Do I love you?


Oh, I do.  I’ll tell you how much, Dear.  I won’t tell you all the details right now.  But someday, when you are older, you might stumble across this blog of mine… And then you’ll find out the truth.


I love you so much that I let you have a pet.  That buffalo that you love so well, the one that masquerades as a dog… The one that digs holes in the front yard and sleeps on my couch.  Yeah, that one.   I love you so much that I let you have the dog. 


Late last night, while you were sleeping peacefully,  your beloved dog didn’t feel so well.  It seems that his foray into the garbage can yesterday gave him much more than the plunder he sought.  He got a tummy ache.  


At midnight, his restlessness grew into groans.  The rest of the house was sleeping soundly.  But Dog was unhappy.  As time ticked by, his sadness ballooned into a storm of desperation.  He needed to go outside.  Bark, bark, bark.


I stumbled to the hall, donned my parka over my bathrobe, stepped into my son’s arctic boots that are three sizes too big for me, and opened the front door.  A cloud of steam escaped, swirling, dissipating off the porch, and I gasped for air.  Did I mention it was cold?  The windchill was under -20 Farenheit last night.  I braced myself.  I’m tough.


We walked up and down the icy street in the dead of night, Dog and I.  With not a cloud in the sky, the stars pierced the heavens brilliantly, glittering their reflections on the snow.  It was brittle, but beautiful, I will admit.  But I wondered at my own sanity.  I wondered how many minutes it would take for my hands to freeze.  I wondered how my mag light would fare against coyotes.  I wondered when your dog would finish his business of being sick, and want to go back inside.  His paws got cold, too.  


We repeated the scenario a couple hours later.  


It was still dark.  Still starry.  Still frigid.  


Still, you slept.  And I was glad.  Because I love you.


By 4:00 a.m., he finally stopped the bark bark bark noises, and settled down for a nice old-dog-nap.  I started the coffee.  


So here I sit, sipping some ridiculously thick coffee, and thinking of you.  You’ll be up soon for school, and I’ll be making your breakfast and lunch and pushing you out the door.  Dog and I will spend the day together, I will write and paint, he will sleep and bark.  


Yes, I love you quite a lot, My Dear.

;

A semicolon is a small bit of punctuation that separates two related ideas.  

It’s a clause. 

A pause.  

A semicolon says,  “Wait!  This is not the end;  there is more to come.”

The news today tells us that some people are tattooing semicolons on their wrists to symbolize that there is more to their life story.  They are people who have fought with death or trauma or attempts at suicide, but they have won the battle.  Even though they walked through a very dark valley, and their world and situation seemed hopeless, they made it through.  People with semicolon tattoos are survivors with a backstory.

They paused. 

And they chose hope. 


So, I'd like to introduce my friend.   I like to call him Semicolon Cat.  He has a backstory.

Someone didn’t want him when he was a baby.  He was thrown away.  Abandoned in the darkness of a Minnesota winter.  He was unloved and left to die.

Semicolon Cat appeared on the edge of a woods where my friend lives.  He was tiny, hungry, and matted.  Just a kitten, he had battle scars from facing a mean world on his own.  One ear was wounded; probably frozen in the winter winds.  It bent over, cartilage broken, and just stayed that way, folded in half.  His tail was bent, too.  It dangled and dragged along as he walked, hanging by a thread.  His abdomen was caked in matted blood.

He stayed on the periphery of the woods, watching my friend’s cat daintily lap up her cream on the sunny porch in the mornings.  She slept in an igloo dog house with a heated floor pad, dining twice a day.  She was petted and fluffy and beloved.  He stayed on the edge of the yard, watching.  Suffering.  Afraid.  Wounded.

The family asked around, but no one admitted to losing a little ragged calico cat.  Not a cat whose half a tail just fell off.  The family put out a little extra cat food at night, and left a warm quilt out on the porch.  

The kitten stayed.

The female cat wouldn’t let him in her house.   “It’s too cold for him!” the children said.  “The little kitty needs a place to sleep!”  They left him treats, and my friends cut a hole in their garage door, just the size for a stray feral cat.  He curled up in the warm garage, and began to heal.  Days and weeks and months passed.  Spring came, and Semicolon Cat fattened up on the love of the children, on the pets and caresses and the joy of strings tied to sticks that he chased around the yard.    

He chose this family, and they all love him, just the way he is.  He came out of the woods and right into their hearts, to stay.  He likes to keep close by, following them around, purring and marking their legs with his scent of ownership.  He is a good hunter, and leaves his people special gifts of dead frogs and moles.  He lounges around, right at their front door, rolling over to expose his belly for pets, because he trusts them so implicitly.  He is the most affectionate and loving cat I have ever met.   He is beloved.

Someday if you find yourself in a dark place, feeling unloved and alone, please remember Semicolon Cat.   

Pause.  

Hope. 

Make it through for the Love and Joy that is waiting for you, on the other side of the woods.  

Because someday, today will only be your backstory…  and you can fill the rest of your story with love.

Okay.  I admit it.  Maybe it wasn’t the greatest idea.  I meant to clean everything up and pack up all the Christmas decorations from a recent photo shoot.  But with the approaching holiday and an impromptu camping trip, life got very busy.  So I left the Christmas tree up through the 4th of July.  

Not a good idea.

Someone took the tinsel.   It wasn’t the dog.  It wasn't the rabbit.  

A small Child took the tinsel from our tree.  It had looked so pretty.  The shimmering, glittering plastic was just too enticing to resist.  

When I came home one evening, there it was, scattered all over the kitchen, dining area and living room.   

Everywhere.  Like leftover sparkles from a fireworks explosion.

“What happened?!”  I yelled.  “Why is there tinsel all over the house!?”  

The culprit was ratted out easily, with laughter.  “Small One decorated the dog for Christmas.”

The dog?  I guess that's understandable.  I mean, kids decorate their bikes for parades...

 “Is that all?”

“No.  You should have seen the inside of the dishwasher.  She decorated that for Christmas, too.”  


Maybe we should stick to one holiday at a time.

This week, I found five unexpected surprises in my yard.  

2.  Bleeding Hearts.  Every year, Dog makes a bed out of this plant, wrecking it entirely.  He starts out by losing his tennis ball nearby, and tears up the earth looking for it.  This plant has always gotten in his way, and become nothing but a sleeping mat for Dog.  And I always get angry.  But not this year.  This year we outsmarted him by enclosing the plant with rocks.  We win!

3.  Poison Ivy.  Yep.  This is what Dog chose to roll about and play in, since he couldn’t reach the Bleeding Hearts.  Dog has had two very soapy baths this week.  He was alternately pleased, unhappy, and confused.  We lose.

4.  I will never go out in the woods again.  This girl wasn’t afraid of my camera in the least.  I am the one who found her, and I am terrified.

5.  Someone planted a garden here, long ago.  It’s only when I am too busy to breathe that I get surprises like this.  When I have no time to weed the garden, when I just let the green little sprouts alone, the strangest and most beautiful surprises pop up.  Sometimes it’s good to be too tired to meddle.  Lovely Things happen all by themselves.  

What is the point of all this rambling, you ask?

I’m getting there.  

Usually I just write about the Love, Joy, and Peace that I find.  

And I do find it!  Even in the strangest places.

That doesn’t mean that other things don’t exist for me.  The proverbial Poison Ivy, black eyes, creepy spiders…everyone has them. 

But we all get to choose what we want to keep in our pockets and memories.  I want to remember the Love.  I want to cherish the smile and contentment of a girl who played hard and won.  I want to treasure Joy in the plant that actually survived the Dog!  I want to remember this blueish flower.  It’s unique and exciting, and I did nothing to create or nurture it.  It needed me to step aside and let it be, in Peace.  I can appreciate that. 

So now you know.  Love, Joy, and Peace are here, right in the middle of everything creepy.  

And you get to choose what you want to hold on to. 

A while ago, I was driving down the highway in my truck.  One of my kids was home from college for the weekend.  She’s a compassionate one…  She doesn’t kill bugs, won’t attend zoos, can hardly bring herself to consume meat…She is a future Cat Lady of the world.  She is Altruistic with a capital A. 

So you know what happened?  

I was driving about 55, a semi truck was coming toward me from the other way.  Another car was right behind me.  That’s when it happened.  A small, grey cat darted out of the brush, and in front of my truck.  I had one second to choose.  One.  I could veer to the center, avoid the cat and hit a semi head on.  I could hit the brakes and get rear-ended by the car behind me, which would also possibly involve the semi.  

Or I could hit the cat.  

My one-second choice became no choice at all, because just at that instant, the poor cat changed direction and ran right towards me.  Right into me.

I calmly pulled my truck off the road and started to cry.  I had just killed someone’s beloved pet.  I didn’t want to be the one to break anyone’s heart.   With dread, I knocked on the nearest door, and asked the homeowner if he had a grey cat.  

He shook his head no, and walked with me back down to the road.  Just then the sheriff pulled up.  

“Another one, eh?” the sheriff asked the man, seeing my distress and the small kitty on the side of the road.  

“Seems to be,” the homeowner said.  “I know my neighbors and I know their pets.  This one here must be another one that got dumped.”

The sheriff and the man explained to me that this was a regular occurrence.  Pet owners who no longer wanted their pets frequently left their unfortunate animals on the property of country folks, thinking that the animal would be cared for out “on the farm”.   In reality, the abandoned animals are left with coyotes, foxes, hunger, highways, and big trucks.  Poor things.  

“They don’t have a chance,” the sheriff assured me. “No way to find out who they belong to, either.”

The rest of that day I was stressed out and on high alert.   I was sad for the cat, sad that I traumatized my cat-loving daughter.  I am a very conservative driver anyway, but that day I was over cautious, anticipating accidents at every corner.   By the time I finally got home for the night, I was frazzled and worn.  

My daughter greeted me at the door with a look of serious awe.  “Guess what happened to me today?” she said.  “After the cat accident this morning, I was so stressed out.  I drove more cautiously than normal, anticipating the worst all day.  And it happened.  Just as I drove around a blind corner with a lot of trees close to the road, there they were;  two kids weaving around on bikes, coming towards me on the wrong side of the road.   They weren’t paying attention and they didn’t see me until it was too late.  I slammed on my brakes, and one kid just glided past me, mouth open, with horror on his face.  He never even stopped.  If I hadn’t been so freaked out about that cat, expecting the worst, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to avoid hitting them.  Those two kids are alive because that poor stray cat dove in front of us today.”

Coincidence?  I don’t think so.  I think the small things in each day can sometimes be the most significant.  Small things change everything…like a little, grey, abandoned cat who made all the difference for a couple of kids.

Even if they never knew it.

I had help today.  

Good thing, because it took six coats of paint (six!) to cover a brown wall in my kitchen.  
Please don’t ever paint walls brown.  You will live to regret it, six times over.  
Brown tree trunks are nice.  Brown dirt is nice.  Brown chocolate is the nicest of all.
But brown on a kitchen wall is not nice.
Dark and cozy, but not nice.
Buttercups and Daisies are cheery and nice.  Sunshine is the best cheery of all.  
But we don’t have any of those…everything outside here is dead and brown.  It’s that kind of winter. 

I’d like to paint every room in my house a cheerful yellow.  But the six coats of paint required to cover the brown frightens me off.  And also, the family is rebelling.  

“Claude Monet did that,” I tell my kids for the hundredth time, showing them internet photos of Monet’s happy yellow kitchen and cheery farmhouse. “You could grow up to be a famous impressionist painter if you ate your oatmeal in a cheerful yellow room.”

“Please no, Mom.”  they groan. 
I won’t tell you what else they said. 

But it wasn’t cheerful.

I did have help though, as I said.  Somehow, between coats 5 and 6, Dog took a leisurely stroll through the paint tray that I left on the floor.  He then ambled all through the living room.  Thank God it's not carpeted.

So, here we come to the point of my ramblings.  It took me all day to cover up my small brown wall with a clean, joyful color.  It’s a little wall.  An accent wall.  Maybe only 12 feet by 9 feet.  

ALL DAY.  And it was hard work.  I was so tired that while making spaghetti for the crowd, I burned myself three times, the pasta welded together like a brick, and I cried.
So much work and exhaustion.  During all this, in the dead, brown world of Minnesota winter, 

God made it snow.  

In ten minutes, the entire neighborhood, and most of Minnesota, was whitewashed a perfect, pure and glittering white.  Ten minutes.  What irony. 

I try and I try to do my bit…make my corner a little bit brighter and better.  To find the love, joy and peace that I know is hiding there, among the cobwebs and brown paint.  In my own way.  With old paintbrushes and leftover paint which I have to check for lumps because it is really old paint.  My way stinks.

I need to step back, let go of my own ideas, and just let God whitewash my world.   It appears to be outta my league.

Snow.  He covered the dead and brown world with crystal clean purity today… made it all a beautiful place.  

And he didn’t even need my help. 

Cute little bunny!  Watch out!  The big hungry dog is coming!  
That’s what you think.  

But the truth is not always what it seems.  
And you’ll never understand what’s going on in this picture unless I explain it.  

Really.

This is my kids’ cute little bunny, Philomena.  She should have a hutch in the great wild yonder somewhere, but instead, she lives in my living room.  She is a two pound tyrant who likes to be the center of attention, and I’m an eejit..  So she wins.  She lives in a play yard in my living room.

We also live with a yellow lab named Jack.  Ninety pounds of muscle and strength… a big boy with a big bark.
Philomena is mischief.  She sits around like a queen,  shredding whatever she gets her teeth on.  Here she has stolen my daughter’s paper doll, and is giving it a 
toe amputation, er - pedicure. 

My daughter is on her way to take it back.  And here comes Jack. Is he a threat?  Is little tiny Philomena safe?  One might wonder.

But as soon as Jack, the lumbering oaf, sets one yellow foot into Philomena’s perceived territory (this day, it’s the pillow)  Philomena strikes out in growls and foot thumps, charging at the impudent dog who dares offend.  

Jack could eat her in one gulp.

But he is afraid. 

Little Phil has biting incisors of death and destruction, and she ain’t afraid to use ‘em.

So Jack, the ninety pounder, is scared off by the two pound bunny.  He retreats in haste, to lay his big head down in shame and submission.  

Philomena wins again.  

It’s hard for me to admit which of these animals I identify with more…  

I am like Jack.  My problems may be small, but I cannot overcome them at all.  I’m so beaten that I don’t even try.  One Perky little Problem sasses off to me, and I slink away with my tail between my legs, and lie down on the floor.  Beaten.  I don’t even have the gumption to try, to bark, or to lift up my head.  I could be so much more than I am!  I have power!  But I’m down for the count.  Poor me.  I lost the fight before it began.  

Some days, every once in a rare while, and only for a moment, I get to feel like Philomena. Sass and bravado in spades.  I am a two pound fury that frightens away the bad guy.  Problems flee like water down a cliffside.  Who needs strength?  I am Attitude with a capital A, and that’s all I need.  

Watch out, world.  

If only I could be more like Philomena, more often.  Small, but brave.  Petite but powerful.  

Oh, my gosh.  She’s looking at me.  Oh dear.  
Excuse me, but I’m leaving now.  Phil says it’s time to sit on the floor.  So I’m going.  Goodbye.  I'll be brave some other day.

Whew.  It’s over, that’s all I have to say.  But it will happen again, it always does.  I’m talking about the fallout after a holiday.  Thanksgiving was wonderful, and it has taken us more than a week to recover.  Now we’ve had our fun, we’ve had some germs, and we have overcome.  Just in time to prepare for Christmas.

So, let me tell you a little bit about my week.

A virus came home, a stowaway in one child’s backpack along with his leftover lunch.  He shared the virus with his sister.  She shared it with me.  No big deal… it was just a cold with a cough.  It came, it went.  But then it got the Three Musketeers, my littlest ones.   

Bing, Bang, Boom.  

Two stayed home from school all week, coughing like barking sea lions.

By the time Small One started coughing, I was pretty worn out.  Poor thing.  She sat on the couch on a makeshift throne, not wanting jello or tea or soup.  Without a voice.  And sad.  She only wanted to be “On Mama”.  I don’t get much done when a child is “On Mama”.  Eventually, we pushed the couch and the love seat together, and all of us just flopped there with a pile of Christmas books and Kleenex.  They looked at books, I snored and drooled.  The rest of the house fell apart.

Sick kids seldom sleep at night.  Neither do parents of sick kids.  My house is a mess and we are tired.  By the end of the week, everyone got cookies for breakfast.  

Did I mention that the dog just had surgery?  He had a lump on his eyelid that had grown to the size of a marble, and we didn’t want him to lose his eye.  Right before Thanksgiving, he trotted into the vet’s office with his beloved tennis ball in his mouth, and had his surgery.  When I picked him up that afternoon, he came home without his precious ball.  We didn’t give him a new ball until we were sure his eye was healing.  So he was without beloved ball until Friday.

Old dog + antibiotics = you better let Dog out when he wants out.   

Dog went out a lot this week.  

Late, late Friday night, all kids finally slept.  Dog began to whimper in his sleep.  He twitched and he moaned a bit.  But he still was sleeping.  What to do?  Let him sleep… he must be having a dream.  Twenty minutes later, Doug was wide awake, staring at the ceiling, and Dog was still whimpering and fussing in his sleep.  

Doug began to worry about the whole Dog + Antibiotics = you better let dog out when he wants out equation.

So, in the wee hours of the morning, Doug stood at the door, waiting for Dog to come back.  Waiting.  Waiting.  Dog had disappeared into the woods.  Doug waited quietly for fifteen minutes, not wanting to wake anyone up by yelling at Dog to come back.

Then, he came.  Start the Chariots of Fire soundtrack… Picture Dog running, slow motion, jubilant, and victorious, out of the woods.  Back towards the house.  

Ball in mouth.  

He had found it in the woods, where he had inadvertently left it that afternoon.  He was joyful.

He hadn’t needed his woodsy bathroom at all.  Not a bit.

He had just been worried about his ball. Worried enough to have an anxious dream.

But now, Dog was filled with glee.  With his happy, click-y toenails on the floor dance at 4 a.m., Small One woke up.  Here we go again…

When I got up Saturday morning, there was a note on my kitchen table.  It said this:

“NO WON WOTS T BE WES O SEK PRSEN”

Translation:  “No one wants to be with a sick person”. 

Poor Small One.   She had gotten up and written that note in the night, when I was sleeping.  Oh how that little girl can twist my heart up.  She can spend all week “On Mama” if she wants to.  We’ll bake more cookies, batches and batches of cookies, and she can have them every day for breakfast.  Poor Sick Small One on the couch.

Some day soon, she won’t have this virus anymore.  She will get her little voice back, and there will be no sibling chorus of barking sea lions on the living room couch.   The dog will be well.  The Kleenexes will be cleaned up.  

Maybe just in time for Christmas.

Maybe a Frozen theme song with adapted words is just what you need to get on with the shoveling today.  Stay warm!  I'm on hot chocolate patrol.  

I have a question:  How many minutes does it take for peaceful, quiet snow angels to turn into a rumble-tumble snow circus?  Don't blink or you'll miss the transformation.

Artist Daughter wanted a cuddly dog.  A lap dog.  Jack was exactly that, when we brought him home in May.  For hours, they sat together in the entryway, hugging and loving each other.  Then came June, and Jack suddenly transformed, growing into a wild, cavorting, digging, mischievous demon.  Artist Daughter became disillusioned, and abandoned all hope of petting him quietly again.  But the wilder he got, the more Genius Child was captivated.  She liked to run, he liked to run more.  She liked mud, he could dig up the yard faster than a bulldozer, churning sand and black dirt far and wide.  She liked the woods, he raced ahead, emerging with a grin and a face full of prickers.  They were a match made in heaven.

In July, her Grandfather died.  He had been her best friend in the family, her go-to for fun and mischief.  With him gone, and her heart broken, Jack stepped in with all the love in his canine heart.  The two became inseparable.  

He slobbered as he ran, drool flying as he fetched a ball for her a thousand times.  He appreciated her mud pies, rolling in her bakery supplies.  He chewed her dolls’ legs and arms off.  She didn’t mind.  He fit perfectly in the fort she had built in the backyard, and her tears for her grandfather were licked away and lost in the fuzziness of his jumping, joyful form.

We were trapped.

She had transferred all of the love for her grandfather to this wild, wiggling, trouble-making lab.  He dug out of his new kennel.  He dug up our entire backyard, trailing moles and mice by digging trenches twelve feet long. He brought mud in the house, staining the pale carpeting.  He had a sensitive stomach.  The explosive nature of his poor digestive system was so powerful, it could only be cleaned up by Doug.  “I told you!” he roared.  “I knew this would happen!  I do not want to be cleaning up after a dog!”  But there was no way a kid could clean up the messes he made.  Until a vet changed his diet and solved the problem, Doug was the one bathing the dog, bleaching the floors, washing even the walls of our entryway.  
We couldn’t get rid of him, and break her heart again.  

We were doomed.

Shortly after that, Stella was born.  I was at  the hospital a lot.  Preoccupied and absent, Doug and I blundered through the many doctor’s appointments.  She had holes in her heart and a weak immune system.   Germs that others carried with no problem would send her back to the hospital, unable to breathe.  We were told to not let people visit until she was stronger.  But we had a lot of friends who wanted to visit, and deliveries for Doug’s work.  So we hung a sign on the front door explaining that we could have no guests in the house.  Packages could be left on the doorstep.  I had to be down in the city, anyway, and the kids were on their own.  This gave Jack the ultimate freedom to be as wild as he wanted.

He played with the kids every moment they had.  And when they tired out and turned their attention to something else, he destroyed everything within his reach.  Confined to the entryway by a baby gate, he shredded the carpeting right off the steps.  He chewed the wooden bannister, leaving it splintered and gnawed.  He actually chewed holes through the drywall. Three of them.  We were so preoccupied with three holes in our daughter’s heart that there was nothing we could do about the three holes in the drywall.  This was our first house, and neither Doug nor I was prepared to figure out how to fix these kind of things.  We only knew how to paint. They would have to stay that way until our lives settled down.  

Good thing we had that sign on the front door.

But for all the damage he could manage, the dog did take care of the kids.  He loved them and cuddled them and played with them all the while we were gone.  He barked incessantly, ferociously at everything that dared come near our house.  I wasn’t afraid to leave them alone because he defended our home with such  terrifying barks and growls that no one would dare come near. 

We needed him.  

Jack was ours.  God had somehow planned this all out, I was sure.  Jack was everything we needed to fix the sorrow in our daughter’s heart.  He was the best playmate, up for any game, any time. He was scary enough to keep the kids safe when we had to be gone.  He was trouble enough to keep them laughing.  Nothing the kids ever did wrong could compare to the wrongdoings of that naughty dog.  They were safe, all right. 

Thank you, God.
Thank you, Dog.

Dog is part of our Family.  A large part.  And a noisy part.  If I told you everything about Dog at once, you wouldn’t believe me.  Adopting Dog defined the end of an era for our family, the end of life as we knew it.  But of course we didn’t know it then.  

They begged for a dog for two years, before I relented.  Two years.  We tried everything to avoid it. We said no, many times.  But every birthday, every kid, it was the same request.  

“Can we have a dog?”

We bought them toy dogs instead.  Small plastic dogs, dog calendars.  Even large toy dogs, soft and stuffed.  Always toys, never the real deal.  That didn't satisfy their longing hearts for a dog of their own.  So we  started dog-sitting for the neighbors.  We dog-sat for a month for a missionary priest who was on a trip.  And we loved his dog, Gina.  Gina was a very elderly grey-whiskered grandmotherly labrador who heaved great sighs of woe when she needed to go out.  She smelled a bit potent.  She preferred to loaf around on her side in our living room during those weeks, while small children crawled all over her.  The kids were delighted.  They loved her gentle, quiet ways, and I got to see just how much that meant to the kids.  When Gina went back home, their hearts felt broken.  They needed a dog of their own.  We still said no.

So they took a small plastic dog, and placed it on top of the china hutch, as high up to the ceiling, and therefore as close to heaven as they could imagine.  They put a candle next to the dog, and began to pray that God would send them a dog.  They asked me to light the candle.  That made me instantly complicit and defenseless.  I couldn’t tell them NOT to pray.  I was caught.  

“Come on, Doug.  You had dogs.  I had dogs.  My dog had ten puppies!  Kids need a dog.”  I said. 

“I know what’s going to happen!” was his response.  “I’ll end up feeding it and walking it and cleaning up it’s messes.  I don’t want to clean up after a dog!”

But the candle had already been lit.

Meet our Dog.  

He stayed a sweet, fluffy, cuddling angel for about two weeks.  Long enough for all the kids to fall head over heels in love with him, and change life forever.  But that's another story.