It’s mother’s day. Nancy is in the kitchen cooking. I can hear her (literally, I can) murmuring, I love to cook. It’s like my mother’s day gift to myself–I’m going to cook. It works out poorly for me: I have not been conscripted to slice, dice or ‘blend’ anything, but I have been called to the kitchen to test the filling for tiramisu, the cheese for the salad and some sort of fancy olive I have not yet placed in the menu. Poor me. Experimental taster. So in truth, it’s a wonderful mother’s day for both of us and I’m not even a mother.

Peace continues to reign. Annie is horning in on my experimental taster job, but otherwise has remained fairly low key and calm. Right now she’s taking a spit bath in the kitchen doorway.

Riley, as usual, is outside lounging in his hole. This is his kind of weather.

I read an article written by a vet on Yahoo! this morning titled, “Why Does My Dog Lean Against Me?”

?

When we were very young and dogless and semi-Murphy trained (Murphy was give or take 10 when we met her and an extremely well-trained dog) we missed her when she went back to live with Ranee and we went dog-searching for the perfect Murphy-like companion. We drove all the way to Cloverfield or something like that Indiana, which is west of Indy, to answer an ad for the perfect dog. He was released into the run so we could interact with him, and he emptied his entire bladder on my left leg. And then he took off running and ran for forty-five minutes. We could not get the time of day from this dog. In the meantime the shelter woman was introducing us to every other dog she had there (although in truth, the dog we fell in love with was hers) and finally Riley had completed his run and he came up to me, wagged his tail, positioned himself between my knees and leaned against me.

We paid his bail, attached a leash and brought him home.

According to the article on Yahoo!, ‘…some trainer will tell you it’s a sign of dominance, some will tell you it has something to do with social skills and boundaries…” The vet himself concluded, “I think it means he likes you and wants to be close to you.”

If I have any objections to Annie, it is that she only cuddles with me when she asleep in bed, or she wants to rub off her Gentle Leader. If I grab her and start playing with her, she mouths me. Or she flea-bites, which is a quick little pinch that collects only the tiniest amount of skin. Hurts. Just a little, and certainly there is no pain intended, but still.

Watch this, Riley says, and he comes up to me, self-positions himself between my legs or up against the side of my chair and he leans against me and I am putty in his paws. He can do no wrong. 

The six-inch forest is wilting. What is that? They are all (I’m going to make a wild guess here) maples, and because they are volunteers and because no one wants them where they are, I’m just going to assume further they are Norway maples, which in English means ‘tall weeds’. What could they possibly have to wilt about?

Nancy is still cooking in the kitchen. I believe we are having grilled ribs, mac and cheese, and a kicky salad with tiramisu as dessert. Perhaps the ribs are for a different meal.

“I hate cleaning up after myself,” she mutters, but I offered to do it and she laughed. “I’m fine,” she says, “I just don’t like it as much.”

I varnished my gourds, which I have neglected of late. I discovered you really can varnish over metallic wax. Surprised me, but hey.

And I ordered another Chet and Bernie mystery from Amazon.

Annie is growing hair on her throat. (She’s never had any throat hair for as long as we’ve had her. When we first got her her throat was all scratches and scabs.) She has more hair everywhere than she’s ever had before. Last winter we had to put her in her coat to take her outside because she was half-naked. However, lessons learned from the laundry: the first time I washed her blanket, I found this tiny forest of little black hairs floating on top of the water, every one of them shorter than my eye lashes, and I had to call her to see if she had any lashes left. They are her coat. The hairs on her coat are shorter than my eyelashes. (Why yes, I do have long, lush lashes.) Her coat shines, but it is the shortest dog coat I’ve ever seen. Riley, by comparison, not only has a longer coat,he appears to have an underforest and then apparently even a coat below that. (This is why she plays rougher, harder and with more teeth than he ever has, but she’s the one with the regularly recurring holes, gashes and lesions. It would take a serious bite to take a gouge out of Riley.) 

  Riley and his coat of many layers playing possum in a game with Annie. His hindquarters are in one of his resting holes. Riley did not dig holes until Annie came along, so the exact ownership of the hole may be more a matter of possession than of creation. She starts them, he nests in them.

When she first came to live with us, she reminded me of a tank. Or a hippo. Now I’m so used to her she seems normal and other dogs looks kind of spindly to me. 

Happy Mother’s Day. 

  

 

 

Most of my life I have been a cat person. Cat people nap. When a cat person is caught napping, the cat says, Fine. Here, I’ll curl up in your lap and help.

Recently I was dragged into a conversion of sorts. First I spent some time with Murphy, who convinced me dog are wonderful beings (and they love to ride in cars!) and then we got Riley and then–because one of us just really doesn’t understand the term ‘enough’–we got Annie.

Today is Saturday. It’s cooler. The world outside is kind of gray with threatening. It’s a lay-on-the-couch sort of day.

So Nancy laid on the couch, stretched out, and decided to take a nap.

For Nancy to lay on the couch, Annie had to get up.

So now Annie is up.

‘Up’ for a cat means ‘up-right’ or ‘not lying down’. ‘Up for a dog means ready, happy and busily on the way to something. (We have no idea what. It doesn’t matter: we’re UP.)

And the Conservatory couch is a low couch. This is the exact height of the Conservatory couch: Annie, standing with all four feet on the floor, can nose-kiss a person lying on the couch. Even face-lick, if necessary.

She can munch them. Munching is a dog thing: it’s sort of a cross between biting and nuzzling, probably a grooming tool. It’s hard to sleep when you’re being munched.

Oh, dear: a herd of motorcycles just passed the house. Ordinarily there would be dogs hysterically barking, but apparently the machine extends into parts of the back yard. You have to love this machine.

Anyway. Between four face-washing, a short tongue bath, two bounce-ons and some dedicated munching, Nancy has given up on her nap and is now rattling around in the bathroom.

It’s a lot harder to nap with dogs. Particularly wide-awake, alert, ready-to-go dogs.

We have developed a much deeper appreciation and understanding for the old saw, ‘let sleeping dogs lie’. 

The magic continues.

Riley, who is lounging in a dog-sized hole in the back yard, began barking angrily at something.

Annie roused up off the couch, releasing a low growl, and slunk into the living room to boof at the front window. She seemed to be picking up steam, egged on by her brother barking in the back yard, and she barked

boofed

thought  about it

growled , deep in her throat

BARKED

and a few minutes later trotted silently into the Conservatory where we are and curled up again on the couch.

I am sure there is some reason why we shouldn’t be using this machine. It’s probably cruel and unusual or will eventually make her go deaf or there is some reason I can’t even think of that makes it bad…but what it appears to do is break that cycle of escalating excitement that she gets into until she’s running around the house like a dervish, barking at everything in sight and flinging herself hysterically against the dining room window.

Annie is calm.

Annie is relaxed.

We are watching in utter amazement.

We discussed getting the outdoor model and putting it by the fence where they most often gather to bark at sidewalk walkers, interlopers and The Thing That Attacks All Life as We Know It, but the outdoor machines have a much larger range (50 feet vs 25 feet.) Neither of us are sure just how long 50 feet is (Nancy might have a clue–I really don’t.) And there are the two chows on the right of us, Jetta and her co-dog on the left of us, Chocolate and the new dog behind us, the bulldog across the street and the dog I haven’t seen yet directly across the street… The chows never bark, so subjecting them to punishing blasts of noise for my dogs barking seemed unkind. I would need to talk to their owner and to Jetta’s mom and dad before we installed the machine.

Nancy said she took Annie to have her nails trimmed Friday morning and Annie’s groomer said she uses a similar devise. (She also shakes cans of pennies. Cans of pennies only work for me as long as I am willing to sit outside behind the dogs with a can of pennies at the ready.)

She also said Annie needs more socialization.

Well, yes she does.

At this exact point in time Annie has no scratches, cuts slices or open wounds from any back yard altercations that these are all from Riley, the dog she lives with. This is a first in all of the time she’s lived with us. She has apparently learned enough social skills to play with her situational brother without bloodshed. Yeah, Annie!

Riley is hard to rile. Well. He’ll growl. He gets testy. Given a change, he then goes off on a scent hunt and ignores his adversary. It takes concentrated in-your-face antagonism to get Riley made enough to fight. She can do it.

Anyway. At this exact point in time Riley is in his hole in the back yard and Annie is here with us on the couch. Riley barks from time to time, but without Annie to get him hyped, he calms down and quits. Annie rarely barks in the house and almost never more than twice (which is apparently what it takes to set off the machine.)

At this exact point in time I could kiss that little gray machine full on it’s little gray lips. 

Last evening Nancy and I were artfully arranged around the television in our customary positions of leisure when the God-awful Horrible Thing That Must Be Barked Away attacked the front of our house. Annie bolted off the couch and charged into to the dining room window where The Thing could best be seen and she said,

               “BARK, bark….

               And then–had there been pins falling somewhere in our home—we could have listened to their music.

               Annie reappeared in the hallway where she was intently nosing something that very clearly should not have been left where it was.

               And then she trotted back into the living room, hopped up on the couch and went back to sleep.

               I have no idea what The Thing did. No more reports on its activity were filed.

               It would appear that after 8 months, several dead ends and bad investments and a dizzying array of pointless human tricks, one small gray $39 box that makes noise I can’t hear when she barks at it may be enough to make her do just exactly that. Stop. Or, perhaps it repels the God-Awful Horrible Thing That Must Be Barked Away, which is fine.

               It works!

               This makes me smile because I had my doubts. I read the packaging. No less than four times the packaging for this box, which works by picking up the dog’s bark on its mike and returning a two second blast of noise in an octave I cannot hear warns:

May not be effective on deaf or hearing-impaired dogs.

               No rocket science involved here. I figured that any devise that needed to warn me four times that a loud noise might not startled a deaf dog might not be functioning at a level of sophistication sufficient to outsmart Annie.

               It would appear I was wrong.

IN 2009 I wrote a post about electronic cigarettes. I have received more comments on that particular post than almost any other. There’s a word for that, which I have forgotten: there are people who troll the Internet, looking for blogging posts that in some vague way mention, allude to or could be construed to allude to a product they are trying to sell, and they then comment on the post and use that comment as a link to create more links that lead to the sale of their product. It has nothing to do with my skills at blogging.

I have a friend who smokes electronic cigarettes, incidentally. As I watch her with her ‘pack’ and her little bag she keeps all of her tools in, I remember: yes, smoking was all about the ritual. I miss the ritual of lighting a cigarette, even after all these years. I knew I would probably never lapse back into smoking the day I gave myself permission to buy a lighter whenever the mood struck. They’re what–a dollar? Maybe two? Nothing compared to the cost of smoking itself. Besides, whenever the urge to ‘slip’ strikes, I just wander on down to the pharmacy and buy another inhaler. Although, truth be told, I still cuddle up next to an honest-to-God smoker in discreetly sniff his exhaust.

Where were we? Nancy, Annie and I went to Annie’s second intermediate obedience class (this round) last night. I took her into the store. We walked up to the classroom, the door opened, and 47 puppies came out. Holly was in front of us before I could even focus my attention, and while Annie was deeply interested in the puppies, Holly kept her distracted from them and focused on us enough to prevent…really, even a growl.

Halfway through our class we switched from a short lead to a 20 foot leash and while I was doing this I dropped the leash altogether and Annie danced across the classroom to greet Diesel, the black lab-mix puppy. He’s about 10 months old, a little on the shy side…everything that sets Annie off. I’m fumbling like an idiot and Holly managed to get to her, but she never really offered to do anything but sniff him. Baby steps, but steps nonetheless.

Nancy talked to the trainers about the barking we have been dealing with, and they suggested an electronic bark inhibitor. It’s a box you set up in a room and when the dog starts to bark, the machine sends out a noise we can’t hear and they won’t like. They’ll learn to associate their barking with the noise and hopefully they’ll stop barking. We’ll try it. A few months back I bought a citrus spray collar for her to kick back some of her barking. It never worked. I took it back. But it didn’t work because it literally didn’t spray any citrus.

Besides, Annie likes citrus.

I get frustrated and I forget, but we HAVE made progress. Annie walked around the store with me last night on a loose leash for quite a while instead of jerking and pulling me all of the time. She is a model for ‘sit’ and ‘down’ (doesn’t like ‘stay’ so much.) We played a game where we put our dogs into a sit and them another classmate walked past us, practicing ‘heel’. With a Lickety Stick Annie is a completely focused model for ‘heel’ (or, at the very least, ‘lick’) and she sat and ignored the other classmates walking past her. I was actually surprised at how well she did, particularly because she was tired and specifically she was tired of ‘sit’ and got this bored, ‘what-if-I-just-stand-here-and-ignore-all-of-you’ expression on her face.

‘Sit’? Really? Go ahead, have at it–why don’t you sit?

The problem dog who would have tested all of the progress we have made was unable to attend the class due to an illness in the family. This is both good and bad. Good we don’t have to spend an entire class avoiding bloodshed, bad that we don’t have the obstacle to work through.

So I will say this. If Annie belonged to someone experienced with owning a terrier, she would be a well-behaved dog by now. I can see that in the way she responds to Holly. Either Annie is extremely smart and a quick learner, or we are busily teaching her commands and lessons she’s already learned.The one example that sticks out most clearly in my mind is the hand command for ‘sit’. I had a certain difficulty making my hand do that. So I was standing there, practicing my hand command and I glanced down and Annie was sitting. Watching me with that, “What’s next?” look. I’ll swear she also knew the hand command for ‘down’. She also appears to have a very clear idea what ‘heel’ means (although again, she could be confusing it with ‘lick’.) Nancy and I are taking the lessons. Annie is merely our guide.

Today is the day ‘that thing’ happens. I have no idea what it’s called. All of the grade school children gather up in groups and stride around town, talking as loud as they possibly can. I had no idea this even happened until I retired–I believe Murphy brought it to my attention–but it happens every year, and today is the day. It’s really very exciting: the kids are all talking and as they get closer and closer to the house, their voices get louder and louder… Annie boofed and took off for the back door at a dead run, but when I went out with treats to distract the dogs, they were easy enough to distract. Let’s see, food versus a pack of loud, strange children… Let’s do the food, Riley. 

Okay. An exercise in faith. I have mentioned this before, but Riley loves kids, particularly toddlers. I will probably never test this, but I believe a toddler could poke his eyes, stick their fingers in his ears and wave his head back and forth by sticking their fists in his mouth and he would never harm her. He would be more likely to bite an adult human than a baby. Annie, on the other hand, is not entirely sure of herself around children. They confuse her. They move too fast, which makes her nervous. So Diesel comes to class with two adults and two children, a little girl about six and a boy younger than she is. Both of them immediately wanted to pet Annie, so Annie and I stood still and allowed this to happen. I’m not sure about this, Cheryl, Annie said.

“You’re fine.”

Later during class the little girl decided she wanted to pet Annie again and someone told her not to. So–being a six year-old–she realized no one was watching her, and she snaked her hand out for a quick pet.

I wanted to say, “Oh, honey, whatever you do, don’t do that.”  I didn’t. Perhaps I should have.

Annie flinched, but otherwise didn’t react very much.

The problem–much like my dropping the leash in the middle of the class–is the difference between Annie’s reaction time and mine. I could see it all happen in real time, but if Annie had decided to nip the child, could I have prevented it? Oh, hell no. And I don’t want to tense up because that travels right down the leash to the dog. Annie would have had the kid down on the floor and bleeding from the ears by the time it occurred to me to move. And it’s not that I think my dog would hurt a child: it’s that I’m just not…sure.

I keep a close eye on Riley when kids are around–but I trust him. (Frankly, it’s the kids I don’t trust. Kids do some really stupid shit.)

Before going to class yesterday I was in Walmart and I stopped by buy some yellow ribbon to tie a bow on Annie’s leash. According to some people on facebook, it tells (some) people the dog is in training, has medical issues or needs not to have people grabbing at it all of the time. It means (politely) please don’t pet my dog. But of course ribbon, yellow or otherwise, is sold by the yard at Walmart by employees who were laid off two years ago so you can admire it all you want, but heaven help you if you actually want to buy any of it…  

So we have our work cut out for us. Stay. New command: “Settle’. And we need to work on ‘heel’ (vs ‘lick’). Nancy said she woke up this morning thinking, “I have to work with that dog today….” 

Wednesday. Beautiful morning, sunny, cool, leafy green.  Yesterday I worried that the six-inch forest was not going to provide much shade for us this summer: today each individual leaf is bigger. You might think I had never gone through a spring before.

Today I am somewhat encouraged. Tonight is Snorty’s obedience class. We have worked with her. We’ve worked on ‘sit’, ‘down’, ‘stay’ and ‘Annie, come!’ We have worked on Jesus Christ, stop barking! until I can walk to the back door and shake a treat bag without say a word and she comes running. (Yes, we give her treats for barking. I expect any day now she’ll figure that out, and whenever she wants a treat, she’ll run out into the back yard and start barking. So far she stops to run into the house and get a treat.) Last night we were able to eat a calm, relaxed meal (with an open treat bag on the table) by calling her whenever she starts barking and giving her a treat. I am following the ‘re-set’ theory: that coming to get a treat resets her mind from high excitement to calming peace. The trick is to keep her from ever escalating to high drama, which is when she runs from window to window, barking at wind changes and cars backfiring on the highway a mile away.

It doesn’t help that the dog next door is neurotic (and a barker,) or that the noisy, hysterical kick dog still lives down the street, or the two chows lives on the other side of the fence where they chuff aloofly. But slowly we are learning. Nancy has a whole speech she gives whenever Annie starts to get hysterical. “It’s okay. We’ve got it. You don’t need to worry your little head about that…” 

I read on the Internet that:

1. Salt poured on a piddle place will pull the urine out of the carpet and kill the smell. I’ll let you know, although right now I’m ready to salt the dining room. I figure about a foot of the stuff, left for a week or so, would give some idea of how well it works. Much less than that I might just as well throw over my shoulder.

2. Vicks applied to my toes will kill nail fungus. Interesting idea. There is a prescription med which, when applied every day for 265 days at exactly the same time every day will maybe, with luck, kill nail fungus…or you could apply Vicks Vaporub for two weeks and it will maybe with luck, kill nail fungus… As it happens I have a particularly happy fungus growing under one nail. Actually it spreads slowly from nail to nail, but this particular nail is actually sore because the fungus is such a healthy little colony. So what the hell? I have applied Vicks to it. It may not be cured, but it doesn’t hurt as much. I am hopeful that it will calm it down to the point where I can cut it. Should you ever need to know more, I will eventually report my findings.

3. South Carolina just elected a congressman who, while Governor, told everyone he was hiking the Appalachian trail while in fact, he had flown off to South America to have an affair. Fidelity is apparently not an issue in South Carolina, and while I’m not sure it’s all that important to me…he left the entire state in limbo while lying about where he was and taking off to chase tail.

4. The Kardashians can make news by changing their wigs, wearing flowered dresses, gaining weight. Breathing in, breathing out…

Not on the Internet (until now) the little black dog is balled up on the couch and chuffing, now and then. In the distance someone’s dog is barking. This annoys her, because for the past few days her people have not allowed her to bark. Ruff. Riley is outside.  I assume he is balled up in the dog-shaped hole that has appeared out there. I started out with one gold dog who almost never dug, and wound up with multi-colored prairie dogs creating a colony in my back yard.

I got the oil changed in the car yesterday. $27 and they replaced a rear brake light (or as my mechanic said, “One of your rear brake lights was out, so we broke the other one.”) And I had the salvageable photographs from the packet entitled ‘Byron Flinn’ (someone else must have written that: my great uncle’s name was ‘Flynn’) digitized. I like this one:

I do not have a clue who these seven children are.

Nor do I know who this baby is (but I love the buggy.)

This is my Grandfather, J. Harold Peck. I recognize him. He is younger than he was when I knew him (of course) but there’s little doubt in my mind who he is. The woman is very likely my Grandmother Lucille (Gwinn) Peck. I find myself staring at this photograph. I remember when I was a kid she used to comment that when she was younger she looked a great deal like my younger sister and she was always ‘going’ to show us a photograph of her when she was younger. She never did. She really did not like photographs of herself nor did she like having her picture taken. (A trait the same sister has since decided to share with her.) 

I had 8 prints digitized (many of the negatives were either damaged or severely over-exposed.) I have no idea when these shots were taken, or if they were all taken at the same time. My grandparents were married the evening my grandmother graduated from high school (he was 5 or 6 years older than she. I think.) In my mind this photograph of the two of them was taken that night–but I don’t know that. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but there is a great deal it doesn’t tell you.

This is the same woman with my aunt, who is 17 years younger than my father, so the photograph is probably +/- 20 years older than the one above it.

Her name was Lena Lucille.   

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.