Life With Dog: "It's just us, girl."

When she was Tiny Girl

When the Artist left Willcox, Arizona, for the last time, it was in a helicopter after hours spent in the ER at North Cochise Community Hospital while the ER doc scoured the state for a hospital that had a room available and could provide the necessary surgery. I had put a deposit down on the puppy only days before, and now, as the Artist was wheeled out to the helicopter on a gurney into the dark hours past midnight, I told him he had to get through the next ordeal, because “the little girl needs a daddy.” He was amused, knowing I was talking about the puppy. 

 

As the medical people were getting him situated in the helicopter, though, the pilot asked me curiously, “What is your relationship to Mr. Grath?” Oh, good lord! Did he think I had been referring to myself in the third person as “the little girl” needing “a daddy”? But I just said, “I’m his wife” and stood watching as the helicopter lifted into the night sky – for a flight the Artist described to me afterward as “transcendent.”

 

I won’t recount all the events that followed (have already done so), but three weeks later my husband was gone forever, and I had to start my much diminished life alone with “the little girl” we thought we would be raising together – the puppy, Sunny Juliet. 

 

Now I often say to her, “It’s just you and me, girl!” She doesn’t have a clue. 

 

Other than her first eight baby weeks, a traumatic parting from beloved siblings, and then 10 days with one of my neighbors (while I sat by the Artist’s hospital bedside), life with me is all she has ever known. Here in the ghost town, of course, she has her Auntie Cheryl and Uncle John and Auntie Therese, as well as her dog-buddy and playmate, little Siberian Husky puppy Yogi, but home is the quiet cabin with her dog mom. Or, in Michigan, our quiet farmhouse. Or rides in the car, again just the two of us. Sleeping on my bed at night. But outdoor exercise and adventure and exploration off-leash every morning, these days with Yogi and Auntie Therese as well as the Momma, so she has a pretty good life overall.

 

Unlike me, she doesn’t know what she’s missing.

 

Whether here in southern Arizona in winter or back in northern Michigan in summer, the Artist sometimes worried about my outdoor rambles. “There could be bears,” he warned more than once, “and what would you do?” Forget bears! What about a bad fall? I used to urge our dog Sarah to “go find David!” in the house or the yard, reasoning that if she got in the habit, I might be able to send her home for help if I needed help. (“What’s that, Lassie? Timmy’s fallen into the well?”) But never did I consider for one minute giving up the long walks, with or without a dog. And “without” never lasted long because, as the Artist put it to me once, “I need you, and you need a dog, so we need a dog.” 

 

The last time we had that conversation, it led to the search that led to Sunny Juliet. From the hospital in Chandler, waiting for his system to be clear of blood-thinning medication so he could have surgery, he urged me to bring the puppy home without delay, and then, when I had, he would ask every day, “How’s the little girl? Tell me about the little girl.” All his nurses knew about the puppy!

 

But he and Sunny Juliet never had a chance to meet, and she has no idea what she’s missing. To her, life must seem complete -- which seems unutterably strange to me when I miss so much of the way life used to be!

 

(“Lucky dog!” we used to say to each other in moments of envy when I was young.)

 

I just finished reading, for the first time, A Man Called Ove, and what brought me to tears was Ove missing his late wife’s laugh. The Artist had an irresistible smile, and when he laughed, ah! Who could help laughing happily with him? I miss exploring the world with him, holding hands, our conversations, his smile, his laugh – so much!

So now it’s up to Sunny Juliet to make me smile and laugh. And when she and Yogi are wrestling, tumbling all over each other, or trotting down a cow path side by side, or when they are sitting politely, eagerness and impatience barely holding them still as they wait for treats, what could be more enchanting? So good fortune is mine, in that I have a good and dear little companion, day and night, wherever I am. Also, in both Arizona and in Michigan, I have good friends and neighbors, and my dog and I have beautiful open space to explore, just the two of us or with friends. We have good health, both of us. And we have each other.

Michigan dog play

Arizona dog play

How does anyone face life, day after day, without a dog? The momma loves her little girl!

The momma with Tiny Girl, before she grew big

To and Along a Ghost Town Trail

 

The Artist and I never took the Gleeson Road, never saw Gleeson, so I decided Sunny and I would make an expedition together and see what there was to see. 

First building on the Gleeson Road. It's for sale.

The Gleeson Road is the second road to the west after the Border Patrol checkpoint on 191. I stopped briefly to photograph the first building, but when we came to the Ghost Town Trail, I decided to stay on the Gleeson Road long enough to see Gleeson and then turn around. The Gleeson Cemetery is on private property, with a locked gate, so I had to turn back east without exploring that site. 

An old wreck of a building along the road, however, caught my eye on the way back, and I stopped to take a closer look. What could it have been?

Ready to move in? Turnkey? I don't think so.

Why is the weathering of materials so fascinating?

There were a few other old ruins to be seen, but one pretty little house right on the road looked quite habitable. At first I thought it was the historic Gleeson jail and was surprised at how homey a jail could look, with the overhang and the Chinaberry tree shading the tiny front yard.  

But no, when I got close enough to read the sign, I saw that the jail was a bit farther down. It too is on private property, though open to the public certain days and hours. Maybe another time. 

Historic Gleeson jail

High Lonesome

High Lonesome, this place was called! Was it a ranch? Mining offices?  Occupied? And why did the name seem so familiar? A week later I realized that it was the name of the fictional Joanna Brady’s ranch outside Bisbee in the mystery novels of J.A. Jance. A completely different High Lonesome.

Gleeson had a post office from 1890 to 1939.

 

John Gleeson … and his wife were an Irish couple who came to Arizona from Iowa and Colorado. They worked in the mines at Pearce – he as a miner and she as a boarding house keeper in the early 1890’s. Gleeson grub-staked a crippled friend and the man re-located [to?] the old mines at Turquoise. He sold out by 1914. Long before white men appeared in this area Indians were mining turquoise on Turquoise Mountain. Tiffany and Company of New York continues to work the mine when the demand warrants. The remnants of the older community of Turquoise came back to life in 1900 for a brief building boom, and there are still restricted mining operations here. 

 

-      Byrd H. Granger, Arizona Place Names, revised and enlarged, 1960

 

Of course, 1960 was a while ago now, so I don't know if Tiffany is still at work in the Gleeson-Turquoise area....

Mining activity on the mountainsides

But Gleeson had really only been a detour for me. My main objective that day was the Ghost Town Trail.

"Primitive Road" -- one of my favorite signs

The curves of the land are soft and beautiful to my eye, but looking closer one sees the scars left by mining. Now this, below, is it tailings or overburden? I have only just learned the difference: overburden is rock and soil merely removed; tailings have been processed in addition to being removed. 

But ah, here! This is the kind of thing I came for! Still handsome remaining walls of an old stone building. Could this be a remnant of the little town of Turquoise? I couldn’t stop photographing the building walls, inside and out, from different angles. Truly, this was vernacular architecture, made from materials at hand, and what more lovely materials could be found? 

Photographing the stone walls necessitated getting out of the car, which also provided Sunny with a little walk. Territory on both sides of the Ghost Town Trail is a patchwork of state and private lands. Some of it is for sale, though I would worry about water quality. 

I did not photograph every interesting ruin along the road. Some I simply missed. Then after the shot of this one below, staring me in the face, my camera battery ran out. If you want to see a little bit of Pearce, however, the last town before the trail rejoins the two-lane highway, here is an old post from explorations the Artist and I made together, and here is a post from the Historic Pearce Cemetery, a place I loved right away. 

Thank you for coming along on this expedition into the past of Cochise County, Arizona, and please join me for more adventures to come!

I’ve been spending a lot of time in Italy recently.

(Random photo of mine. When taken? Why?)

 

My visits to Italy happened through the magic of books, of course, and here are three that transported me to places I’ve never been before.

 

(1)       Spender, Matthew. Within Tuscany: Reflections on a Time and Place

 

As potters are often secretly obsessed not by ceramics but by fire, so sculptors are sometimes obsessed not by carvings but by stone. And the craftsmen who work in quarries do not think about stone, they think of the mountain. In all three cases it is a question of sublimating a mean passion for a grand one. Man makes his little artefacts, but it is the live material as nature brought it forth that remains the challenge.

 

Anyone who has ever traveled or lived in Tuscany or dreamed of so doing will want to read this book, but it will have special meaning for artists (as the quote above makes clear), horticulturists (olive harvesting and oil processing are described in great detail), historians and lovers of ancient history (the author is fairly obsessed, to use his word, with the elusive Etruscans), and anyone who has ever read Dante at all seriously.

 

Sculptor and painter, as well as writer, Matthew Spender and his wife, Maro, came from London to Siena in 1967, intending to live there for “a year or two,” but life had other ideas in store, and before they knew it they had established an Italian life. With their two little girls in school, Spender joined a community band (a clarinetist, he says unkind things about violins) and researched several aspects of Tuscan history, along with pursuing his art. Matthew Spender is the son of poet Stephen Spender. Maro, an artist herself, is the daughter of painter Ashile Gorkey, whose biography Matthew Spender authored. The family backgrounds of both Maro and Matthew are complicated by dysfunction and sparkling with famous friends, but if a reader knew nothing at all about the author or his family, Within Tuscany would still be fascinating and beautiful reading.

 

It is a somewhat strange book. Part memoir, part historical commentary, the author reveals his own occasional awkwardness pitilessly more than once. His lens is at other times a long one, focused on previous centuries, before turning back on himself in close-up. But always, the writing intoxicates. Musing on Bruce Chatwin’s dream of death and how not even the art we make, though it outlives us, is destined to be immortal, Spender writes of these art objects:

 

For a while they can act as shields against total annihilation, our death first, their death and the eventual death of the planet as it whirls around an exhausted sun, awaiting its own eventual extinction, each finality fitting in the other like Chinesse boxes. For me, the outstretched hand of painted flesh from a painted sleeve will do, stretching to support me as I approach the tunnel, before the blinding light. 

 

I don’t fit into any of the categories of readers I said would love this book, but I did love it and highly recommend it. 

 

 

(2)       Leon, Donna.  My Venice and Other Essays

 

Donna Leon is an American writer who has lived for many years in Italy. She writes murder mysteries set in Venice. That’s all I knew when I picked up this book. 

 

My dream city is Paris, although more than one friend feels the same way about Venice, which has never been on my short list at all. But reading about Venice? I’ll do that. 

 

What a surprise this book was! I adored and delighted in this opinionated group of essays and how the author does not pull a single punch! She says she will never live in the U.S. again, but she does not see her adopted home city or country through rose-colored glasses. 

 

It is difficult, even in the midst of my thirty-year love affair with them, to say that Italians have anything that could even vaguely be called a civic sense.

 

Much as I loved this book and highly recommend it, however, I’m finding I don’t want to say too much about it or quote too heavily, because you need to discover it for yourself: Some of you will love it, some might outright hate it. (This I infer from the review I read after writing how I loved it. Not everyone did.) I’ll warn you that Donna Leon calls dogshit shit, not poo, and when one of her essays is titled, “It’s a Dick Thing,” she means just that, but she doesn’t hate dogs or men, never fear. Give it a try -- and get back to me with your impressions, please! 

 

Inspired by her essays, I’m now reading one of her murder mysteries now, Doctored Evidence, which in turn was inspired by an annoying neighbor, in real-life Venice, who kept her television at an unbearably high volume, night and day, despite repeated complaints….

 

 

(3)       Smith, Mark Gordon.  Tuscan Echoes: A Season in Italy

 

Mark Smith’s story is closer to that of most American visitors than the two foregoing books, in that he did not make a long-time home in Italy. That is, he had lived in Italy as a child, with his family, in the 1950s, but only after many all-too-brief visits as an adult was he able to arrange to live in Florence for 18 precious weeks, beginning on the first of May.

 

Time became the gift that provided opportunities to take in quiet moments and places, to capture the special essence of Italian life. Even now, I need only close my eyes to feel the heat of that Tuscan season. There were days when an infinite clear blue sky soared overhead, hot breezes shrilled the cypresses of cloisters, olive trees shaded fields of straw punctuated by bright red poppies, and aisles of Chianti grapes marched forever up every hill. On every day, in every corner turned, a new discovery was made; with every museum entered or church visited, there were thousands of other events that reached out to be remembered. As the seasons turned, leaves blew at my feet and, eventually, the rains of fall arrived. 

 

I don’t know how to interpret breezes that “shrilled the cypresses” and can’t help wondering if he was really looking at “fields of straw” (perhaps some grain?). I do recognize that sense of discovery, every day, around every corner, familiar to me from my own first month in a rented room in Paris, venturing out every morning safeguarded by talismans from friends, armed with maps and high school French, coming “home” at night to sit at the dining table with my landlady, each of us with paper and pens and dictionaries at the ready in case of a communication puzzle. One month for me, eighteen weeks for him – time enough to settle in and feel deliciously at home, reveling in the “gift of time.”

 

And yet -- I was disappointed in Smith’s book. To me it read like  letters written to family back home rather than personal diary entries or letters to a close friend. Also, all three of today’s books were written in the first person, so why did only this one strike me as relentlessly “I, I, I”? There were too many unnecessary details about “heading” here and “heading” there and turning corners and sitting down and not nearly enough detail about, for instance, what he had for dinner at the fabulous restaurant mentioned. And while I wouldn’t have wanted him to be curmudgeonly or dissatisfied, was every single moment of those eighteen weeks golden? Unlike Spender and Leon, a reader has little sense, from his writing, of this author's character or idiosyncrasies or his life apart from these eighteen weeks.

*****

 

My advice: If you want a happy tour guide, take Smith; if you want opinionated irreverence from an insider, Leon is your woman; and artists, you will definitely find Spender the most revealing of what concerns you most. But perhaps you have favorite books on Italy to recommend yourself. Or another part of the world. 

Where have you traveled lately through the magic of books?

Meanwhile, as we ease into spring here in southeast Arizona, this is right where I am when I leave the books behind and step out my door.

Destination: Clear, Running Mountain Water

The day's goal --

[Note: This is the second of two outdoor adventures from February, the first having taken place on Saturday, February 18, and posted on Monday, March 6. We made this hike featured in today's post on Saturday, February 25. Sunny and I also made another expedition, mostly by road, but that one also included a walk along (and, for her, into) Bonita Creek) on March 1. Soon another batch of photos will take us on Cochise County's Ghost Town Trail, and then there there will be a trip to Italy. You won't want to miss Italy, I'm sure!]

 

Today I give you the payoff right at the beginning, in the top image, rather than beginning with a road shot, because the objective of Friday’s hike, Dragoon Springs, required first of all finding the way into the section of the Coronado National Forest where the springs are located, and that took us longer than anticipated. 

Getting to the beginning

After a couple of false starts, however, we found our trailhead. The morning was overcast, my friend bemoaning the lack of blue sky, but the dogs didn’t care. As always, they were happy to be together and ready for adventure. 

It didn’t take long for Sunny to find her first bone of the day. It wouldn’t be the last for either Sunny or Yogi. 

 

Where the road branched, we eschewed the direction leading to the old stagecoach station (there are some old stone foundation walls and the final resting place of the only Confederate soldiers to die in Arizona, which you can see here), because it was running water we wanted to see. Our destination was only a mile away – but remember, these are mountain miles. We also had to get by a big bull and several curious cows (no, no photos of the cattle -- I was otherwise occupied), but employing leashes and sticking to the road, we passed by safely. The bull moved off the road when Sunny barked. And our road curved through beautiful hilly grassland.

BIG FIND! ...Maybe too big?

 

Next dog treasure was a seriously exciting find, but Sunny decided it was too big to bring along. Anyway, the jackpot lay yet ahead….

Jackpot! Deer leg!

Now the dirt road began to twist and turn. A deep cut down below to our left held the creek, which we could glimpse now and then from our lofty edge, and you wouldn’t expect to reach a creek by going upslope, but we were going to its source, the place from which it flowed – or at least as close to the source as an old lady (moi) would be able to get. 

Twisting road

Looking over the edge...

...to water far below.

And now, here is my friend, as far along as she’s been before, which turned out to be far enough for me. We stopped long enough to take some nourishment and rest and enjoy the sight and sound of the running water….

We are there!

It is cool and beautiful!

I love it!

But then (not my idea) we went some distance farther on what quickly became a veritable goat path: a very narrow trail, all loose stones, and no “shoulder” whatsoever, which meant that one slip or false step would mean a precipitous and painful downhill slide. I managed a few photographs (largely because I was so much more comfortable stopping and standing than forging ahead) but finally admitted I needed to turn back. Thus a full day’s expedition was truncated to half a day. 

"I'm not afraid of heights. It's edges I don't like."

Looking over the edge, I was ready to turn back.

I was happy with everything I’d seen, though, not only the grand mountain vistas – always thrilling – but also the little things along the way. 

 

And the next day, Sunday, brought high winds, cold, wind-driven sleet and horizontal snow, so it was good we used the grey morning to seek out the springs. It was a beautiful place, a beautiful hike – and I have an idea for taking a new and different direction the next time we go.

Beautiful day!

Beautiful scenes!

Good dog!