Maybe I’ll get Cedar a pair of binoculars for Christmas. And myself a bird guide. On today’s walk I tried to document some of her stop, drop, and think moments. (You should be Christmas shopping or something. Not much to see here, but it makes me smile, every day.)

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this nuisance dog;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Gloucester, Shakespeare’s Richard III (Cedar Folio)

What is a blogger to do when at least half of his audience comes home?

Hand her the leash.

Katie’s out somewhere with Cedar-girl, toting her around town with her also-newly-arrived-home college friends. I suppose the comparison is a bit dramatic, but I’ll make it anyway (since I may have no readers left): I feel a bit like a singlehanded sailor hitting port for the first time in months.

I walk across the kitchen. No footsteps. I go to the bathroom. Solitude, from sit to flush. I come home from a hard ski (and frozen locks and help from amazing Juneau friends as frozen Tom was starting to become a thing), and I don’t have to go for a walk in the darkness. Hot tub and quiet. Whoa.

And Tim hasn’t stepped on her or run her over yet. Although he did smash her head in the front door and accidentally lock her in the garage.

It’s cold here. Clear for days and real winter. And so nice to have both kids home. I’ve been brooding a bit–must be some combo of the short days and my Norse genes–so it’s nice to just take inventory of all the goodness.

In case my other reader (who bears responsibility for those Norse genes) tunes in, I thought I’d share a few moments from the past couple of days, made glorious, honestly, by the return of the kids.

Below is a slide show, Mom. Click the arrows to see more photos.

A Time to Talk

When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.

—Robert Frost - 1874-1963

I get it, Bob. Yeah, you oughta quit hoeing to talk to a friend. But maybe come out beyond the wall? Those old New Englanders…

I want to quickly chronicle how much I love Cedar helping to create times to talk, and not just between the two of us.

Today we left the driveway and talked to Kelli, out shoveling snow away from the storm drains for the inevitable slushageddon when temps rise. We loaned her a trickle charger for her Subaru, buried in a couple of feet of snow. Down the hill we saw Buck, who must have hidden the broom he was using on his driveway since it was bare concrete. Buck caught us up on his remote cabin construction while Cedar had a silent scent conversation with his new pup Mini via splotches of yellow snow.

Couple of waves to the grader operator (hoping he might take mercy on an old man with a cute pup as he headed up our way to make the daily massive snow berms across driveways), a short walk in the woods, a quick wave to Eliza, dog Jeff’s mom, and then up the hill to see Nikki and dog Lucy. Lucy had emphatic words for Cedar in the form of some old lady growls, but Nikki soothed the moment with love for Cedar, whom she had never met. Nikki and I talked about her recent deer hunt and swapped a few stories of trying to gauge a deer’s size in the woods. As we chatted we watched a neighbor hotrodding around in a Bobcat deftly moving snow. Turns out it was friend Peter, just back from Death Valley, catching up on his own snow removal and piling up a whole lot of neighborly good karma. Smiling as always, Peter made a few seconds to talk, but had to get the machine back to the rental soon, so hurried away, but not before he offered to come over and move snow for us. Across the street to Tom’s, shoveling, as always in shorts, where we chatted briefly about Cedar as shovel-helper, how retrievers need jobs, and whether I might like to accompany him and and another friend on a future hunt. Cedar waited mostly patiently, watched birds and people, and had her own private scent conversations all the while.

One more neighborly moment to relate, thanks to Cedar. In the last few minutes of light yesterday, she and I set off on the big tree trail. I had a headlamp in my pocket, but as usual, when we got under the canopy, my eyes adjusted and the snow depth lessened. We cruised along until we were surprised by a Labradoodle, plodding along in the half-light on the packed snow trail. When neighbor Michelle came into view, I recognized the Doodle, but not the Husky who was with Michelle. She didn’t know where the collar-less Husky had come from.

Cedar and I forged on, and Michelle and two dogs went back the way we had come. About 15 minutes up the trail, Cedar and I heard someone shouting from the woods downhill and saw a headlamp bobbing in the rough terrain. We shouted back and forth a bit and finally met up on the trail. I called Michelle, who had the Husky safe with another neighbor, and dog-tracker Abby and I began walking back to find her pooch. Since it’s Juneau, we started laying down lines of connection. Abby asked if I were Katie’s dad (one of my two best credentials), so she was in with me no matter what. With Cedar darting in and out of the headlamp, we had a nice conversation, talking about her experience growing up in Alaska, about coaching and running and skiing and careers. It wasn’t until she said her dog’s name, Remy, that I realized I had met them both just last weekend on a ski trail.

Back to Bob Frost and his stone wall. Today while skiing I visited with a friend who casually remarked that her daughter would find her way into the adult world “on her own timeline”. Her relaxed faith launched some mental-emotional thing for me that felt a bit like the giant slabs of snow sloughing off of the big trees right now. I fell in love with Juneau in my youth precisely because people were on a different timeline than I felt back in New England. Collectively, folks didn’t seem to be in a big rush to get to college and declare what they would be in the world at 17 or 18. I remember being blown away, at 19, sitting at a bar with fishermen and women, bankers, loggers, lawyers, and through my young eyes, no one had more status than the other. Except maybe the bartender. And the guitarist with the heavenly voice.

Decades later, as Cedar leads me to saunter around our little nook of suburbia right here against the wild country, I welcome the times to talk she creates, the friendly visits, sans stone walls.