Tag: Rusty

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Albuquerque’s North Valley

Photo of a cow lying under a Cottonwood

Picture a little kid’s drawing of a house: at its simplest, a triangle perches on top of a square.  Then imagine the kid with the crayon getting restless.  She stretches the square into a long skinny rectangle and topples the triangle over the edge. The triangle lands in the rocks next to the rectangle and turns the little house into an arrow.

You can’t get comfortable in an arrow. We sold that house and decided to head off in the direction the the arrow was pointing. We moved in temporarily with my friend Ken in the North Valley and gave our granddaughter one of our cars. That’s why I’m walking down Guadalupe Trail this morning, past some cows and a singing pyracantha hedge full of invisible birds.

I’m looking for the little half-sized road that will take me to the ditch bank. Among the many gifts of spending the last  six week’s as guests in my friend’s house has been the chance to fall in love with this little stretch of Albuquerque’s North Valley.

Things happen here

that never happened on the West Side. A few days ago a woman wandered into the yard with her beagle. She wanted to know if I had lost a turtle.  When I said no, she left and came back a few minutes later with the turtle she had found wandering in the road. “I’ll just leave him here anyway,” she said.

Ok. It’s a nice yard for a turtle. It had a neon pink Z painted on its shell. I watched him lug his prehistoric body around the garden until I lost sight of him between the flagstone path and the chamisa.

It’s not just that strangers bring you turtles in the North Valley. The other night Rusty wasn’t feeling well, and I found myself curled in a blanket, sitting in a rocker on the front porch at 2:30 in the morning. It was peaceful in the cool dark, and I felt almost lucky that I’d been drawn out of bed.  Rusty, instantly calmer in the fresh air, went to sleep at my feet while I rocked and daydreamed.

We might have stayed there all night if I hadn’t heard something breathing. It was a deep, grunting, wild noise, followed by some serious rustling in the garden.  For no reason that holds up to daylight, I imagined a wild boar, its giant tusks angling for the kill. I woke Rusty and hustled him inside, wondering what feral beast was sniffing for us in the night.

To the best of my knowledge, there’s never been a wild boar sighting in the North Valley. In the rational light of morning, I see the holes in the grass, each one the size and shape of a skunk’s nose.

In the North Valley

I’m remembering how much I enjoy walking. Not just to walk, but to get somewhere. This morning the cows are out as I head South on Guadalupe Trail. I count four of them, with the biggest leaning against a cottonwood just beside the road. He looks at me without much curiosity and swishes flies with his tail.

When I get to the ditch,  I hang a right and then another one at the no trespassing sign and suddenly I’ve left streets behind. I’m walking beside an arroyo, flush with flowing water. Old land rights still dictate when farmers may open simple wooden gates to flood their fields. Sunlight dapples my arms as it sifts through cottonwood branches and lands in shards on the dry ground.

I bend to pass through the first stile, alarming a lizard that skitters up the fence post. A coyote appears about ten yards up the trail. He looks at me and prances ahead, then turns back, keeping a constant distance between us. Somewhere to the east on the other side of the ditch a rooster crows.

I step through the second stile. It’s morning in the North Valley, and I’m walking in an older version of the world. I was going to say I’m not at work, but I don’t think that’s true. My new work life is a little bit like a jigsaw puzzle before you get the edge pieces done–I’m still figuring out what will go inside. “Whose woods these are I think I know,” is running through my head. Who’s to say walking through the bosque on a sunny morning doesn’t count as work, if you’re trying to make a life  as a writer?

When I turn left to head toward the coffee shop, the coyote runs ahead toward the Rio Grande. I’m thinking about a few lines from the Navajo Blessingway Prayer: “With beauty before me may I walk, with beauty behind me may I walk.”

Just before the coffee shop,

the dirt turns back into pavement. The house on the corner marks the transition. Long skinny garden beds separate the house from the road. Signs are painted on water drums and fence posts and compost bins.  “Be joyful,” “Be You,” “Sit here and enjoy the new.” A few weeks ago, the sunflowers were blooming and the vines were heavy with tomatoes.

I turn toward Rio Grande and have coffee with my friend. On my way home, I pass the yard with the painted bench again. I’ve been trying to decide if it says enjoy the new or enjoy the now. A young man is working among the plants this morning, and I think about asking him. I say hello and thanks and tell him how much I enjoy walking by his garden.

“You’re welcome,” he says, “Would you like a zucchini?” And just like that, he pulls a knife from his pocket, cuts the long, thick fruit from the vine, and hands me a zucchini. I decide I don’t want to know if he wants me to enjoy the new or the now.

I walk home with my zucchini.  It’s just another morning in the North Valley.

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Packing: Five Things I’ve Learned

Photo of stacked boxes

Shredder, lamp bases, frogs. That’s my favorite of the 151 labels I’ve written on boxes since I started packing back in June. For the last two months, I’ve been running up and down the stairs, lifting, sorting, tossing, carrying, wrapping, weighing, taping, and stacking every single thing my husband and I own.

Rusty has been watching me with his head tilted to the side. He is worried that I might pick him up, wrap him in newspaper, and throw him in a box labeled winter coats, wine chiller, dog. (And if you want to know why a person moving to Florida would have a box labeled winter coats in the first place, you are already beginning to understand what this process has been like for me.)

Rusty’s distress aside, I’m now happy to report that the movers will be here in a few days, and we are ready. I hadn’t planned to stop posting essays while I packed, but once packing was underway, I couldn’t sit still long enough to complete anything that wasn’t going to end up swaddled in cardboard.

I like to think I was just listening to my old friend Rilke. He says, “You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines.”

I don’t know if I’ll pull off ten good lines here, but I do feel like I have been packing for a whole lifetime. Perhaps I’ve even gained a little sense and sweetness. Here is what I’ve learned while my blog was dark.

ONE: I can only be single-minded about one thing at a time.

What’s that thing that’s the opposite of an oxymoron called again? Oh, right, a tautology. That heading I just wrote fits perfectly, because the term single-minded already means one thing. But believe me, it takes more than a tight tautology to convince me that I can’t finish a paid writing project, prepare two Sunday’s worth of music to play in public, write a guest post for another blog, and keep posting on my own blog while I single-mindedly stuff 3,500 hundred square feet of house into 151 cardboard containers.

Nope, what it takes is exhaustion, sore feet, sore hands, a few tears, and a few dozen eye-rolls from Fred. Things got better when I realized I could just stop doing everything else for a while. (I offer this as a cautionary tale–if you are like me, you will conclude that unlike me, you have what it takes to pull off doing everything at once. To you I say, “Hello, kindred spirit.” We can talk again when you reach the other side.)

Two: I should have been great at Tetris.

Remember Tetris? All those little Ls and Ts and squares fall from the sky, and your job is to stack them into a perfectly filled-in wall. My step-daughter is great at it. No amount of practice could make me good at that game. I just played for free online and confirmed that I’m still terrible at it.

And yet, if I do say so myself, I am a ninja when it comes to packing. That tiny empty space at the top of the box of kitchen bowls? It would be the perfect size for my mother’s old music box. That square wooden Cathy’s Kitchen sign (my mother’s again)? That will fit perfectly to reinforce the bottom of the box with the pots and pans. In perhaps my finest ninja moment, I emptied the third roll of packing tape and realized that the cardboard ring inside would perfectly protect the little glass globe my parents brought from Italy.

Don’t even get me started on tearing off the perfect size piece of bubble wrap for every picture. I’m telling you, if this writing gig doesn’t pan out, I’ve got options.

To be fair, I should mention that Fred has a ninja packing skill of his own. He can smell an empty cardboard box from three streets away, and charm grocery stockers, gutter shop owners, and my favorite winery into passing them along. Of those 151 boxes, I think we paid for three.

Three: The gap between what I have and what I need is immense.

I probably should say obscene, but being that honest might compel me to take more action than I’m ready to take. Ever since I packed up the kitchen, we’ve been living just fine with one skillet, one 2-quart pot for boiling water, and one French press coffee pot. If you look in the boxes you’ll find something like twenty-two pots and skillets. (I didn’t count them, but I’m not exaggerating and I’m a little afraid that I might be undercounting.)

And for the record, I found that barely used French press tucked deep in a cabinet behind some dried out bandaids as I fretted about packing my real coffee pot, the one that grinds the beans and has my coffee ready for me when I wake up in the morning.

I could go on and on: clothes, shoes, books, vases, tools, even underwear. I have too much of all of them.  It’s sobering to pile up all the evidence of your excess in boxes in the living room. One night I was talking to my sister and Clare told me that she came to this same realization  when she was packing for her own recent move. She said she found herself crying at the size of the job, until she realized that it was ridiculous to be crying because she had too much.

While I haven’t gotten rid of anywhere near as much as I should have, Clare’s words have helped me keep this work in perspective.

Four: One thing empties another.

I started packing the same way I start every big task. I made a giant list of every area in the house I’d need to pack. It included things like “upstairs hall closet, loft, upstairs master bedroom, closet under the stairs, china cabinet, bookshelves…” and so on.

I love lists. I’m one of those people who adds things to my to-do list after I’ve completed them just so I can enjoy the satisfaction of crossing them off. This list, though, wasn’t working. For weeks and weeks, I couldn’t cross anything off. I’d start emptying the hall closet, and before I knew it, I was running to my bedroom for a sweatshirt to wrap around a tennis racket. I’d find myself needing some stuffing to keep the mugs from rattling around, so I’d head to my sock drawer. Towels dribbled out of linen closets; shoes and plastic hangers filled gaps in boxes of lamp bases and tools.

I kept complaining to friends and family that everything was in process and nothing was getting done.

Then one day, Fred and I walked around the house opening closets and tugging on drawers, and there wasn’t anything in them. Somehow we’d packed up the house without ever crossing anything off the list.

One thing empties another. I feel like there’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Five: Packing tricks you into thinking you can take it with you.

One gentle Tuesday a few weeks ago, my packing had a sound track. Aurora, the violin-playing-gymnast grandchild, is learning to play guitar. She doesn’t learn a new instrument the way I would, by buying books and obsessing over understanding every little detail.

“What are the notes for each string?” I ask her. “I don’t know,” she shrugs. She’s just learning to play one song, gently, beautifully, confidently. This morning she plays the first eight bars of “Here Comes the Sun” over and over again while I pull plates and bowls out of kitchen cabinets, wrap them in newspapers, and seal them into cardboard boxes.

It’s a gentle morning, and Aurora’s playing is light and lovely. She and I have been playing music together since she was a tiny kid who wouldn’t talk and wanted violin lessons. In a few minutes we’ll both stop and slice some strawberries for lunch. In a few weeks, she’ll start high school. She is on a mission to finish in three years. In a few months, I’ll move.

Right now, though, I’m savoring this moment standing in the kitchen. I’m not thinking about where either of us is headed tomorrow. “Here comes the sun,” the music sings again and again.

I keep wrapping plates, surprised by how easy it is to believe.

Thanks for coming back! If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to pass it on and tell a friend about LiveLoveLeave. If all goes well, I’ll be back in a week. 

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Dogs I’ve Known

Photo of Rusty lying down
Excuses, excuses.

I’ll tell you about some dogs I’ve known, but first I need to make some excuses. Last week I was ahead of the game. I wrote a full draft of a post on Sunday afternoon, so when Monday got busy, I didn’t worry. I figured I’d revise Tuesday morning, post my essay, and call another week of blogging a success.

That plan worked great until Tuesday morning, when I reread my essay and couldn’t stand it. I’m not sure what was going on in my head. I’ve fought that “it’s not good enough” demon many times before. Every other time, though, I’ve managed to wrangle my ideas into some sort of small truth, hold my breath, and press the “Publish” button.

Tuesday morning, I couldn’t even stay in the game. I bailed. That unrevised essay is sitting abandoned in my “drafts” folder, where it might just live out the rest of its days. “It will be ok,” I told myself. “I can still post something later this week.”

Then Wednesday, I got sick. By Thursday evening my eyes were streaming, my nose was dripping, and I felt like I was breathing with lungs full of honey.

So, as I languish on the couch not writing next to a full box of Kleenex and an empty box of Kleenex that I’m using as a trash can, Fred says what he always says when I say I’ve run of things to say.

“Write about dogs,” he says. “Or dead people. People like that stuff.”

So last week passed

that way, and through my coughing, sniffling, chills, and fever, I’ve been thinking about all the dogs I’ve known.

I’m not counting the Farrell’s Lhasa Apso that barked ferociously from the top of their stairs and made me afraid to feed him. Or Pepper, the Watchen’s lab who I sometimes watched for a weekend when they went away.

I’m talking about dogs I’ve known like Benny the Beagle. He was the first dog. I didn’t want a dog. Then Fred and I went to dinner one night and as we ate, he told me stories about the dog that slept under his crib when he was a baby.

We went home that night with Ben, whose sole talent in life was to look soulfully into your eyes until you gave him food. My father-in-law used to cook him steak, and eggs, and chicken. (On the same day–that was breakfast, lunch, and dinner.)

Many years later, when Peter and Ben were both much older, they would sit together on the couch watching tv and eating peanuts out of a giant can.

Then somehow

(and this part is still a little fuzzy), we got Annabelle.  She was a puppy when we got her. I remember that we used to say, “No, Ben,” a lot, but take it from me: “Just say no” doesn’t work any better as birth control than it did with drugs.

So for a little while, I knew a bunch of beagle puppies. In those days, we still had the waterbed Fred owned when I first met him. That’s where Annabelle went when it was time to bring her babies into the world. Let’s just say that wasn’t an ideal choice for any of us.

Of all the dogs I’ve known,

I remember three of those puppies. Our friend Ed and his wife and four kids came to visit as the puppies were just getting old enough to give away. Ed didn’t want a dog. No dogs allowed. He absolutely didn’t want a dog.

On the last day of their visit, we went shopping for a crate so they could take their puppy on the airplane. Sherlock was a beloved member of their family until he died happily, many years later.

I also remember the puppy that didn’t make it. I held him in my hands as Fred drove to the vet. She said some things I don’t remember, and then I held the puppy as she inserted the needle. I remember watching his heart go from beating to still. Outside Fred leaned on the hood of the car, and his whole body crumpled in one lone sob.

The last puppy I remember is CT, or Lester Crooked Tail, to be official. He was born with a gimpy tail and an opportunistic bent. Fred’s dad Peter didn’t think the dogs should be alone when we went to work, so a few days a week, we’d drop the dogs at Grandpa daycare.

CT knew a good thing when he saw it. While the other dogs romped and rollicked like normal puppies, CT glued himself to Peter. Sure enough, he got himself adopted by the man who cooked meals for his dogs.

Years later

when we sold our house and built a house that was big enough to live in with Fred’s parents, the beagle family was reunited. My sister Clare (not a dog person) once described Ben, Annabelle, and CT as furniture that followed you around.

While I’m thinking about it, Clare is the only person I’ve ever known whose houses come with pets. Every time she moves, there’s some animal that “comes with” the house. Bentley, who came with her house on the hill in West Virginia,  is another dog I’ve known.

He lived on the land at my sister’s before she moved in. He moved over and made some room for them and slept on their porch for years. When I’d visit, I’d feed Bentley ham and he’d let me brush him, much to my sister’s surprise. I was sad when I learned Bentley died. He was a good dog.

When Ben died, I learned that dying is something that happens to your mouth. Ben had been slowing down, hinting that something was going on, for a few weeks. Then, he rebounded. For a full week, he ran up and down the stairs and  followed us all around the house.

Then one afternoon, he lay down for a nap in the sun near the back door and didn’t wake up. You could see it in the funny set of his mouth.  CT died under a table in the living room. Annabelle was harder. She didn’t want to die. By the time we took her to the vet, she was so obviously close to dying that we wished we hadn’t taken her. I held her head and she was gone.

Other dogs I’ve known include Snow White, who smells bad and sits on my lap when we watch her. And Circuit, who pushes Rusty away and flops his crook-eared head into your lap, pledging affection without a price tag.

And then there’s Rusty.

Rusty has always been more person than dog. He worries a lot. Change unsettles him. He watches tv and barks at the animals, even if they are fake animals. Every time. I’m talking to you, Geico gecko. And you, Trip Advisor owl in your bathrobe. Rusty knows you’re up to no good.

Lately, Rusty has been having a lot of trouble standing up. His back legs aren’t working so well. We tried going up to bed without him, but he’d wake up after an hour or so and bark from the bottom of the stairs. Now we sleep downstairs in the guest room.

Rusty has an appointment at the vet on Thursday, and I’m hopeful that there will be something she can do to help him get more mobile again. A pill, a shot, a fancy “hip harness” device like I’ve seen online. Once he’s up and going, he’s all puppy.

So, there’s a quick tour of the dogs I’ve known. I’m grateful to them for their uncomplicated dogginess and their unwavering love.

Being sick has made for a strange day. I was too miserable even to read, so I’ve been writing a little and dozing in front of the tv.

It wasn’t a great day to watch CNN. In between writing about dogs, I’ve been looking at pictures of kids in cages and listening to tapes of children crying for their parents.

The thing I remember best about my father-in-law was that he liked dogs more than people. On a day like today, it’s easy to see why.

As always, thanks for reading, and feel free to share this post with your friends.

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Thief

Last Thursday, after living the first six years of his life as a largely law-abiding citizen, (I’m not counting the time he ate our rug or mistook my slippers for his; those early crimes were committed before he reached the age of reason), Rusty tossed respectability to the curb like an over chewed bone and embarked on a life of crime.

I’ve never seen him happier.

The incident took place on a drizzly afternoon. We were enjoying our usual walk when I stopped to talk for a moment with a friendly older man washing his car. He must have felt the need to explain to anyone who walked by why he was hosing down his Honda on one of Albuquerque’s rare rainy days, so he shrugged, grinned, and said, “I’m from Portland,” which I took to mean “I know this looks like rain to you, but trust me, it isn’t raining.”

The piece de resistance was an ordinary green tennis ball. Rusty has had lots of them over the years. They sit ignored in the corner in his toy basket until his friend Circuit comes over and carries all the toys outside. Rusty never takes the toys outside, because he doesn’t believe he can fit through his doggy door with anything in his mouth.  He thinks Circuit is pretty cool for having this supernatural ability.

Anyway, Rusty has never cared much about any toy. He’ll play ball with you, if by playing ball you mean Rusty gets the ball, trots around a little, and waits for you to come try to take it from him. He’s never really understood the point of the traditional fetch game; it makes much more sense to him for the human to do the running.

I laughed with the car washing man and Rusty seemed to be in a hurry for once to get going, so we continued up the hill. I kept asking him what the big rush was, if he had big plans for the evening, but he was holding his head kind of funny and not answering me.

I’m not naïve to the fact that my dog can be sneaky. Rusty wasn’t even a year old the first time he faked having a goat head in his paw. We go on a lot of walks and we live in New Mexico, so we encounter a lot of goat heads.  (And if you are not from New Mexico, and you are actually imagining the head of a goat stuck in my golden retriever’s paw, just go with that. It couldn’t be any more painful than what I actually mean.) We have a system, Rusty and I.  He comes to a dead stop, lifts the affected paw as though he’s on point, and I, loyal servant and companion, kneel and remove the diabolical sticker.

Only this one time, there wasn’t a sticker. He just wanted some extra time to sniff out the new dog on the other side of the fence. I’m not making this up. After I fruitlessly searched his paw for a few minutes, he admitted he was faking it. He took his paw back and pointed with his head to the fence, where the now thoroughly sniffed dog was rustling around. “Sorry, I just really wanted to sniff him,” he told me, as clearly as if he had used words. Then he swung his head forward, saying, “We can go now,” so we did. I remember wondering at the time what else my dog was pulling over on me.

As he pulled me up the hill on the day he became a thief, he wouldn’t look at me. He cocked his head to the right when we reached the top to tell me which way he wanted to turn, and that’s when I saw the green felt gleaming between his teeth.

He ignored my half-hearted “drop it,” and kept going, for the first time ever sniffing absolutely nothing for an entire block. Every now and then he’d look over his shoulder at me, as if to be sure I understood that something important was happening. As soon as we got home, he ran into the house, down the hall, through the kitchen, and out his dog door into the backyard, never even slowing down to see if he could still fit.

I think he was showing his new ball his kingdom. He strutted around for a few minutes, and then came back in, ball in mouth, and lay down with it safely tucked between his paws. A little while later, he took a nap with his new ball all nuzzled up beside his nose.

If my life were a sitcom, this would be the part where the responsible parent takes the tearful child back to the candy store, makes him confess his crime, return the half-eaten candy bar, and trade the fleeting pleasure of chocolaty nougat for the presumably more lasting sense of righteousness that comes from having done the right thing.

I can’t do it. My dog is blissfully happy. I couldn’t make this elated dog give this ball back to its rightful owner if she were four years old, wearing pigtails and overalls, and standing in front of me crying.

Saturday afternoon I’m working on this essay and trying to figure out exactly what my thieving dog is teaching me about my commitment to joy and my lack of commitment to property rights when the doorbell rings. The man standing there when Rusty and I open the door is wearing Dockers and a tweed jacket, and he has some of the saddest, kindest eyes I’ve ever seen.

Those eyes, the ninety pounds of fur leaning against my leg, and the knowledge that my husband is upstairs in his office have lowered my usual “strange man at the door” defenses, so I’m actually listening when he says, “Have you ever wondered what happens after we die?”

Before I can say, “You mean, other than every day?” he hands me a pamphlet, says “There is some very comforting information in there,” tells me to have a good day, and walks off down the driveway.

These aren’t my mother’s Jehovah’s Witnesses. Growing up we lived a few blocks away from the Bethel Park Congregation on Irishtown Road, so it was pretty common for an eager believer to ring the doorbell on a summer afternoon and launch into an explanation of how we could be saved. Those Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t hand you a pamphlet and tell you to have a good day. They wanted to convince you, and they had all the time in the world for you to come around.

One day, my mother, devout Catholic, decided she was going to make her case, too. She started explaining Catholicism to the Jehovah’s Witness, and the two went at it for a long time on the front porch.

Because it’s Saturday, I actually read the man’s pamphlet, and it’s full of Old and New Testament quotations about life after death. I’m disappointed that the argument is as circular as it is, so I find myself thinking about the marketing team who came up with the plan to focus on eternity in this year’s doorbell ringing campaign rather than contemplating life and death with capital letters.

It’s the beginning of November, so Sunday morning the banco at my church is covered in photos of the dead and we’re lighting candles. For some reason, ever since I realized I was ok with my dog being a thief since it made him so happy, I’ve had the old liberation theology phrase, “a preferential option for the poor,” in my head. It always strikes me to think how at odds that theology is with today’s politicians who claim to be on God’s side yet work to demonize the poor. “Poor in spirit” is ok; poor in body and material goods is lazy.

Not knowing who Rusty stole this particular tennis ball from, I’m not sure if my dog is Robin Hood or JP Morgan, but it turns out I’m just rooting for joy. I’m thinking that this whole life/death thing might be a spectrum, not an on/off switch, and joy is what pushes at the far right boundary.

It’s been a week now, and Rusty’s new tennis ball is still his most important possession. He brings it to me when I get home from work, and I chase him around for a little while, and then we both flop down to rest, tongues hanging out, feeling like it’s good to be alive.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

 

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Summer

Every night before we go to bed, my husband tries to convince our dog to sleep in later the next morning. “Rusty,” he’ll say to the ninety pounds of fur that makes his bed beside ours, “Don’t wake us up until 7:30 tomorrow.” Rusty wags and nuzzles as if he agrees, curls himself up like a giant snail, and falls fast asleep. Most nights he doesn’t run to the window in the middle of the night to bark at Jax, the neighbor’s dog, but sometimes he does. Most nights, I sleep through it.

Every morning since school ended and summer began, Rusty wakes up at 6:15. By 6:30, the dog can no longer contain himself. He bats at the bed, turns in circles, and, if we ignore him for more than a few moments, lies back down with a dramatic, drawn-out sigh, the sort of sound a child makes when he’s letting the air escape from a balloon as slowly as possible.

It is a sigh that says, “Hello, the birds have been singing for an hour already,” and “Seriously? You are going to sleep through all this daylight?” It is a sigh that never fails to make us laugh. It is a sigh that is heavy in its finality, yet is followed within seconds by a leap to his feet and a renewed round of pawing the bed. If we show signs of moving, he’ll stretch his long nose toward whosever pillow he’s closer to and stare lovingly into sleepy eyes.

It’s hard to resist such a persistent call to play. He sniffs me on my way into the bathroom, as if to make sure I haven’t changed too much overnight, and he turns in circles while he waits as patiently as he can (which isn’t very patiently) for me to do all the things humans have to do before they leave the house in the morning. It’s clear he thinks I’m overdoing it. Clothes? Shoes? Brushing your teeth? Aren’t you ready yet?

The biggest thing I’ve learned since having this dog who drags us out of the house at least four times a day for walks is that bunnies are terrible at hiding. We inadvertently terrorize them every morning as we bound by. The rabbits, and there are thousands of them in my neighborhood, come to a dead stop as we approach. Their stillness, they seem to believe, renders us blind.

Rusty has gotten pretty good at not lunging toward them each time, but still, I gather the slack of his leash into my fist as we pass, just a few feet away from a rabbit that is standing stock still in front of a bush he might more wisely have chosen to hide behind.

After we pass, we lumbering animals who could not possibly outrun those springs with fur, the bunnies bolt across the street. I can only surmise that evolution gave them such prolific reproductive systems to counteract their poor survival instincts.

One time on a walk like this one, Rusty found half a bunny under a bush and had it in his mouth before I knew what was happening. I couldn’t get him to drop it, so I ran the rest of the way home, one rabbit paw hanging out of each side of the dog’s mouth like a giant cartoon mustache. I stuck my head in the front door to get Fred’s attention, hoping he’d agree that extracting a dead rabbit from the dog’s jaws was more his job than mine. While I was distracted, Rusty happily ate his dead half rabbit for breakfast.

Another time, our neighbor’s little yappy dog got beat up by a rabbit in their back yard. Half of the dog’s jaw was chewed away and for weeks he wore a bandage that made him look like an old cartoon of a person with a toothache.

This is the moment in the essay where, when I show up faithfully to write each day, some muse floats into my fingers, and, wham! epiphany! explains to me why I’m writing about rabbits.

While we all wait for that to happen, I’ll tell you that after I walked and fed the dog this morning, I got on my bike and set out for a rambling ten-mile ride. The sky was blessedly overcast, the clouds heavy with ash rising from fires in the Jemez and Pecos mountains. Seeing me approach on wheels this time, not alongside a wild animal on a string, more bunnies demonstrate a new set of bad survival skills. They dash at me out of the ditch, and I find myself braking repeatedly to avoid hitting them, as if they were deer on Pennsylvania highways.

I had been thinking I’d write about abundance this morning, not a bunny, but it appears that today’s muse is a comedian. I’m grateful to my dog for wagging me out of bed before the light grows old each morning.

Do me a favor, don’t tell my husband.

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Strong

Tonight when the big orange dog jumped up on the leather couch he couldn’t settle. He’s a lanky dog, so sometimes he can’t quite maneuver himself into a comfortable position. The problem is this: after he turns south and shakes, and then turns north and rubs his head on the back cushion, and then twitches his back paw and turns south again, thinking perhaps he’ll lay his head on the arm rest instead of in my lap, his fur has gone all static electric wild, and he’s totally freaked out. You can practically see the sparks shooting and his synapses shorting, and you just can’t figure out how to help him. (And if you are thinking that at this point a rational person would instead be thinking about how to get the big hairy dog off the couch, I get it. But that’s not the house I live in.)

Tonight as his fur splays out in an electric halo, I hear myself tell him, “Just give up and lay down.”

Just give up and lay down. They are the kind of words that hang around in the air after you say them, determined to mean more than you intended. You keep humming them like the first three notes of a song you used to know, until your neurons get their act together and you remember that once on a very bad day, a very good priest said, “Don’t be strong.”

Seriously? I like strong. Strong is easy. Strong is cry later in your car. Strong is keep showing up on time. Strong is put the dishes in the dishwasher, prep for class, get the laundry done. Strong is “Good, thanks, and you?” or “I’m ok. Really.”

Strong is when your voice doesn’t catch when you find yourself reading out loud this line, spoken by the irritating mother in The Sound and the Fury, who, having lost her son Quentin to suicide, realizes her granddaughter Quentin is missing and says, “Where’s the note? When Quentin did it he left a note.” Strong is reading straight on through to the next sentence, without your students seeing that your heart is now on the outside of your body, all static electric wild.

I like strong.

Sometimes, though, words are spells.  When the priest said “Don’t be strong,” I stopped being strong. I cried outside under the cottonwoods. I cried in the classroom. I cried in the church and in the cemetery and in the morning and on Thursdays and when birds startled out of trees. I cried when Orion appeared on the horizon and when the cranes flew in. I wasn’t strong.

In 1994 I tumbled over a horse’s head and shattered my wrist. A great surgeon pinned my bones to a plate and stitched me back together. I remember walking through O’Hare Airport before it was fully healed; all I wanted to do was to protect it, to hold it close to me like a little broken bird. But I was strong, and I had somewhere I was supposed to be, so I had gotten on the plane. I remember how all the people around me looked like weapons; I clenched my body against them, the way morning glories fold their petals as the light wanes.

It doesn’t work like that when you’re not being strong. You don’t have any petals to close. You walk through the world without any skin, as though you’d just had your chest cranked open for heart surgery and the surgeon has forgotten to sew you back up.

When you’re not being strong, everything hurts. Things that happened decades ago when you were being strong sense your weakness and rush back to hurt you all over again. Things that haven’t even happened, like when the kind looking man at church tells you he’s come here to kill Satan today, hurt you as much as if he had actually taken a gun out of the little gun-sized pouch on his back and begun killing the people you love. When you’re not being strong you learn to call these sorts of moments trauma.

When you’re not being strong, you don’t just relinquish the job of protecting yourself from the world; you also relinquish the job of protecting the world from itself, which you hadn’t even known you’d been trying to do. You see this in the shape of your shoulders. Months later, when you have forgiven yourself for all the pain in the world, you actually choose to keep your chest cranked open and decide not to step back into your skin. You see pale green top the trees and marvel at how well the world has spun on without your constant attention.

My words don’t have the same incantatory power over the dog. He jumps off the couch, heads outside to bark and sniff for a while, and finally comes back in. This time he lands the sweet spot on his first try. As I write, his head is in my lap and I’m bending my arm at a funny angle to type around an ear. Every now and then he nudges my laptop, as if to push it away and nuzzle closer. “Give up,” I think he’s trying to tell me. “Lay down.”

(Oh, and one more thing in case it’s been a long time since you’ve read The Sound and the Fury. The second Quentin didn’t commit suicide. She escaped out the window and shinnied down Caddy’s plum tree. Life came and called her, and she ran.)

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