Another busy week has been flying by.
I took a real day off on Sunday, though. Well, most of a day off. Several hours, anyway. Tree guy and I ventured down to the Leelanau/Benzie county line to explore several little lakes: Armstrong, Brooks, and Pearl. My favorite was Armstrong, the smallest of the three. There was a public access but no dock. Very few houses. A very peaceful setting. Just standing and gazing felt restorative.
Eventually, turning northward again, we stopped in Cedar for Polish food from Tom Koch’s Polish Kitchen food truck. Wow! Pierogis with jalapeño popper filling! And Tom’s dill pickles are the best I’ve ever had—just dill enough, with a fresh, satisfying, crispy crunch.
Lakes and lunch were so exciting that we had to rest a while when we got home again in the early afternoon.
Monday, though, was a super-busy day off, as Mondays usually are. It began with an agility session for Sunny and me, only our second this summer. Good to get back in the swing! Then there was housework, laundry, shopping, mowing—the usual Monday routine. Up early on Tuesday, I had plenty of time and leisure to refresh my memory of The Vacation, by Robert ‘Carlos’ Fuentes, over coffee, even time to write up some questions to ask him in our onstage conversation that evening at the Willowbrook.
What fun! Carlos is such a lively guy, with such a happy, positive outlook on life! I only hope the audience enjoyed our onstage conversation as much as we did.
After a long-anticipated event, I’m always happy to have a quiet morning, and Wednesday morning’s fresh, cool, still air made being outdoors the best possible way to start the day. I’d only had enough energy to read about four pages of Mistress Masham’s Repose before falling asleep the night before, but when Sunny was ready to get up and go! her momma wasn’t far behind. Coffee, toast, yogurt, and a handful of berries right off the canes was breakfast. I’ve made two batches of jam, and the freezer is still full of berries, so now I can indulge in desultory snacking as the annual harvest diminishes.
Although my new domestic partner is also a reader, my reading has slowed down with another human being in the house, but somehow I managed to finish a couple of books over the weekend, one long one I’d been working on for weeks, Spirit of Place: The Making of an American Literary Landscape, by Frederick Turner, another a short, quick novel from the first half of the 20th century, Edith de Born’s The House in Vienna. Then I thought I would re-read all of Jim Harrison’s Brown Dog stories, but I’m bogging down already in the second one. They really are “guy” stories! And while I may be a tomboy, in some ways, I have never been a “guy” and never wanted to be one. When I said as much one afternoon, Tree Guy reminded me of what a wonderful novel Dalva is. “Right. And that’s not a Brown Dog story,” I reminded him.
My attention was not held.
The other day I received an email—no, actually, it was caught in my spam filter, but I did glance down the list of spam and saw the heading—entitled, “Can we be honest with you?” I don’t know what it was about. I did not read further. But the question stuck in my head. CAN whoever-it-was be honest? One hopes so! Some people, it seems, are incapable of honesty. No doubt the writer intended to ask, “May we…?” Well, why would I want to receive lies? If asked, “May we send you a garbage can of disinformation?” naturally I would decline. But then, as I say, I only looked as far as the heading before deleting what had already been caught by my spam filter.
Life with Dog
Zen-girl, a.k.a. Sunny Juliet, is blissfully ignorant of economics and politics. Sometimes her humans linger over coffee for what she considers an unnecessary length of time, but the corner of a piece of toast now and then is all the bribe she needs to be patient a little longer. I asked a friend how his new little dog was doing, and he said the dog is providing him with a lot of “satisfaction,” in that he is “good company."
When Sunny and I resumed agility sessions after a three-week hiatus, a hiatus during which the dog momma completely forgot about getting out and setting up the weave poles, the most challenging station of any course for our team, Sunny did not chide me for my mistake but did the best weaving she could, as if we’d been practicing every day! She is in the moment, whatever the moment may be. Of course, she doesn’t have bills to pay or meals to plan or laundry to do, and she doesn’t vote and never will. She’ll never apply for a paying job or move into her own apartment or even read a newspaper. All she has to do is be ready to jump in the car when the momma asks, “Go for a ride?” Or come in the door after our evening walk when she hears the word, “House!” A pretty simple life.
No human life can ever be as simple as a dog’s life, but their companionship makes our lives all the more worth living. Really--what would we do without them?
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