Sorry, Cedar. Some things have come up that have me thinking about the monogamous nature of our relationship. Yes, there is someone else. I had considered her a mere distraction until the weekend’s events.

Now, I’m afraid, dear girl, that the center can no longer hold. You have pushed my limits far enough that I’m willing to admit to you that my heart wandered somewhere else these last few weeks.

“Even while we were skijoring?” you ask.

“Well, only when you stopped pulling, bit the harness, and made me ski without poles up the hills (as in like every other minute).”

“Wait. Is there anyone besides Therese? What about that girl Jessie? You seemed more concerned about her than getting me my dinner on Saturday night.”

“Yeah, I can’t get anything past you, can I? But does she eat my shoes?”

“So will they take me skijoring?”

And trees and snow and couches and toys and balls and swimming and did I mention birds? 

Retrospective: A few images from the first part of Feb.

My love has concrete feet
My love’s an iron ball
Wrapped around your ankles
Over the waterfall

Florence and the Machine, “Heavy in your arms”

“…Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”

Robert Frost, “Birches”

Because I have a prosthetic memory, it takes an email to let me know that today is actually Cedar’s 6-month birthday. The AKC informs me she should now be at 60% of her eventual weight. She weighed in at 55.5 lbs last week, which puts her on course to be a well-grounded lady at 92.5 lbs.

Cedar’s weight projections have had me thinking about mass and gravity. Meanwhile, thanks to getting lost by night in The Wild Trees, I’ve found my gaze tilted up a fair bit lately. Is that tree actually climbable? Could one get to branches by climbing the tree next to it? What’s going on in that canopy?

On this morning’s walk, maybe a bit “weary of considerations,” I was thinking about Frost’s speaker in “Birches,” all bound up in nostalgia for youth and acknowledgment of age and limitations. Thanks to my Google prosthesis, I reread the poem when I got home…

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,

I thought about my college buddy, Dudley, a swinger of birches par excellence, who had refined the “sapling grab” where one can launch off a cliff, grab a treetop, and be sort of reverse-pole vaulted back to earth. I laughed at myself nearly 40 years later in “the pathless wood,” thinking about how much energy I put into not giving gravity too much of me to pull on. And I thought briefly about those great lines of consolation, “Earth is the right place for love / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” You don’t get there, to that ease of consolation, without aspiring higher.

Heavy, eh? Meanwhile, Cedar plods along needing no physics or poetry to keep it light.

Shortly before Cedar and I headed out for our morning slog, Facebook did its job of patching up my Swiss cheese memory, and reminded me that 11 years ago today, Tim, Katie and I were exploring this newly cleaned up trail, thanks to our family friend and neighbor through the woods, Kurt Iverson. Tim would later create a geocache in the tree pictured here—a cache which exists yet today.

This morning as Cedar darted around –both of us a little skittish while the city or state fired avalanche-releasing artillery (danger is high right now)–I thought about Cedar’s life as an 11 year-measuring stick. With luck (and maybe a little growth in the common sense department), she’ll live about that long.

Since Tim and Katie posed for that shot, they have lost their mom, and have each, in my estimation, made heroic recoveries. Both are in college, Tim a few months from graduation, Katie finding her unique path in the competitive East Coast college scene. Tim has taken the Putnam math test (three times), and has an entire network of “geocached” (via Strava) wild spots all over the Intermountain West. Katie survived the great Texas freeze of a year ago on a wilderness canoeing trip, spent 30 days at sea, and has continued to hold herself to impeccably high standards of kindness and reason and athleticism. Both are wonders of resilience.

Next to this 600 year-old giant this morning, I wondered where the life of Cedar will take us all. I heard a piece on the radio last night about how to be a kinder neighbor in our troubled times. Get to know “everyone on your block,” was one piece of advice. I laughed at the urban bias of the show–we all know each other (maybe just well enough to still like each other) on our street–but wondered if I ought to substitute getting to know the trees on my “block”.

This morning, stumbling a bit to keep up with Cedar and recalling an old scrap of a Dylan tune that dislodged from somewhere in my brain, “Time passes slowly up here in the mountains,” I can’t tell what’s fast or slow, but I’m glad this one tree (with help from Facebook) has cached a memory for us.