

I have no great insights into the world today.

And very soon it will be time to make lunch.

This morning lurking in my email was a notice from Poetry and Writers Magazine entitled “58 Writing Contest Deadlines”. I have  been rummaging among my unpublished works, bringing some of them to my writers group(s) for discussion and response. I should publish some of them.

Yes. Right.

*snaps fingers*

I simultaneously believe two things, both tucked firmly side-by-side in the same mind. They don’t even fight with each other until it comes time to submit something. I believe a.) I am a gifted writer, that writing is the reason I was put on this earth and an integral and significant part of my personal identity and that anything I write has value, purpose and should immediately be published, and b.) I write esoteric, obscure, extremely personal and probably boring stuff no one else on this planet would find even remotely interesting.   

And I believe my dogs are more interesting than any other dogs alive today, and I believe I will just magically begin losing weight without effort tomorrow.

So I opened the email and trolled around the writing contest sites. It’s amazing how convinced you can be that you have written something wonderful, meaningful, significant and extremely publishable versus how quickly you can review each contest and say, “Nope…probably not that one…doesn’t fit…wouldn’t get my style…” fifty-eight times.

So how many rejections are pending?

0.

How many submissions have I sent?

0.

You can’t fail if you don’t try.

 

Here we see the beet field (left) and the carrot field (right) in their first rainstorm.

I should probably explain our gardening system first. Last year Nancy took up tub-gardening. She raised beets, squash, zuchini, brussel sprouts, potatoes and several herbs in artfully-arranged tubs in our back yard.

Last year we started the season with one dog, added Noomi, lost Noomi, and eventually added Annie.

Annie is an avid gardener. She harvested her own tomatoes.

And then she took up gardening full-time.

This would be the garden she dug for Riley. As you can see, it’s nearly the perfect size. He’s coming along well, I think.

She also stood in the blue tubs and dug her way to the bottom. This accounts for the decorative fencing around the tops of the tubs. On top of that Nancy coiled a drip hose and ran water through it to create ‘rain’.

I am sometimes fascinated by peculiar things.

The beets and carrots may be a little hard to see. She planted the seeds saturday. This is the beet field and the herb garden from last  year, below:

And her pride and joy, squash blossoms.

 

My father is in the hospital in Alabama. I called his room: no answer. I’ve called almost everyone I know in Alabama, Indiana and Michigan, and I have determined that we don’t know very much about his condition. I have called Jenell 35 times today.

So the neighbors came home to use the back yard (theirs) which sent Annie into a frenzy and she had to run outside to throw herself against the fence. I called: she was too far gone to hear me. So I went out to get her, and half-way across the lawn I heard my phone ring…

Yup.

Jenell.

Hurried back inside…

I’ve called her five times now. Either she doesn’t answer or the phone tells me she’s talking to someone else. I am sure there are a lot of people for her to talk to.

I hate modern communication.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I first mentioned to notion that I might retire, many of my friends looked at me, smiled sympathetically and said, “Oh, I just don’t know what I’d do with myself if I had all of that time.” 

I said, “I’m going to write a book.”

And I do write, quite diligently, actually. I have a few other stopgap measures for filling that overwhelming burden, spare time, but I have nowhere near as much of the stuff as you might think.

What I do–often for hours on end–is look for things.

The stuff I had in my hand a few minutes ago. My car keys, which appear to be The Most Mobile Objects I own. That Thing (if only I could remember the word for it) that was right here just before the last time I cleaned my desk. The sissors which, for the fifteen years I lived in my house in Jackson were always in the second drawer to the left in the kitchen. (Not sure where they were in the house in Walnut street, but then, I was dating heavily then and I was almost never there. I’ve only lived here 7 years, six of which I have been home all day most of the time, but they move around here. I can never find the things.)

Not all that long ago I took some old negatives that would not fit my scanner to Norman Camera to have them transferred to CD. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to this process and it cost me more than I had casually figured. I have two CDs from that project. Somewhere. 

The problem appears to be (as it always appears to be) that I cleaned my desk (again) sometime between the last time I had them and the day I decided I wanted them again, which, as it happens, was today.

It would appear I put them somewhere ‘safe’.

I should get over that habit.

Okay. So I didn’t put them ‘away’–I put them in a temporary ‘safe’ place WIWFTL (where I would find them later.)

Where would that be?

It eventually comes down to the Eternal Hoarder’s Quiz:

What good does it do you to have if you can’t find it?

If you know it ‘has to be’ somewhere on this desk and you’ve been looking through the stuff on this desk for two and half hours, does that suggest a.) it’s in the wrong place, b.) your logic is bad, c.) you have too much stuff on your desk and d.) you really don’t need it that badly.

Maybe you threw them away.

Complete with the original negatives.

How long has it been since anyone looked at them?

You don’t even know who most of the people are.

You copied the four photos that were most important to you.

I don’t where they are.

I hope wherever they are, they’re having a party.  

 

Saturday morning has arrived with it’s ever-changing medley of lawn mowers, street traffic, chain saws and barking dogs. Annie struggles. It says in her contract that we should be alerted to the menacing arrival of the Johova’s Witness guy peddling Awake! throughout this hell-bound community, but we yell at her whenever she starts barking. He was on our porch!

His hands touched our doorknob!

Cheryl opened the door and thanked him for a free religious tract!!!

“Try not to eat the Witnesses,” Cheryl said as he hung her her lunging, barking dog from her hand by the collar.

I wasn’t going to eat him, I wanted to lick him, Annie pouted, but the man backed quickly away, out of reach.

“You’re right,” Cheryl said for not apparent reason to Annie, “that was mean of me.” Cheryl seems oddly pleased with herself this morning.

The blooms of the neighbor’s honeysuckle bush, which lean affectionately over our fence, are beginning to fade. I was going to show you a photograph of the blooms, but Xanga is refusing to download right now.

Nope. Not doin’ it.

I have this collection of ‘fiction’ pieces (most of them based on my life) which are all 6 pages long or less. Not really essays, not really stories… Not necessarily funny. I keep telling myself I’m going to submit them to various magazines and quarterlies, but I usually just end up writing another one. I would post them on Xanga, but most of the places I have studied for submissions require that any pieces they accept not be published anywhere else first.

So in addition to short pieces and the never-ending novel with no niche, I write blog entries and then sit down and write to myself in my journal.

When Ilah came here she was taking a handful of medications and she was struggling with a number of annoying, inconvenient bodily responses to life. Nancy looked over her medications and their side-effects and said, “Well no wonder she has dry mouth…  No wonder she runs to the bathroom so often…” One of the problems we detected was that she would hobble out to the kitchen to ‘get some Pepto’, and the next day she was taking something else, and it seemed reasonable to Nancy and me that if you took one medication one day, you would have a bodily response the next: Ilah, however, doesn’t always remember what she took yesterday, so she was bouncing back and forth between constipation and the utter lack of it. We said, ‘stop taking that stuff and let your body settle down’. And Nancy gave her a little book to write down everything she takes each day so she can keep track.

Nancy said, “Cheryl, do you have a little book my mother can use?”

I have boxes of little books. I gave her one.

So fast-forward three or four months. Ilah came to lunch one day and handed me a little slip of paper. “I found this,” she said. “I’d like you to put it up somewhere.”

I took it. Gazed upon it.

She said, “It was in that little book Nancy gave me to keep track of my meds. She must have put it in there for me to find.”

The paper is a blog entry about Riley a little after he came to live with us. It’s about a dog staring at a gate and  his impressions of what his new human thinks about that. I wrote it. I probably also printed it out and stuck it in a little book. The entry has nothing to do with Ilah or Nancy. Ilah didn’t even know which dog it was about, so I suspect she didn’t have the vaguest idea why Nancy would leave that particular message for her to find.

Because she didn’t.

But Ilah found it, and presumes it has some special meaning (even if it eludes her.) And now she wants it framed and conspicuously hung where we all can see it.

All of that kicks me back about ten years when we self-published Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs and proudly gave everyone we knew a copy and Ilah never remarked on it and finally I asked, “Did you like it?”

She said, “Not really.” And then she shrugged. “Did you want me to lie?”

(Well, now that you asked… When I take a piece to my writers group for help working out the kinks–no. When I have just published my very first book, which has been my goal and sole focus of ambition since I was thirteen…yeah, go ahead and lie if you have to.)

So it’s not as if she is a fan of my writing (or as if that particular blog entry were a particularly good example of that.)

I am not quite sure what to do with it. I put it in a picture frame, but she doesn’t want it in her room. Her suggestion was that I tape it to one of our Alice Lewis prints that hangs in the kitchen. (Something like tacking a grocery list to your Van Gogh.)

Sometimes life is just a series of quirky little mysteries.

Annie is in the dining room sneak-boofing at something in the window. She can’t bark because the gray machine slams her eardrums, so she boofs. Sometimes she growls. What she does not do is bark hysterically over and over again until she works herself into such a fit that she’s wired and growly all day.

I have, however, learned something else about the gray anti-bark machine: it is completely ineffective on Riley, who is a mere 10 pounds heavier. He weighs 52 pounds, so he is not a large dog by most standards. Apparently the larger the dog, the less effective the machine is. I learned this from our trainer last night. I am trying to process this information, but I am failing. What possible relationship is there between size and sound? This processing is complicated by the fact that when Annie barks loudly in the Conservatory, I get a blast to one ear. It’s…uncomfortable. Startling, I think is the most accurate assessment. Once I thought I heard a sound, but for the most part she barks and this blast of pressure hits my right ear. One could make a case for hysterical hearing, I suppose. The sound is supposed to be too high for human ears to hear, and I don’t have any reason to believe my hearing is any more acute or  has a higher range than anyone else’s. (Well: Nancy’s or Ilah’s, certainly.)  And I have only experienced this phenomenon in my chair in the Conservatory, which is some distance (probably not 25 feet) from the machine. It doesn’t happen all of the time. I suppose it’s possible that it’s a delayed response to Annie’s bark itself, except I never experienced it before the machine came… Anyway. My point is, I weigh considerably more that 52 pounds and it affects me. It has NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on Riley. If he ran into the dining room to bark the mailman away he barks. And barks, and barks. Get thee to your little red, white and blue truck and drive away, you infidel  The machine was firing red bolts of light at him all of the time.

On the other hand, Riley doesn’t bark all that much. He hardly ever barked at all before Annie came. We are hoping he will adjust back to his pre-Annie level of barking and all will be well.

Annie is the star of her class. (I still can’t process that.) She is very smart and she adores our trainer and she picks up commands almost immediately. We are working on one that doesn’t really give her that little jolt of happiness previous commands have supplied–we’re working on ‘wait’, which runs contrary to Annie’s basic nature–but she picked it up quickly when Holly worked with her. We have three dogs in our class, Blue, who is a big bubba of a pit bull, happy, happy dog, still struggling with puppymind, and a black lab-mix puppy named Diesel. Diesel is a beautiful dog, but he has anxiety issues. And then there’s our little black rhino-butt, Annie. Hi hi hi, let’s go, let’s do this!  

And this is the thing. Annie is less reactive around other dogs. We were walking through PetSmart last night to get to our class and this young couple was walking their half-grown cat on a leash. (Really.) Annie saw it first: her tail started wagging furiously, Come on, come, let’s go meet this cat But for all intents and purposes, Annie likes cats. I averted the meeting, not having any idea how the cat felt about meeting a dog. We watched a min pin get loose in the store, but we just watched. And Blue took off at a dead run to greet Annie and she just…greeted him. He’s been in several of her classes and she’s greeted him before, so I didn’t panic (I didn’t have time) but it went very smoothly. We generally avoid other dogs in PetSmart, but she has definitely calmed down.

And she has no obvious holes in her body, which mean she has finally mastered playing with Riley. (Or to rephrase that, she has finally learned when to quit playing with Riley: that when he says, ‘stop, I’m tired of this’, it’s actually time to stop. There are very few dog commands I intuitively understand, but being an older sister, I recognized that one right away.)

We are actually going to go for the Good Citizenship Certificate. With Annie.

Right now, however, the hysterical barking kick dog down the street is regaling us with some sort of concert of dissatisfaction. We are trying, trying to be good, but it is SO HARD to be calm when right down the street one of our kind has completely lost it!

Now someone else has joined the chorus. Some hound, perhaps.

Boof. 

Now that I have sparked a spike in the sale of the Indoor Bark Control machine… Further reports:

Annie still barks at the window. She does not bark as much. She rarely escalates. She often abandons her barking and comes back to chew on something in the Conservatory where we are. It does not stop the behavior: it inhibits it.

This is remarkably untrue for Riley. Someone walked past our home today with a shorn Pomeranian, which is against all rules known to man AND dog, and he ran into the dining room and barked and barked and barked. The red light flashed: he barked. He didn’t even appear to notice. 

So: worth a try? Definitely.

100% effective: apparently not.

Also the packaging says not the run the machine all of the time. I have no idea why. We haven’t taken the battery out since we got it because the battery is a pain in the ass to install (this could easily be a quirk of our particular machine.) Maybe intermittent use has some value we are unaware of.

Ilah is having a bad morning. She’s “got it in the neck”, her legs are weak and she’s feeling puny. She needed an emergency Tylenol. I was malingering in bed when I heard, “Nan-ceee…”

Nancy was in the kitchen. Nancy doesn’t hear all that well and Ilah is 95, nearly 96. Her projection is puny.

So I rolled out of bed and was grabbing for some clothes when Nancy’s phone rang. It was me.

(“Why am I calling Nancy?” I asked myself. “I’m a little busy, here…” Because the phone in Ilah’s room is in my name.)

So half-dressed I raced to Ilah’s room (9 steps down the hall, limping) and she had colapsed in her chair.

“I’ve got it in the neck, my legs don’t work. I need a Tylenol. Where’s Nancy?”

“She’s in the kitchen.”

“I can’t hear you.” She waves her hand regally, helplessly toward her bed. “Could you get me my hearing aids–they’re in a box. Bring the whole box.”

I fetch her hearing aids, which are in the box right beside her bed and which she almost never puts in until after she’s had her morning bath, which renders every conversation we have before 11:30 useless: she asks a question, I answer, she blinks and then points to her ear and shakes her head.

I have a thought: put them in in the morning when you get up, like I put on my glasses. There is some kind of issue with her hearing aids. It changes periodically, but there is always an issue. I suspect, if I were being fair about it, that hearing aids are problematic for everyone. 

So I fetch the hearing aids and wait patiently while she installs the batteries, puts on her glasses and says, “Where’s Nancy?”

“She’s in the kitchen.”

“I called and called and nobody come…”

“She can’t hear you.” But I can. You called once, and I came. I’m standing right here.

I go and get her a glass of water and two Tylenol. I am muttering in my head about pain that is so excruciating that it could be resolved with two Tylenol, but I am never a fountain of pure joy first thing in the morning. I catch Nancy up on the adventures in the bed room.

Ilah takes her pills. She needs to ‘rest’.

About fifteen minutes later Nancy and I hear this weak, tired old lady’s voice say, “I’ve got to go to the bathroom…”

It is hard to determine how much of what Ilah says out loud is intended for a listening audience and how much is personal rumination.

One morning, sitting alone in the kitchen eating her breakfast, she said, “I wished I’d have died.”

“What?” I called.

She blinked and pointed to her ears.

At lunch she told me an amusing story about something that happened 50 years ago, when she embarrassed herself so badly she wished she had died. “I was thinking about that this morning,” she said. 

She’s had her breakfast, now. She’s going back to her room. “I’m feeling better, now,” she says. Actually her report was more detailed than that–her neck is still stiff, but her legs don’t hurt as much, and she doesn’t know what caused any of it.

“Prob’ly old age,” Nancy says.

She has her door open still. Either her room is too warm (I’m not sure there is a ‘too warm’ in her world) or she anticipates needing to send further updates on her condition in the near future. 

I record all of this with one singular thought, which is the thought I continue to repeat, like a mantra, whenever I deal with Ilah. The thought is, I’m sixty-four. 

I am unlikely to survive to the age of ninety-five–almost everything I have done with my life has pretty much guaranteed I won’t–but I have hereditary access to long-lived genes, and nothing is more abhorent to me than the thought of transitioning through the end-of-life in the care of someone who resents taking care of me. I want her to feel welcome here in our home–her home. I want her to feel safe and secure and well-cared for. It’s not even a deal–I’ll take good care of her if you’ll find someone to take good care of me–it’s a personal value. She deserves to feel loved and well-cared-for.

Thank you for absorbing a little personal steam.

Spring should be along now any time. Even in Michigan. It is a bright, sunny day today. According to the back fence it is about 57 degrees out there, which is warmer than the forecast predicted. Both dogs are in the house this afternoon, although they come and go. Like the pots, which were recently de-shedded in preparation for the chickens, we are all waiting for the frost date.

Ilah announced this morning that she’s been seeing white ‘snow’ falling all morning. I suggested they might be petals from the ornamental pear, and she agreed they were petals: the ornamental pear, however, is naked of blooms and has been since Saturday. And she outlined all of the blooming white trees in the surrounding neighborhood, calculated against wind velocity and distance, and it appears there is no apparent source for these petals that are still falling down upon us. I guess we’ll have to move.

I shouldn’t be sarcastic. I try not to be. I don’t know where the petals are coming from either, I just chose not to worry about it. It’s a little like the bird feeder we hung at her window. We discussed it. We talked about the price of bird feed versus the invasion of the grackles, which stopped our bird feeding activities years ago… I bought a sock of finch feed on sale and brought it home, Nancy hung it, and we said, “There–something for her to look at when the word-search puzzles get too boring.”

She called me a few days ago. Hurry, hurry, come. Oh, sorry–it’s gone. And she pointed at the feed sock. There is a bird who comes to see her but she can’t tell what bird it is because it comes around 4:30 and lands in the shadows and she can’t see it clearly enough to know what it is. So now we have the continuing mystery of the Phantom PM Bird. It has a schedule but no identity. If she gets up out of her self-ejecting chair and races out to get one of us on her walker, the bird flies away.

It’s “dark”.

There is some sort of ever-darkening birdwork going on here.

I ask myself, just how much effort does it take for you to stand up, walk to her bedroom and look through the window at her bird feeder–which you bought, by the way, and made your partner hang for her mother’s amusement. Is that really too much to ask? Really? You gave it to her: why wouldn’t she assume you’re interested in birds?

I think it’s a house finch. Which I have said.  There are enough of them around here. The bird book describes them as ‘sparrows dipped in strawberry sauce’. They can appear ‘dark’.

But we don’t know for sure. Just like we don’t know where the white petals are falling from.

And I think to myself, Maybe you should leave that bed room once in a while. Try sitting on the porch. But then, the porch is cold for me, and I can’t tolerate the tropical sauna that doubles as her bed room.

From the porch she could keep better watch on the people in the brown house across the street.

The people in the brown house across the street are not the same people who lived in the brown house across the street when she came here in late January. ”They moved,” she tells me. It’s clear she wonders where I’ve been.

I don’t care. I’d never met the people who had just moved in when she came. The only reason I knew the people who lived there for 2 1/2 years before that was because their dog periodically went on a walkabout. Her name was Chloe. She was a beautiful blue pit bull. She nearly stopped my heart cold the first time I met her: I was walking Riley on his leash and I heard toenails on the pavement, turned, and this rock-jawed, muscled gladiator was trotting up to greet us… She out-weighed my dog by 20-30 pounds, and he’s a lover, not a fighter.

Hi, hi hi, Riley said.

Hi, hi, hi, Chloe said. You live here, don’t you–I live across the street… 

I‘m walking my woman right now, Riley said, I have two of them. They put me on a string and I drag them around the block.

Cool, Chloe said, I think I’ll sniff her. Hey, she smells good. See you around….

Chloe taught me to temper assumptions about appearance with a little reality. Once again.

The wind is blowing outside the Conservatory window. It seems oddly quiet, since the windows are all closed because it’s colder than it looks out there. All manner of tiny leaves and petals and organic matter is fluttering by in the wind. Dandelion seeds, for instance. 

I could get in the car and drive around the neighborhood, looking for shedding white trees.

I could lobby to keep the chickens in the pachysandra patch between Ilah’s bedroom window and the neighbor’s fence. She could watch the hens all day. They’re bigger than house finches, and we could control their schedule. She could keep track of where they lay their eggs. She could come flying out of her room on her walker whenever the dogs start barking at the chickens.

There are four of them. The chickens. Or, there will be four of them. They haven’t come to live with us, yet. Nancy’s son is brooding them while we figure out how to build a chicken house from a shed, a backyard, a garden, two dogs and and Nancy’s mother’s word search schedule.

Chickens are, oddly enough, the only creature I know intimately from infancy to plate, including that difficult and unpleasant transition from living to dead, plucked, cleaned, and cooked. All of the women responsible for my continued existence at one time or another raised and killed their own chickens. Now my partner wants to try. Every time I think of it, my mind shifted immediately to the over-sized raccoon living on the stairs in Gray Gardens. 

Yeah, those old women were characters all right.

We found all three of them–and two dogs–buried under these piles of white blossom petals. We have NO idea where those petals came from…