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).
_Lancet_, March 21, 1970
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.
(The quality part of this clip captured by Katie Bausler, whom we apparently film-bombed.)
Earlylast 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.
Approaching the Dutch Harbor airport, about 15 minutes out from the aircraft-carrier-sized landing strip blasted out of mountain during World War II, the cabin full of rowdy fisherman often got silent as the plane dropped, shuddered, slid and battled wind shear. Profanity changed to prayer. I’ve done more “touch and gos” in 737s and smaller planes there than I hope to do in the rest of my life.
I was once flying down in “America” and a couple of off-duty pilots in the seats in front of me were talking about the approach to “Dutch.” I had to intervene. I told them I had lived there and asked them if they hated that route. They responded “No, we love it…” in near unison, and one of them explained “We get to fly the airplane.”
Lately I’ve been admiring Cedar’s sheer joy in using her body—usually in the snow—and have been thinking she’s out there flying the airplane—doing what she’s designed for, whether it’s running alongside me skiing for a couple of hours straight, wrestle-playing with other dogs, sniffing stories out of the woods, or swimming in the ocean or snow drifts. Using her dog body the way it was designed makes her visibly happy. Tail and body wagging, tongue out, nose down, and whole body somehow smiling.
A few happy dog moments musically enhanced by Mason Jennings…
I’ve been skate skiing almost daily and I have to say that getting in the groove, letting my body take over, shutting off my noisy brain, feels a bit like flying the airplane, too.
But like that famous ground crew guy who stole the plane, neither of us has really considered how to land it.
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.
Post-Sandy Beach truck nap, with a light snore sound track.
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.
Thirty ONE degrees….The screen should say, “Check climate collapse before committing to ski races.”
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.
Looks like the real fun should start at around 27k. What was I thinking?
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.
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.
Therese JohaugMy shoes
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?”
Diggins gets Silver! First non-European on the 30k podium, ever.
I’m a day or so away from not posting at all this week, which would be a first in Cedar’s 19 weeks of being blogged. Methinks the world would still wobble around on its axis, and that my audience out there, if there is one–Have I lost you yet, Mom?–would be okay, too.
On the way to Sandy Beach.
Here in Week 27 of Cedar life, we’ve moved out of cute puppy mode, and into “How much exercise can you possibly give me, Dad?” mode.
While AKC tells me I should be brushing her teeth, trimming her nails, and playing “safe but fun interactive games,” I’m working on keeping up with her exercise needs, and more solid recall, especially around distractions. We’re not that far from bear emergence, and yet it seems we’re a country mile from a solid HEEL when we really need it.
So, we muddle onward, swimming with less panic, not chewing too much stuff up, skijoring with only an occasional nip of my ski tips, and sometimes even listening in the presence of other dogs.
It’s 11 am and she’s snoring, so score one for Dad.
My friend Arthur has many special talents. He likes to know your birthday, and if you ask him, he’ll tell you what day of the week you were born. When I came across this relatively recent windfall, I imagined it might have germinated 500 years ago. According to Arthur, February 12, 1522 was a Sunday. I haven’t asked him if used the Gregorian or Julian calendar, and the whole plot thickens when we venture into how the Tlingit folk who were the only ones that might have watched it grow as a sapling marked the years. I doubt they would have tagged her with a Western day of the week, but I’ll name her Sunday Hemlock, Síndi Yán, because Arthur also likes to commemorate those who have passed on by saying “In loving memory of____ (the person’s name)___” to the universe. I appreciate that.
Arthur
Those early passerbys might have let her grow knowing some day she would be valuable for tanning hides, dying fabric for robes, making spoons, halibut hooks, dipnets, spear shafts, and combs. They might have selected some of her branches for collecting herring roe, or used her needles in salve for burns. Or they might have had other ways of valuing her.
Síndi Yán lived two-thirds of her life before the A’akw Kwáan folks living under her had any contact with Europeans.
Cedar and I climbed up on her stump, still redolent from the fall, on Saturday. Cedar was delighted to go off trail and explore the crown with me, where we discovered that Síndi broke into two when she hit another downed tree, after scarring some nearby younger ones.
I’d love to know more about what Ms. Yán experienced in her lifetime.
I’ve just started Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory, and am thinking today of these opening lines.
The tree is saying things, in words before words.
It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.
It says: A good answer must be created, many times, from scratch.
It says: Every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it. There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find. A thing can travel everywhere, just by moving still.
Richard Powers, _The Overstory_
I know Arthur, who specializes in questions, would agree about the value of a fresh answer, from scratch. I, on the other hand, am just beginning to form my questions about the natural and human history of our back yard.
I’m glad Cedar is along to nudge me off my mind’s beaten paths.
You must be logged in to post a comment.