A to Z "P"

P...puppies and paw prints.

I have to share this story--a goosebumps story. Last Wednesday I got home from walking the community trail after work, and I noticed that the daffodils and jonquils were blooming behind the house--the flowerbed by Pokey's grave. "Poke" was my old Border Collie Springer Spaniel mutt mix.  He was 15 years old when I made the most painful decision of my life--to have the old boy put down.  I cried for weeks. I didn't think the puffiness would ever leave my eyes. It did, but the hurt never left my heart. 

So, I went back to admire the flowers last Wednesday, and as happens, I started talking to Pokey. I guess in a weird way, I feel guilty about Leo-- the new little puppy who came into our lives just seven short weeks ago, desperately needing a home. He was such a tiny baby, only five weeks old. My guilt? Because Pokey was this fantastic dog that I didn't think I could ever move forward beyond. Anyway, I told Poke while I stood by his grave, that Leo was pretty neat, and that he reminds of me of Poke. And then I said I wondered if Pokey sent him, or if it's Pokey's spirit returned.

That evening, hellacious storms blew in, bringing wind driven rain that drenched the front porch, even under the roof. About 9:00 I put Max and Maggie out to pee. Max is our 120 lb rescue Rotty mix, and Maggie is our 70 lb rescue Rotty mix. I left them back in shortly after. They were never set loose to get into anything.  They wanted outside again  about an hour later. Lots of wind, rain, rumbling thunder and things outside they wanted to get a look at I figured. It was an unsettling evening.

When I stepped out onto the porch, I saw white paw-prints on the step and on the porch just at the top of the steps in front of the door. The wind was driving the rain again, so I left the dogs back in. I thought maybe (but doubtful) that they'd stepped in something-- and whatever it was had to be next to the step or the porch, so I went back outside to see if I could see something--I wanted to get it out of the dogs' (and the porch's) harms way. Nope. There wasn't anything, including paw prints, leading up to the steps.  But there were paw prints on the steps and the porch.

I went back inside and got distracted. The next morning when Dave and I stepped outside onto the still wet wet porch he looked down and asked what the dogs stepped in, or whose dog had made the footprints. I told him about the night before. I grabbed the porch broom and tried to sweep the print off of the sopping wet wood. It didn't brush off. It looked like dogs had stepped in white stain.

I sort of (and sort of not) tongue in cheek suggested to Dave that Pokey had come back to visit--to see Leo.  Dave commented that some of the prints were too big to have been made by Pokey's paws. So I told him that maybe Gus--our 12 year old Husky Rotty mix who had to be put down 8 months before Pokey, had come back to visit too. 

Dave and I scratched our heads and got on with our day.

When I got home from work, Dave told me that he had looked all over the yard, the driveway. There was nothing else, no other white paw-prints. We didn't talk about it much after that until Sunday night while driving home, out of the blue I asked him, "What made those paw-prints?  They were made in a storm of blowing, drenching, rain." He still has no idea either.

Crazy. 

I'm Thomas--the doubter. I want irrefutable evidence. I want empirical evidence. I want to believe without seeing...but just can't. I'm still looking for a plausible answer...

When all of the logical, rational, and tangible explanations are exhausted, don't we have to begin looking at the illogical, irrational, and intangible ones?

Did our old dogs come back to visit?

A to Z "B"

A country childhood must surely put nearly anyone in close proximity to a barn.  They are pretty interesting, if you think about it.  Consider the materials they are built of--the old ones relied on local materials.  To some degree, you can judge the age of a barn by it's structure.  The roof-lines of barns in snowy areas might be designed to carry a snow load. Most of the local barns are hillside barns, as is the one of the farm I grew up on. That particular barn was constructed of logs, and had a barn-stone (quarried sandstone) foundation.

And in those country barns, sometimes you find a beenest. White faced hornets and yellowjackets are two types that often built inside old farm buildings.  And where you find bee nests, you find children who get stung because they do foolish things, like mess with the bee nests.

Behind the barn where I grew up, there were old ponds in the woods on the neighbor's property.  The ponds were edged in cattails, and were more swamp than open water.  The tree canopy was dense, and the woods were dark. So were the swampy ponds. My grandmother told us that was where the boogeyman lived. That was enough to keep us away from any danger of drowning. ~laughing~  Well played, Grandma! The creepy factor followed me the whole way to adulthood.  The really funny things is, almost 15 years ago, we bought property to build a house. The boogieman woods is part of it.  I've come to love the woods, but you still couldn't pay me enough to pitch a tent down there and spend the night in it.

Homemade butter, buttermilk, and homemade bread were part of every lunch. 


And berry picking was part of every summer.  And if you've ever done it, you probably know...it gets into your veins.  I loved to do it as a kid, and even slipping on the downhill side of fifty years, I still love to do it. One of my very best memories is of a summer day, getting home from work early, grabbing the berry pails, and we took off, me, my three children, and two dogs. The sun was shining, the wind was blowing, and we picked wild black raspberries for hours. The kids' faces were stained purple from berries and we were weary when we made our way back to the house.  All that winter--and even still, when I open a jar of black raspberry preserves, I take a sniff and smile. I swear, I can smell that day, feel the warmth of the sunshine and the wind blowing, and I hear my children laughing.

Another day in the country...a good life.

A to Z: Art...For the Sake of Art.

Art for the sake of art.  It popped up this week.

 Once, in a conversation after seeing the movie, "The Hunger Games."  Someone mentioned to me that there are angry book fans raising a ruckus about the casting.  I am not getting into politics. Just wondering about what happens when we become art critics?

What little switch in our minds, gets flipped?  When we become critics, does it remove the sense of pure joy of viewing art?  At experiencing art?  I know that when I am critiquing writing, I step back and disengage the part of my brain that is given to pleasure, laughter, and fun.

I am not alone; humans are like that. When we becomes critics, we become business people. We flip switches in our brains, becoming judgmental, analytical even...  "Just the facts, ma'am..."   We thrust ourselves toward a place of understanding.  But this type of understanding lacks philosophical leanings.


I thought that the movie was good. The sense of story was excellent.  It was all Hollywood, of course.  But, I didn't pay to see a movie filmed by a group of locals from Mainstreet, Podunk, USA.    Hollywood is over the top, big-budget, selling a vision of a book-- to people who don't read, along with the readers.  The readers, the purists whose first view of the story was in their heads-- painted there by the words of the author.  And...as often is the case for us readers, it is vastly different than the view Hollywood paints.  Each are lovely, in their own place.

At work, the Hunger Games art-dissection popped up again.  I had to chuckle when a friend,Carla, said, "It's art. Stop picking it apart."  Which reminded  me of one of the clearest lessons I was ever given about art.

I wasn't in school yet.  In the bedroom I shared with seven siblings, there were two pieces of "art" hanging on the walls.  One, an old print of a river scene.  Nothing about it was odd--a canoe, water, reflections. Everything was in  its place and as it should have been.

The other?  Well now...that was a different story.  There was a Pixie...I assumed it was a girl. In retrospect, perhaps it wasn't, but that was not my concern.  What bothered me, ceaselessly, was that her green stockings turned into green shoes with curled toes.  There was no defining line between the two. Were they leotards? Did she not have shoes on? How could the leotards have curled tips?  Why doesn't she wear shoes? Why, if they are green socks, do they not go up to her skirt?

After relentlessly badgering my older sisters about it (I think since I was old enough to ask questions) , one day--and one question too many, one of them--a teenager then, said, "It's art. Just shut up and enjoy it."

Ha!  There you have it. Art...for the sake of art.

Learning Problem Solving (from a four-year-old :-)

Problem solving.

I am not referring to math problems.  I mean everyday problems...situations that pop up unexpectedly.  Sometimes when we get older, we get into a pattern-- more of a holding pattern, when it comes to problems.  You'd think that age and practice would have taught us to look at things from different angles.  But all too often we become frustrated and then fail to use our creativity to our greatest advantage.

Maybe part of it is because we get so serious about problem solving. We get tense, and that shuts down our creative natures.  Maybe we are in too much of a hurry--trying to force an immediate solution.

And maybe we have learned a non-productive way to approach problem-solving.  The way we think does affect everything. One time I even started to read a self-help book that taught people how to think differently.  It appears there is a market for it--so there is probably a need?

And then, maybe...just maybe, it is a little bit of all of that.

Nattie Friday is my favorite day of the week. We like to have little projects. Sometimes we bake, sometimes we do a craft...but this past week, we dumped out a box of  Cheez-its brand crackers--the Scrabble ones.  And then we proceeded to spell words.

Nattie is a bright girl, and can name most of the letters when she sees them. Recently empowered by her preschool lesson on the letter "A", which somehow made it official that she did know what the "A" was, Nattie went in search of letters familiar to her, naming each as she found them. A great orange heap of letters, facing this way and that, and upside down, slowed her progress.

Amid giggles, we discussed what the letters "said". That was my word from my early school days in the mid 1960s.  Now we all know that letters don't really "say" anything. :-)

First up was her name.

                                                                                                      
Next up, of course, was her mom's name, which was a breeze--even with three of the magical "A"s she had just learned.  Next? Her dad's name. Then we searched and searched, but somehow, the letter "H" was not in the box! It had become impossible to spell her father's name!

Natalie said, very matter-of-factly (I know-- "matter-of-factly" is a rather questionable use of artistic word license ;-) "We should spell daddy, because that is what I call him...because...he IS my daddy."  Great suggestion! We had "Daddy" sorted out and arranged in a couple of minutes. Then we went in search of m-o-m-m-y.      Uh oh!  In that big stack, Nattie and I could not find 3 "M"s...only two.  While sorting through them, Nattie stopped and said, "Grammie, we can turn a "W" upside down."   :-) Yep, the second "M" in "Mommy" is a "W" turned upside down. 

I am not only impressed with how quickly she solved those problems, but am fascinated at watching human development blossom in front of me. She is just past turning four years old. This problem solving was not taught to Nattie; it was likely, innate.

I never finished reading the self-help book, by the way.  It seems that humans arrive in this world with some ability to solve problems, and then lose it along the way while we are being taught the way to solve problems.

And, to add just a bit more fun to the day, and since the crackers were stale (I found them in the back of the cupboard) Nattie was allowed to toss some of them to the dogs--who, as made obvious in the photo, adore her.  And when she is pitching food to them, she is a god among humans. :-)