Peasy Tales: From Sarah to Peasy

A friend sent me the link to an article on pet loss – and even as I type that phrase, “pet loss,” it seems wrong, the words trivial and inadequate to express an experience more properly called heartbreak, as the article describes so well. 

 

I’ve reached the stage now, though, where I can talk about Sarah and her death and her absence to old customers who visit the bookstore. I see some of them looking for her bed under the table by the window, and I see their hesitation. They’re afraid to ask. It’s all right. I can talk about her. But when I read this article, I cried once again. There will never be another Sarah. Sometimes, I admit, I think that even as I watch little Peasy bounding joyfully ahead of me on our morning walk-run.

 

Some people who have lost a beloved dog say they’ll never have another because they don’t want to – can’t -- go through the losing again. I understand what they’re saying. We all grieve and recover differently, whatever the nature of the loss. The Artist and I had each other after we lost Sarah -- but still, I just could not stand not having a dog. 

 

Sarah had been a focus for the two of us outside ourselves, the third member of the pack when we were on the road, and my constant companion in the bookstore, as well as on outdoor explorations and rambles. My winter ghost town hiking partner and neighbor continued to invite me to join her with her two dogs, but without a dog of my own I felt incomplete, a kind of walking-wounded ghost myself.

Sarah at the bookstore

Sarah in the car

with friends in Arizona

with Michigan neighbors in youth -- all three gone now

So the Artist and I began the search, hampered because what we really wanted was another Sarah: female Aussie-border mix with big, soulful brown eyes, soft, floppy ears, and a beautiful plume of a tail. Maybe something smaller…. It didn’t matter, anyway, because “our” next dog was never waiting for us in the shelters we visited, and we couldn’t afford to go traveling the country in search of a purebred Aussie.

 

Well, you know how the story turned out, so I’ll cut to the chase. You know (and if you don’t, you can revisit it here and here and and on and on) how I took a chance on the dog no one wanted, the skittish little boy we thought was a girl, a skinny, wild thing with only a stub where his tail should be. You might remember that it wasn’t love at first sight but that I did grow to love the little guy, despite his “issues” and the challenge of getting him through and past his fears and defensive responses. 

Early on, our outdoor rambles with Therese and Buddy and Molly were a great success. Another hurdle was the cross-country car trip back to Michigan, something the Artist and I had both dreaded, fearing the worst from our special-needs dog, but he was as good a traveler as Sarah had been. 

His issues remain, however, and we have to make special arrangements when out-of-town guests are expected. Sarah loved the whole world and always welcomed company. Not Peasy. He was and remains wary and nervous with strangers, apparently as concerned for our safety as for his own. He is going to need a lot more practice to develop anything that could be called “social skills” with human beings outside his own family.

 

But he loves having a family and a home, and when the three of us come together again after the end of a human work day away from home, he nearly turns himself inside-out with happiness, dancing around us and emitting tiny little yippy moans of ecstasy. We have grown accustomed to his little ears, his amber eyes, and his goofy little stub of a tail. As I say, he has established himself in the winter ghost town neighborhood pack, too, and proved himself like Sarah in being a dog for all seasons.

 

Peasy is not a replacement for Sarah, and no dog could ever replace her. She was the dog of a lifetime, for both the Artist and for me. But little Pea and the Artist are finally bonding (it took them a while to begin, long after Pea and I had fallen in love with each other), so that coming-together at the end of the human workday is joyful for all three of us.

 

And while what my friend Helene said of people, that “No one replaces anyone else,” is true of dogs, also, it came to me the other day that a large part of my comfort and happiness with Peasy comes from the fact that he has displaced not Sarah but the pain left by Sarah’s death. There has been no empty time to drag around and sob over the dog no longer with me since needy little Pea came into my life. 

 

Yes, he needed me. He needed a family and a home, no one else wanted him, and without me it’s likely he would still be in prison, if alive at all. 

Good wait!

But I needed him, too. I needed a dog that needed attention and training and love and exercise, a little being I could bring out of the darkness and into the light so that we could explore the big bright world together. He was my dog when I adopted him, the Artist emphasized. The Artist could have lived “dog-free” without our practically perfect girl and would certainly not have voted to take on a “dog with issues.”  Even I have had periods of hopelessness when Peasy backslides and shows one of us his Mr. Hyde face -- which happens less and less frequently as time goes by, thank heaven! So, all in all, it was months before the Artist said, in a tone that managed to combine affection and resignation, “Peasy, I guess you’re our dog now.” 

 

We have challenges yet to overcome with this guy, but he has definitely won a place in our hearts. It isn’t Sarah’s place. It’s his own place.

My Darling, Sweetest Girl

Sarah was adopted from the Cherryland Humane Society in Traverse City, Michigan, in January of 2008, at the age of four months.

Sarah died at 8 p.m., November 17, in her winter home of Dos Cabezas, Arizona, aged 13 years, with her family at her side. 

 

Rest in peace, darling, sweetest girl – you will live in our hearts forever.

 

“Reading the Landscape” in Our Different Ways

Sarah puts nose to the ground every day

A recent groundswell of interest in Sarah’s winter doings provokes this post. I won’t presume to speak in Sarah’s voice, as she is a very quiet, nonvocal dog. She gives a single low woof! if she feels the need to alert us to something, and we always pay attention then, or she might whine, very softly, if she wants something and feels we are not paying attention, but that’s about it. So hope a few photographs and brief remarks will fill the bill and make Sarah’s fans happy.

Sarah and I go out exploring the high desert near our winter cabin at least twice a day, morning and mid- to late afternoon. (Her evening sortie is brief, for utilitarian purposes only.) For me, during these expeditions, vision is the primary sense, hearing the second. I can’t present to you the morning song of the mockingbird, the happy cranking of the cactus wren, of the thump! of a vehicle going over the cattle guard at one end or the other of the ghost town, but here is one of the kind of sights that catches my eye. 

It’s different with Sarah. Her nose is #1 sense organ, and she employs it constantly! Sometimes I have a visual hint to tell me what she might be smelling. For instance, I might see a track that she thoroughly sniffs. Or when she applies her nose to the end of a twig or grass stem, I can infer that some animal recently brushed against it. —But what kind of animal? Cow? Coyote? Javelina? Bobcat? Her nose must detect so many distinct scents!

If Sarah were at all verbal, I’m sure she would share her discoveries. As it is, she collects her impressions, and I collect mine, but she and I do enjoy one another’s company while exploring, each in her own manner. 

Wishing you a day of good smells!!!

Invisible Passage

When Sarah was a puppy

Time. We don’t see or hear or taste it and feel no rush of wind as it races by (or as we race through it), but traces of its passage impose on consciousness. People kept remarking on Sarah’s greying face and how she’s looking like an old dog. “No, that’s just her coloring,” I kept saying. “She’s only eight years old.” Then I looked back at pictures of the puppy we brought home in January of 2008. Her face does have more grey in it. Sigh!

Winter. Would it ever arrive? Would we have winter this year? We’d all begun to wonder, especially after Tuesday night’s historic overnight high temperature for northern Michigan in December. It’s still too soon to say what January will bring or even how the rest of December will play out, but while roses were in bloom yet on Thursday, the wind was chill, and there were some snow flurries. Seasons are such mysteries. Their formal divisions – based on movements of heavenly bodies – often seem irrelevant to life on earth, which is always particular to where one is living that life.

Business. As elusive as time, as uncertain as winter! I don’t expect lines to form at midnight, crowds camping out on the sidewalk, impatient for my bookstore to open. Mine is not that kind of business, Northport not that kind of town. My in-store December sale, though, is a good one: 20% off new books in stock, 50% off used books in stock. Consignment items (few) are the only books not discounted this month. Everything else is fair game – fine bindings, first editions, the rare, the beautiful, the treasures calling your name!

Hours. Tuesday through Saturday, 11-5, are my regular hours until the end of the year. Closed December 25 (and January 1), and probably closing early on December 24, too. The sale is on now and will continue through December 31.

And now, from Time to Hours, we have come full circle, the perfect signal for me to close this post. Just think -- in only a matter of days, we will be having more light again between morning and evening dark!

Puzzling a Dog

David thought we should get Sarah to pose at the jigsaw puzzle table.

Puzzlers at the Super Bowl Escape Party got two of the six puzzles put together. Would Sarah be able to make any progress on a third?

She is a willing little poseuse, notre charmante cherie!

That's it, girl! You're starting to get the idea!

Sarah will probably need a bit more help, so stop by Dog Ears Books soon during our winter hours, 11-3, Wednesday through Saturday. There are still more puzzles to be put together.

And Charles Dickens? Yes, we have him, too--and much more besides!

David Is Doing My Homework!

Upright, angled, falling and on the ground

Book clubs, reading groups—call them what you will, they tend to become (especially the smaller ones, I’m sure) very tight-knit little fellowships as years go by. The reading group I’ve been in the longest—I’d say it’s been at least six years, maybe more, that we’ve been getting together as time permits—meets only five times a year. There are five of us in it (all women), and busy schedules make even our five meetings difficult to schedule, but we persevere, and so it happens that sometimes we meet even when all five of us have not completed the book under discussion. Not reading the whole book? Isn’t that heresy?

Here I must say, not so much boasting of a virtue as admitting to a compulsion, that so far in our history I have always come to meetings having started at the beginning and made my way completely through the book in question, but my perfect record is headed for the dustbin this month. I have been so busy with Dante and with book reviews and with proof-reading and with being outdoors (both with Sarah and without), keeping up with multiple blogs and wrapping up year-end bookkeeping, that when, of three possible dates for us to meet, the very earliest was fixed upon (not my preference, you may be sure!), my heart sank. “I’ll do my best” was all I could promise.

My outdoor companion, always ready to go

Then on Monday, having read only the first three pages, I handed David the book so he would have something to read while I visited a friend in the hospital. I told him he would find the story “gripping.” Understatement! When I got back to the car I don’t think he’d even realized I’d been gone, and he has been engrossed in his reading ever since. Now and then he puts down the book to give me a report on what is happening “now” to the main character. He has also been telling all his friends about this fabulous book.

What can I say in my own defense? David is not writing a paper for me. (If he wrote anything I would publish it here under his name, not mine.) He won’t be taking a test for me. (There is no test, or I would be reading the book right this minute!) And, really, would it not be unkind to separate him from a story he is enjoying so very much, just so I can complete an “assignment”?

Don’t you want to know what the book is? It is Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. And there’s another copy at my bookstore in Northport, if Bruce didn’t make off with it today after David’s rave review!

Sarah in the late afternoon sunshine