Doggone These Dog Days

Apparently, for about twenty minutes today--while we were wandering Woods Park--Finn was dead, which would have surprised both of us, had we noticed, especially considering how diligently he was stalking the squirrels.  Halfway through the walk, my brother called to tell me about Finn's untimely death.  Or at least what people had perceived as his untimely passing.

My bad.  

I consider myself a halfway decent wordsmith, but I had clearly botched things up with this morning's Facebook post.  I thought I was being playful with the concept of time, referencing how the past four years had felt like a decade, how--heck!--the past week had felt like a year and, yet,  how I couldn't believe the speed with which nine years had passed since we'd first gotten Finn.  I posted it and then we went went galumphing on our way.

One condolence quickly snowballed into a small collective of digital grief, until I pulled the plug on the post, post haste.  A few awkward PMs and a revamped post later, and we'd mostly cleared things up.  Good news for Finn!

But I was left with a sense of how quickly we go dark these days, and what a price our lightness pays because of that. 

Worn down by endless days of repellant rhetoric, fractured factions and calamitous COVID, we eventually find ourselves stripped of nuance.  No more subtle greys--just black and white.  But mostly black.  I've certainly seen it in myself.  My dull brain has missed many a pun this year, for example, and I recently interpreted a yelp from Finn as proof of a sinister disease ravaging him. One meant a missed opportunity to giggle, while the other became a wasted visit to the vet, nuance but a wispy memory.

We all seem to be on edge right now, quick to misinterpret and slow to celebrate.  Boy, am I ready for a return to lightness, to a time when I once again can discern intent, pick up on subtlety, bust a gut with my buds.  Because this?  This is an unsatisfying place to be.  Especially if you're a dog, just trying to celebrate your "gotcha day" with an extra walk or two and maybe another handful of kibble. 

 

Warmth

I write this during the early-morning hour of a blizzard.  As you can see, Finn is making the most of it, cozy beneath the how-can-they-make-material-so-soft warmth of my fleece blanket.  What you can't see is that my own form is also comfy under said comforter.   

Earlier--just after the call from the district that I should stay in bed (apparently, even people who only very occasionally collect wrinkled dollar bills at school sporting events still qualify for The Call) --Finn thought that perhaps I'd abandon my book and head downstairs, so he scurried off the bed to begin his doggy calisthenics on the carpet in the other room.  That's when I reached my hand over to the spot he'd just abandoned and relished the warmth of his imprint. 

Good lord, I love that sensation...the thermal memory of someone I love who now is somewhere else.  Three mornings each week, weekend warrior Mark abandons me before 5 a.m., readying himself to do things for airplanes that I still don't quite understand.  Often, I let my arm drape over his pillow, his warmth still pooling there for me.  

I love that all of my friends and all of their students also got the early-morning call to stay in bed and savor the hard-earned warmth of skin-on-sheet. 

And when I finally swap pjs for something only slightly more public-appropriate, donning coat and boots for a walk around the block,  I'm certain I'll find that warmth again, the imprints of those I love, showing up in the least-expected places and ways.  In the brilliant red flash of a male cardinal darting for cover.  In the uplifted swirl of snow, the resilient bend of little bluestem, the crunch of snow under tires.

The warm imprints of our beloved are everywhere, mixed up in and moving through this ridiculous life, whispering their breathy incantations, reminders that we most certainly aren't alone, even in the storm.   

The Longest Month

When I taught (I know, I know. I should be wary of using that term, lest a dozen former students PM me, frantically typing up myriad examples of all the times I did not, in fact, teach), anyway. . . . When I taught, I always considered February--stunted though it may be on the pages of my Sierra Club weekly calendar--to be the longest month of the year. Void of vacation days, punctuated by the pap of a day Hallmark created to bump up sluggish sales, the sun still too low in the sky to ignite anything but ennui, February offered little in the way of hope.

Now retired, and wrapped in the poly-blend blanket of politics and pandemic, I'd be forgiven for mistaking this January for any February. And we just now got to double digits, for crying out loud.

Thank goodness I found this swamp-oak leaf the other morning, resting on the pavement at Woods Park, so neatly outlined in the remnants of an overnight fog. That tiny discovery jolted me. First, I thought, what is something with the word "swamp" doing in Nebraska? And, as someone who has always struggled to use scissors deftly, or to outline decently, I wondered how on earth the fog fell so perfectly along the leaf's edges. What was it about those edges that called to the rimy crystals to alight on them?

Later in the walk, my eyes follow the footprints of a fox--propelled by hunger or curiosity or horniness--and I admire the curved line of its path as it bent towards the northwest corner, where backyards abut the pines.

How is it we spend these short winter days doom scrolling, frightened by our worst instincts and fearful of invisible invaders, when, just up the street, brittle leaves sparkle in crystalline finery and the foxes turn their sights toward family?

Even as we wonder how we will see this brutal winter through, the landscape changes and the sun stretches upward, its arms growing longer each day.