Today, while Cedar and I were taking a couple of easy laps around Mendenhall Lake, my friend and I had this text exchange. 

I’d confess that Cedar is doing a bit of wound licking these days if it weren’t for the fact that I can’t find any wounds. 

She licks her paws more than is normal, that I know. It happens both during beach walks on the sand and during and after skis. 

Tonight I spent a bit of time Googling. The AKC suggests that she could have allergies, parasites, arthritis, or other wounds—in turn suggesting that she could have a neglectful owner. To my credit, I have a vet appointment for her tomorrow. 

My research led to a rabbit hole (or maybe a fishing hole?) which yielded this gem of a 1970 letter to an editor of a scientific journal (who in titling the piece flashed some dry humor).

Sir—(ahem)… I shall let you know if any of my own actual abrasions are henceforth offered to the dog (who I’m quite sure would take up the offering). 

Meanwhile, back to my buddy’s text, I may be recovering and training at the same time, and I should confess that Cedar is helping, even if it means her paws take a licking. 

Early last Saturday morning, the young people I work with ran a “writing and conversation event” they called “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”. They prompted us to write about a time we gave or received love. With Cedar at the door, how could I not go there?

DOG COMMANDS

When I greet Cedar the dog in the morning, 
her body swaying, her amber eyes hugging me, 
I try to remember 
She is preparing me to love on this day,
A day which will include many things not to love. 
There will be that email that makes me furrow my brow, 
Or check the sports scores.
There will be an insurance issue and a budget question
Or a forgotten conversation.
There will be aching joints and reminders 
That I live on a one way street.
So what will those amber eyes tell me?
My feeble human translation:
This moment is worth wagging for.
People will smile when they see me.
And I can do the same (even without amber eyes),
Which will tell me I don’t have to use my voice to love,
That instead, just being present—
And not too much of a pain in the ass—
Can be a way to love.
She teaches me
We were built for love; 
It’s what our hearts and minds and bodies want to do. 
She stands by the door.
“Let’s do it,” I say to her. 
She tilts her head in reply, as if to ask,
How many more times she’ll have to try to teach me
The same damned commands. 

Today’s lesson from the Big Tree walk is a simple one. Spruce and hemlock self-prune. It occurred to me as Cedar and I hit trail (with some lovely fresh snow) this morning, that these old boys and girls are adept at whatever the opposite of nostalgia is. They don’t cling needlessly to their past; they launch for their future, dropping their lower branches as they go. 

I was reading this morning that there’s a sort of cost-benefit analysis going on here. While curiosity might pay to the raven, sentimentality pays no dividends for our local spruce and hemlock. Don’t pull your weight? We’ll just cut you off from nutrients and engage “cellular senescence.” In addition to being a much prettier sounding word than “cladoptosis,” senescence allows some juicy anthropomorphism. Maybe we can age with such sibilant grace, leaving behind things that no longer serve us and growing, still, with full-on optimism for the future. 

But even when the tree cuts off the goodies from its lower branches, it has no way to clean house. Like the rest of us, it awaits the days or the years’ surprises, all the forces of the forest itself—rain, snow, insects, fungi, to… as President Biden implored us last week, “finish the job.” 

Cedar, by the way, has finished the job of being full grown. She’s eighteen months, with no senescence in sight—only sighs that the walk is done. 

Cedar’s not going to ski today. We walked and she swam Sandy Beach instead. So nice to have a little springy-ness to the light today. 

At spin class this morning, I joked with the instructor, who takes pleasure in our pain, that I was tapering for the upcoming ski with Tim, and was going to take it easy. Her response was that my taper would begin immediately after class.

Just now I looked up the concept of “tapering.” (The sage reader will note the question mark on the title. If I admitted to tapering, full-stop, I would have to be accountable to have actually trained.) The good—and I’m sure well-tapered—folks at Runners’ World suggest one begin tapering three weeks before a big race. The big problem there–due to snow conditions, and the aforementioned punctuation problem–I haven’t really even been training for three weeks. 

My retort to the spin instructor was that I started tapering when I hit 50. And that’s probably true. No more running. Not much hockey, or my joints hurt. Alcohol’s down to every great once in a while. Hiking? Just not too much downhill… Sex? Never mind. You get the point. Aging is its own form of tapering, and one that I have been practicing with a marathoner’s diligence. So I’ll be fine, right?

But wait, a taper is a candle, too. Let me just offer a small flicker of light. Here is my face after the only other ski race I’ve ever done… an 11k. Now imagine it four times as wince—y. Once again, Cedar has the right idea.

Here in the rainforest, there’s a world—or at least a season—of difference that comes with one degree of warmth or cold. We dropped a degree and it’s winter again.

For now. The timing is fortunate, I think, because I’m supposed to meet Tim in less than a week for the 40k Ski to the Sun marathon in the Methow Valley. 

Even though the conditions here are beautiful today, I’m thinking of taking today as a rest day after a hard week of skiing. Even the pooch seems a pit pooped.