Category Archives: For the love of a dog

When Children Break Your Heart

For the love of a dog, Gratitude, Parenting, Writing

 

Two days ago we said goodbye to our dog, George. You can read about how ill he’s been here, if you wish.

I won’t go into details of his final days. Or his eleven years. Not now. I’ve been writing between tears, though, trying to capture every detail, every memory, every feeling. That’s been both cathartic and awful. But I need to put it to paper. For someday.

I know that this almost unbearable grief means that we loved George and he loved us. Uncomplicated. Pure. Utterly fuzzy.

It’s been a shit year, personally and politically, but this dog has, as always, been a constant. His moods. His needs. His sweet face. His ability to absorb a hug, sigh, and then put his head back down as if to say, “It’s all going to be ok. Now please let me nap.”

The last 48 hours have clarified how much this dog has woven himself into our hearts, our lives, and our routines.

After dropping the kids off at school today, I put my purse on the counter next to this.

 

I’d been doing so well, too. Looks a little like a heart, doesn’t it?

Right after George passed away, the twins were processing, each in their own way. They wrote a little eulogy on the whiteboard we keep in the play area. I didn’t get a picture before they wiped it away in grief but it said, “George. Born July 4, 2006. Died December 19, 2017. Rest in peace and fuzz.”

My daughter spent a part of her day on Tuesday making a card for her brother.

In case you can’t read Kindergarten, it says “Hope you feel better Logan*. I love you.” That green blob on the left is the dog, and the blue lines with pink dots are his angel wings. Written in the angel wings are “Miss You.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how children break your heart. With their goodness and their grief — I can’t take the credit for the first, and I cannot do much to alleviate the second, but I am grateful for these three little people.

And for a dog who filled these last eleven years with simple love.

 

*The fact that she spelled it “Login” is the greatest thing ever.

Loaf Pans, Sweet Aromas, and Metaphors in Winter

Creative non-fiction, For the love of a dog, Inspiration, Parenting, Things that smell, Writing,

This morning I’m making pumpkin bread, ostensibly for my son who’s home with a cold, but mostly because I want to fill the house with the aroma of ginger, cloves, and nutmeg. Comfort. Care. Sweet.

Of late, the home has smelled of sick dog and not-so-homemade meals. The smells of exhaustion.

The pumpkin bread recipe has different baking times for different loaf pan sizes. 8×4 or 9×5.

My loaf pan, browned from years of lightly greasing and flouring, is 8.5×4.5

No joke.

Not quite here, not quite there. Close enough.

That’s how I feel these days, in this place, at this time. Maybe, in many ways, I always have.

It’s a not-entirely-comfortable feeling. No one wants to feel out-of-place.

No, that’s not right.

Out-of-step. I feel slightly out-of-step. Slightly mis-sized. Needing a little finagling to mingle with the other, uh, loaf pans. A different shelf or a little twisting here and there.

On my counter right now is a beautiful, perfectly baked, aromatic loaf of pumpkin bread. Due to the irregular size, it needed more observing, more tending, more awareness than other loaves…more wiggle room and patience than allowed for in the suggested time ranges. It took more than the 52-57 minutes. It took adjusting the oven. It took years of experience to know by sight and smell when it was close to done, and by the quality of crumb on the toothpick that it was.

There’s a lesson there that I choose to apply to myself on these days when the light is fleeting and the year fades into promises for the future. On these days when we hear no and why and you’ve got to be kidding me, on the days when self-care — the soulful kind, not the chocolate kind — is needed, on the days when the fight for rights and beliefs and humanity seems ever needy and urgent…on these days it’s ok to find the metaphor wherever we can.

Even if the metaphor is that there will always be crumbs.

November in Review

For the love of a dog, Inspiration, Month in Review, NaNoWriMo, NaNoWriMo 2017, Writing, , , , , , , , ,

Can I start you off with the best thing?  I dare you not to smile.

You guys, I’m tired. I’m on doggy hospice duty these days, and the ol’ Fuzzball has been needing a lot of middle-of-the-night tending for weeks now. But it’s the greatest gift I can give him these final days. It does make me foggy the rest of the day, though. We push through, don’t we?

It’s also been a month of tremendous work output – I somehow finished NaNoWriMo in eleven days – and now I am retreating a little to take stock and refocus on next steps.

I rarely wait for New Year’s to start a new goal. Heck, I won’t even wait for a Monday. I’m finalizing some plans and will share here when ready. I also have some very exciting news to announce shortly.

I do know that I want to write one essay a week starting this week. I have no end point, no plans. There is no “1 Essay a Week for the Next 100 Weeks” type thing. But if NaNo taught me anything, it’s that I like being motivated by a goal that has a tight timeline.

I had a semi-momentous birthday in November, which may be contributing to this deep-seeded need to get grossly introspective. I feel sometimes like I’m Konmari-ing my own damned mind and life. All good. All good.

I’m not sure what it was about late October through November, but I sure pulled some great reads off my shelf.

Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating and Cooling packs a lot of emotion in  a slim volume. Outrageous, hilarious, painful, and poignant.

Chelsey Clammer’s Circadian is a breathtaking and bold piece of art that merges and weaves together various forms and styles to try to arrive at understanding what may never be understood fully and to stumble upon truths that are often hard to accept.

Maggie Smith’s Good Bones. Breathtaking poetry about motherhood and middle years with strong, hearty through lines and themes.

I posted this review of Michael Ian Black’s Navel Gazing: True Tales of Bodies, Mostly Mine (but also my mom’s, which I know sounds weird):

Reading Navel Gazing was like discovering an up-and-coming band on a college radio station that you want to run around and tell everyone about and force them to listen. Not in a hispter way, really, but more in a "This guy gets it" way that made me go back through old yearbooks and double-check that we hadn't gone to school together back in Jersey.

Michael Ian Black packs a lot into this book -- health, aging, relationships, genetics, ancestry, mortality. It's surprisingly existential at times, rich, full, and just snarky enough to avoid being saccharine.

And funny. Did I mention funny? I literally was chasing people down to read them quotes from the book. And they don't hate me for it!

Highly recommended and truly appreciated.

Here are some fun things I ran across on the Internet this past month.

Here’s why you’re bored after you accomplish something.

Speaking of Konmari, can watching Groundhog Day make you a better artist?

Always time, always hope.

And now? I read, write, and figure things out. It’s a good end-of-year task. Something about low light and angles of things. Asking and truly answering “What do I want?” is an act of courage…and a lot of fun!