Sudoku

Usually it’s still dark when I wake. And it’s cold – I turn the heat down at night, and crack the window because when you share a bedroom with two large dogs you have to. I burrow under my nest of blankets and ignore my bladder for as long as I can, then I jump out of bed, stumble to the loo, put Argos out (he and his bladder are also getting old), scurry to the kitchen to turn the heat up from 65 to 67 F, let Argos back in and dive back into bed. I promise myself that as soon as I hear the heat exchanger fans stop running I’ll get up, get dressed, do all the morning things, tackle my to do list. I will have a good, productive day. I will write.

Then, while I wait for the house to warm, I play games on my phone. Fishdom is the most addictive. Wordle, of course – does anyone not play Wordle? And the other free games offered by the New York Times – Spelling Bee (I win if I find the bingos) … Letter Boxed (three moves max) … Tiles … the crosswords … Sudoku. I like games because you can solve them. There are no grey areas – either you win, or you lose. Take Sudoku – there’s only one right answer, but you go through the process and the solution emerges and then it’s done. There’s no fallout, no leftover parts, no mess.

Sometimes I use up my lives on Fishdom, then switch to the NYT games, and by the time I’ve done those I have more lives on Fishdom … It’s remarkable how long one can put off getting out of bed just switching back and forth between games. And of course there’s the news, and the advice columnists, and Reddit, and all of YouTube.

So many hungry, jostling people, yawping for attention, love, justification. Relevance. Meaning. Isn’t that what we all want?

Which brings me to the point of this blog post – which I started in October. In fact I pretty much finished it in October … but then I set it aside, as I usually do, because I wanted to add some pictures, and also I like to wait a day before publishing and give one last read – only I every time I tried to do that I pretty much fell apart all over again. I’ll try to do better this time because it needs to be done and posted so I can move forward.

As I was saying regarding the point of this post: I need to yawp. I’ve been needing to yawp for a long time. The problem is, this is not a depression blog, and I don’t want to write misery porn. But this year has sucked so much, just one swipe of the cosmic vacuum cleaner after another. It has sucked the skin right off my body, leaving me flayed. Defenseless. When I leave my bed, my soft nest of blankets, there is no protective barrier between me and … everything else.

But this blog is where I come to figure things out. I take a snapshot of my life that, for some or other reason, feels significant, and I put it into a frame, and I hang it up on a wall and point to it and say, “See? Look at that! What do you think?” Sometimes I indulge in a spot of mindfuckery – I hang it upside down, say, or I point at a different wall and wait to see if you notice the picture. Because you are a crucial part of the process. I don’t journal – I’ve tried; everything I’ve ever read about writing preaches that journaling is a crucial part of Being A Writer, but I cannot commit to writing without at least the hope of a reader. There has to be a dialog, even if it’s imaginary, or there’s no point.

Everything I’ve tried to write this year – both here and in the maddeningly almost-but-still-not-quite-finished book – has been pointless. It’s been coins dropped into an empty well – instead of a splash and a glint if the light is angled just right, there’s a faint, sad thud and a sinking into mud.

It’s been that kind of year.

So. Anyway. Here I am. Yawp.

Just call me Kilroy. (Photo by David Clode on Unsplash)

I am here to draw a line under 2022. It’s nearly over anyway, but I need the line now. Sometimes a line is necessary – you draw it, and then you total up whatever’s above it, and then a kind of magic happens. Everything above the line is captured, encapsulated, contextualized in the solution. It may still not make sense. It may still have the power to make you cry. But still it’s a solution, boxed up, and you can set it aside and it looks tidier than having everything just all over and anyhow.

2022 actually started last December, after I wrecked the pickup and Patchee died. I was discombobulated and needed to take a few days out to take stock, to think, to plan. To pray and prepare my heart for the new year. So I kissed the (only slightly resentful) Hubbit goodbye and checked myself and Argos into a nearby hotel.

I guess I got some praying done, but wifely habits die hard; I checked in with the Hubbit by phone to remind him to feed the chickens, and found him in a snit because he’d stumbled upon an amazing bargain while poking around the internet, and had bought me a laptop, and then – minutes after paying for it – realized he’d been scammed. And no matter how much I reminded, begged and nagged he could not and would not step away long enough to feed and water my feathery ladies. It was bitterly cold – same as the weather we’re having now, actually: weeks at a stretch below freezing, so their water froze and there wasn’t anything growing and the bugs and worms had burrowed deep. They needed care, but the Hubbit was too busy being furious with the bank (which was refusing to stop his online payment) to pay attention.

So I left the hotel and met him at the bank, where a young man was rude and unhelpful, and then I followed him home and found Mr. Roo collapsed and dying, so I dealt with that and went back to the hotel and tried to pray some more.

Meanwhile, although I didn’t know about it until a week or two later, on the other side of the planet my heart-sister Twiglet was fighting for her life in an ICU. She must have told me she was having hip surgery a month or so previously, but we’re so blasé about that kind of thing these days – a joint wears out and we pop into the hospital for a couple days and come out with a new one and it’s just a no-never-mind. Only, she developed an infection that roared through her body and sent her mind spiraling through bizarre landscapes. For months and months we lurched between “Praise God! Her infection markers are way down!” and “Oh no … a new bug has taken hold…”. It was a rollercoaster ride from Hell that went on and on, and on … and through it all I got to speak with her only once, in February. (I managed to make her laugh!) The rest of the time I was told she was too sick to speak. Or too tired. Or not lucid enough. Even when the news (I did get regular updates) seemed good, I was told she didn’t have her phone.

It tore my heart out not to be there – but even if it had made sense to go (it didn’t; she was rarely allowed visitors) how could I leave the Hubbit? In the savage, grey cold of winter he shrank and huddled into himself. I was afraid of what else might die if I left to go even further from home. I was afraid he would sit and eat nothing but junk food and get himself lost somewhere in the interwebs. I was afraid he might fall. His best friend, formerly known as the Cool Dude, lived on the property … but he’s a drunk and unreliable.

January, February, March I distracted myself by picking away at the bank, trying to get them first to cancel, then to reverse the Hubbit’s payment to the scammers. It was stupid to fight so hard for a mere hundred dollars, but rage drove me. The first customer service rep was so disdainful in the way he spoke to the Hubbit, treating him like a foolish old man; the others were ineffectual; the system was designed to be as difficult to navigate as possible. I wrote to the Attorney General, I blasted them on social media and sites like Yelp!, I pleaded and berated and threatened for months – such an appalling waste of time and energy! (And I got nowhere – there was too much else going on and I eventually let it go.)

Meanwhile, in March it was the Hubbit’s turn for had a quick little routine surgery – a simple removal of his gall bladder. It was no big deal – he was in and out in one day. Easy peasy.

They warn you that the gas pains afterwards are dreadful. The procedure involves pumping gas into the abdomen, and it floats around in there, getting stuck in awkward nooks and crannies, until it’s absorbed through the intestinal tissues and ejected in the usual fashion. The best way to get rid of the gas is to get up and move – which hurts, of course, but we were told that you have to tough it out and then it gets better.

The Hubbit wouldn’t move. He said it hurt, and also he felt sick. I summoned the Bitch Wife, who lashed him with her tongue, and he hated me almost as much as I did. And he did not get better. So I called various doctors and he went back to the hospital, where he failed to poop for a record-breaking number of days. When his bowels finally woke themselves up and performed, his nurses and doctor sang the Halleluiah chorus and packed him back home … where he continued to huddle, and shrink, and on the rare occasion that he spoke his speech was slurred and he forgot what he was saying – and usually what he was saying didn’t make a whole lot of sense anyway.

I called doctors again, and they patted me on the head and explained that he was old, until in desperation I summoned my Inner Karen, and she uttered the L word.

If there’s one thing doctors take seriously in this country, it’s lawsuits.

What I actually said was, “You know, I’m starting to wonder just who I’m going to sue when we find out his death was preventable. Should it be the hospital? Or your boss?” (I was speaking to the surgeon’s assistant. He was busy with another patient.) So she trotted off and returned a few minutes later with the surgeon in tow. He looked at the Hubbit, who was slumped in his chair and staring into space, and said, “You’re really worried?”

“Look,” I said. “He’s old. And he’s annoying and cantankerous. But outside of his political opinions there is nothing wrong with his brain!”

“Hmm,” he said. “Well, he doesn’t have any of the usual symptoms of an abscess, but let’s just check it out to set your mind at rest.” So they did, and he had an abscess the size of a fair-sized zucchini, all swollen up with glop from his bowel and less than a day away from erupting. He spent a couple more weeks in the hospital, and then they were about to send him home and he was well enough by then to tell me he wasn’t happy about that, so Karen popped her head out again. Once again they did a “probably unnecessary test” to “set everyone’s mind at rest” and found leakage where no leakage should be. At last in April he came home, fully restored to his annoying, cantankerous self, to my profound relief.

Meanwhile I’d developed a pain in my knee so severe some days I could barely walk. None of my remedies worked – neither ice nor heat, not an anti-inflammatory diet or fasting, not exercises or stretching or rest or powering through. But there was a huge bag of grain that the Hubbit and the Formerly Cool Dude had dumped in a random location, where cattle and horses kept breaking into it every time they bust out of their pasture (which tends to happen a lot when steers get to a certain age. I think it’s Mother Nature’s way of ensuring that we won’t be too sad when we kill and eat them.) So because I was hurting too much to lift it unaided, and the Hubbit was too feeble and floppy to help, I asked the FCD to move it to where they couldn’t get at it, because gorging on grain is a pretty sure way for grass-eaters to kill themselves. Well, somehow that request for help went sideways and the FCD launched into a vicious tirade that comprehensively covered everything he disliked about me – which turned out to be pretty much everything.

In the overall context of the general shittitude of the year, the booze-fueled ravings of a depressed, self-loathing misogynist is a relatively small matter. But … this was someone I’d known for a quarter of a century – since I arrived in this country. Back in the day, if he and the Hubbit went hunting together I never worried about potential accidents. I liked him, respected him, and trusted him. Even as I’d watched him deteriorate during the eight or so years he lived in his motorhome on our property, I’d wished him well and hoped he’d manage to turn himself around. So the implosion of that relationship, the Hubbit’s ambivalent response to his behavior, the FCD’s continued presence for months before he suddenly just up and left without saying goodbye or even leaving a forwarding address, all combined to taint what little peace and happiness the year had to offer. And now I’m sorry the Hubbit has lost his friend and git-her-done partner. But for myself I’m relieved that he’s gone. And that’s all I have to say about that.

My heart sister … I gave her such a hard time for joining the Red Hat Society!

I continued recording messages to send to Twiglet. They weren’t profound … Her husband said she enjoyed news from the Outside World, so mainly I bitched about my sore knee and yattered on about fence-smashing cows and too many dogs and gardenly frustrations. My prayers were also neither profound nor articulate. When you’ve been praying for a long time for something you really desperately want, after a while you run out of words, and all that’s left is an agonized, wordless “Please!” But when the infection flared up for the umpteenth time in June, her doctors were ready to quit fighting it. The only way to save her, they said, was to amputate her leg. “She’s strong enough,” they said, “But she might not be for much longer.”

Of course the people who loved her immediately rallied with intense prayer – not to save the leg, but for the doctors to have wisdom, and for this terrible journey at last to be done. I made up my mind that, come what may, I would go to be with her after she got back home, just for a week or two to help her recover. I imagined the koeksisters we would eat, and the conversations we would have, and how raucously we would laugh, sitting on her stoep overlooking their beautiful garden. I may have sent her a message mocking her for taking such extreme measures to lose weight … Or maybe I saved that joke for when I would see her. I don’t remember.

A few days later the doctors opened up the wound site just to check on the status of the infection. (This was something they had done often. The infection was deep in her bone, so blood tests weren’t reliable.) And in light of all our prayers – because I’ve had experience of miracles, and she had she – it wasn’t all that surprising to learn that the infection was clear. The surgeon who had proposed amputation told her husband, “I can’t justify removing a healthy limb.” At last it was over!

But…

That little surgery was one cut too many. Over the next few days, system by system, her body shut down.

On the Fourth of July I was out – I forget why – and en route home I connected briefly with her husband. He was at the hospital with her, and she wasn’t doing well. I asked if I could talk to her on his phone, since he was right there, but he said she couldn’t speak. He told me to record a message that he could play for her. I wanted to argue, to ask him please just to let me talk to her, even if she couldn’t respond – same as I did with my Marmeee … but he was so tired, and you don’t argue with someone who is sitting at his wife’s deathbed – not even when you both are convinced that she’ll be fine. When I got home I sat on my veranda, and as the fireworks started going off all around me I recorded a series of messages just to tell her I loved her, and that she had done well with her life, and that everything was going to be okay.

The next morning I woke to the news that she was gone. And then I took my knee to the doctor, who diagnosed bursitis and injected a steroid and made it better. Easy peasy.

While I was with the doctor I asked him if I could stop taking the blood thinners I’d been on since my pulmonary embolism last August. He approved, and a few weeks later (it was Twiglet’s birthday – her family gathered on a beach she loved and sent her ashes out to sea) I was back in ER, once again unable to breathe, followed by several days in the hospital, and so now I’m on blood thinners for the rest of my life.

Around about then Cujo moved to Idaho, depriving me of my rescue partner and most reliable venting buddy. We’d already decided – way back in January or February – that it was time to get out of rescue … and I’m almost there. But after she left I contacted the shelter and offered to take an old dog, because they tend not to do well in shelters and Cujo’s and my rescue has always done a pretty good job of finding wonderful homes for seniors. So Chief, a sweet old guy, moved in. After a few days I took him for a vet check, as we always do with seniors, and learned that he had advanced lymphoma, so the Hubbit and I decided he would just spend his last few months here on our little farm. Only not long after, for no clear reason (it’s possible the cancer had metastasized to his brain), he walked under the moving tractor, so he didn’t even get that.

I think that’s the last horrible thing that’s happened this year – except that I’ve been getting slower and sadder and more and more useless, and eventually a few days ago I paid my doctor another visit and it turns out I’m severely anemic. I kind of think that’s good news, though … I mean, it isn’t, of course. But at least this enemy has a face and it’s not the Black Dog, and I have a strategy for getting better. So that’s good, right?

But.

I am so, so tired. I’m sad. I feel old, fat, itchy and achy. Despite my best (currently feeble) efforts to be Holly Homemaker the house won’t stop throwing up all over itself, and – just to help that process along – we have two more dogs that needed somewhere to be and somehow this was the only spot available, and the cold hit before I could finish my end-of-growing-season chores, and there’s frozen snow everywhere just waiting to turn mucky and then freeze again. The pickup is still wrecked. The book is still not written. I’m still breathless.

The best friend I ever had and ever will have is still gone and always will be.

Sometimes I think how much easier it would be if I just stopped. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t actually want to die. In fact, when the doc got a bit vehement because he felt I wasn’t taking the whole anemia thing seriously enough (he wants more tests to figure it out, and that’s fine) I did feel a twinge of ehhh … I hope it’s nothing bad. (I don’t think it is. For quite a long time I’ve been pretty much living on cheese and tomato sandwiches, which aren’t generally a great source of iron.) But my body kind of has a use-by date now, and it would be so easy just to stop taking the dang blood thinners and let my blood do whatever it wants to do. It would be so easy peasy.

It’s time to draw that line – but how to do it?

Life is nothing at all like a game of Sudoku. There is no one perfect solution. There is no single sure way to make the squares in a row line up and act orderly.

It’s nothing like a column of numbers – there’s no way to calculate the sum because the answer keeps changing.

You can’t even draw a line in the sand and say, “Okay, Life, I dare ya – step over that and see what I do to you!” Because sometimes life laughs and runs away, and sometimes it plants you square in the nose, and sometimes a wave billows in from the side and washes the line away.

Sometimes the line isn’t even yours to draw, and the best you can do is take note, and move on.

Photo by Daryl Han on Unsplash

So this year for Christmas the Hubbit ran over himself with a tractor

Needless to say, he didn’t pick the little old Ford tractor to get run over by …

Not this dinky early 40s model, which is the first tractor we bought when we moved out to the farmlet. (Picture taken some years back. We haven’t had any snow this year … and although I should be stressing over climate change, right now it’s working for me. I haven’t the faintest idea how to keep our driveway clear!)

… although, on consideration, that one might have been worse, because although it’s little and cute it has monster wheels designed for gripping soft stuff, like dirt, snow and the flesh of absent-minded old men. In any case, the tractor of choice for his life-altering moment of inattention was this one…

About 3 tons of He-Power, probably more than you want rolling over your foot-leg-groin-gut-chest, although less horrifying if the tires are smoothish, like those on cars.

If I’m sounding a tad pissed off, it’s partly because this is not how this blog was supposed to go. When I started here, my goal was to entertain, with occasional detours to expound, philosophize, denounce, and share recipes. But the first seven months of this year were so fundamentally shitty that I quit writing altogether until I recognized it was my sole defense against the Black Dog, and since then it’s been one damn shitty thing after another, and now this.

Here’s what happened: The Hubbit was in the workshop getting grain into buckets to feed the cattle before he started on some tractor-related fun-on-the-farm. The tractor takes a while to warm up, so to save time he stood beside it to turn it on. It was supposed to be in neutral. He always  leaves it in neutral. Except this time.

He leaned into the tractor, pushing down the clutch pedal with one hand while he started it with the other. It roared to life, and he released the clutch. The tractor leaped forward. The big rear wheel trapped his foot, rolled up against his leg, and slammed him down onto the gravel scattered over the concrete apron at the door of the shop. It crunched over his pelvis, abdomen and shoulder, before – oh, the sweet grace of God – it rolled off him, rammed into some barrier inside the shop, and stopped.

I was in the corral, around the corner of the shop, pitching apples into a wheelbarrow to feed to the cattle. I heard him yelling. “I’m coming!” I called, starting to close the gate to the stall where the apples were so that my old horse, Vos, wouldn’t get in and eat them all and founder himself. The Hubbit kept calling.

It’s annoying, living with a deaf person. They call you, and you say “Yes?” You say, “I’m coming!” and they don’t hear. They keep calling. Sometimes it’s as though they’re not even trying to listen for an answer. Just call, call, call until you appear. Sometimes it’s so annoying that I very deliberately finish what I’m doing and take my time about going to him, refusing to be rushed.

But not this time. There was something in his voice that snatched my attention so that I left the gate swinging wide, let the apple-laden wheelbarrow tip over, ignored Vos as he shoved forward to grab what he could. I wrested the big corral gate open, hurried to the tractor – I’m too damn fat to run, but I can hurry. He was on the ground and at first I thought he’d just fallen – it happens; his knees are shot and the dogs are clumsy. But he kept calling until I was right up next to him and put my hand on him. He appeared to be bleeding from his eyes, his face was bloody and scratched. “Get an ambulance!” he wheezed.

We live 20, 30 minutes from town. While we waited I hurry-hurry-hurried inside for blankets and pillows – not much use against the cold ground – I didn’t dare move him – but better than nothing. He’d fallen below the bucket of the tractor, and I didn’t trust the hydraulics to keep it up, and even more I didn’t trust myself to raise it, so I scurried about finding random objects that I could prop under it so it wouldn’t drop and crush him. I called the Cool Dude, who called our neighbor Paranoiber, who arrived and then left immediately to chase down the ambulances and lead them down our private road. (They brought in a helicopter as well; it landed in Vos’ pasture, but he was too busy eating apples to care.)

And then the the bustle of people whose clothes glowed luminous orange and yellow, reassuring smiles, figuring-it-out frowns, staying out of the way, staying close enough to answer questions. A wail of pain as they lifted him, the juddering roar of the unwanted helicopter leaving, the wail of the ambulance on the road to the hospital. Cool Dude insisted on taking me in and then didn’t listen when I told him the way to the new hospital location. His battered, swollen face on the white hospital pillow. Internal bleeding that demanded a flight to a better hospital in Spokane. I came home when they took him away, took a shower, threw some clothes in a bag, fed the dogs. I put fresh bedding on the bed so it would be nice when he came home – which seemed to make sense at the time.

He has a fractured pelvis, broken ribs, a cracked scapula, and bruising, but no organ damage. The scans also revealed a lump in his throat – something unrelated to the accident – so before they released him they biopsied that, which gives us something extra to think about.

I spent the first interminable week in Spokane sitting, first in ICU then in the orthopedic ward. I kept insisting that I hadn’t married him for his looks so his brain better be okay until, to shut me up, they showed me scans that proved the wheel had missed his head. I cracked inappropriate jokes about every indignity, photographed under his hospital gown so he could see the astonishing size and purpleness of his swollen groin, nagged him to suck on one plastic tube and blow into another, coaxed him to eat, bitched when his blood sugar soared, applauded when it dropped, and, hour after hour, waited for the doctors to come.

He’s been in rehab now for a week, and the waiting continues. He can sit up, can get from his bed to his wheelchair, can use a portable commode if they get it to him in time, but it’ll be a while before he can walk. He’s on heavy doses of pain medication, so of course he also needs laxatives, and … well, suffice to say they’ve spent the past few days figuring out how much of those he needs and how long they take to work. I’d like to think that next time the need for laxatives arises they’ll be in less of a hurry for them to work before they wallop him with an extra dose, but since the people giving the laxatives aren’t the people cleaning up when they do what they’re meant to do, that’s by no means certain.

The Hubbit’s little princesses, Patchee and Ntombi, are learning to make do with me. Today I took them to visit him for the first time. Ntombi was most interested in befriending the man in the other bed, whose wife had brought snacks, but Patchee trembled and lay down under the Hubbit’s wheelchair, and when it was time to leave she begged me to let her stay.

I visit him for an hour or two most afternoons. Usually I take a dog or two. Sometimes we chat; sometimes we seem to have said everything we will ever have to say to each other. They put him through an array of tests when he arrived and, for the first time in his life, he didn’t ace the cognition test. His world has shrunk; it encompasses his pain scale, his physical therapy exercises, his carb intake, his blood sugar count, his bowels. He has a pile of books that he doesn’t read. For the first time in as long as I’ve known him he watches television. I’ve bought him a Lumosity subscription for Christmas, and when he’s dull and spacey I release my inner bitch and pick fights with him over his failure to despise that asshole in the White House as comprehensively or intensely as I do. (Sometimes it takes a poke with a sharp stick – or the verbal equivalent – to send a good surge of oxygen-laden red blood cells shooting brainwards. One does one’s wifely best.)

My world is misshapen and discombobulated, and to find my way around it I’m redefining the boundaries of what matters, and excising everything else with a sharp and ruthless blade. Some days I look at the weeks or months ahead and blaze with a kind of excitement – this is a shake-up, an opportunity to change, to renew our marriage, our life, ourselves. I’m acutely conscious of God’s grace, and hungry to draw close to Him. I make lists of the things I can make better, develop strategies for personal growth and home improvements. Other days I drag myself out of bed and put one foot in front of the other until it’s bedtime again, and then sometimes I can sleep.

Let’s talk. Have you had periods in your life when every time you thought things were as bad as they could be they got worse? How did you cope?

When rescue fails

Last week a thing happened, and I feel.

The problem with words is, we talk too much. They get overused and shabby, and when you really need them to say something they’re worn out and not up to the job.

But something happened, and I must tell, and words are what I have.

Where to begin? I’ll start with this text from the Hubbit, received while I was at a writer’s conference in Seattle in September. That’s as good a place as any.

“Scarlett died unknown causes. Suspect the food as several dogs don’t wanna eat it. Am buying new food.”

There was also a photograph. If I hadn’t read the text first I’d have thought she was sleeping.

Scarlett – what she really looked like.

Scarlett was one of our rescues … I’ve told you I rescue dogs, right? Kuja and I started a small group last year. So far we’ve rehomed around 75 dogs and 30 cats, and also helped owned pets that needed vet care, food, and so on. Anyway, Scarlett was a beauty. Her mother was a Belgian Malinois, daddy was a German Shepherd / Husky cross. She was the last pup left from an accidental litter, and when she came to me she was around eight months old and still didn’t have a name. Her people hadn’t been cruel to her, but they’d never wanted her, and it showed. She was pretty shut down, and I figured she’d be a good project for Peter Pan.

I’ve mentioned Peter Pan but never explained his place in the Took menage. He showed up several years ago with a teenage girl we knew. They pitched a tent in the backyard and all was roses for a day or two, then early one morning I saw her spinning her wheels as she roared down our driveway, and I went outside to find him forlornly folding his tent. That’s when I learned he was homeless. He was just a boy – 22 years old, and had spent the years since he aged out of the foster system couch-surfing and drifting back and forth across the country.

Well, he stayed for a few days, which turned into weeks, then months, until he was ready to move on in spring of the following year. I was sorry to see him go and missed him – both the help around our farmlet and the laughs. He’s high a lot, which makes him giggly; this annoys the Hubbit, who is sternly anti-weed, but amuses me. He showed up again a few months ago – I told you how happy I was to see him. Anyway, he took his puppy training responsibilities seriously. Scarlett didn’t warm to him – she was a shy pup, easily scared – but I kept encouraging and advising him, and he kept her with him all day as he went about his work on the farm.

Then we took in Cairo, a a gangly, goofy Malinois pup produced by a backyard breeder who sold him then wouldn’t take him back when the buyer changed his mind. (Mals are like velociraptors – not for the fainthearted.)

I already had my hands full with our other foster, Cojak, a German Shepherd designated “dangerous” that I’ve been rehabilitating. But it was no problem – it’s as easy to play with two puppies as one, and I hoped Cairo would bring Scarlett out of her shell. Peter Pan started going around the farm with two puppies prancing around him. He got less farm work done but I was good with that; the dogs were more important.

It saddened me that that none of the dogs really liked Peter Pan. He tried so hard to win them over, coaxing and loving on them … I felt bad for him. It didn’t help that Cairo got banged up in an encounter with one of the cows when he was out in the pasture with Peter Pan and got too close to her calf, and also both pups got badly stung by yellow-jackets while out in the shop with him. They were miserable, with their swollen faces and crusty, oozing sores, and they clearly blamed him for the hurt. I kept reassuring him and offering advice – “Don’t force it – let him choose to come to you and then reward him” … “Don’t try to bribe them; just let them know you keep treats in your pockets, and wait for them to come and ask” … “Give her space – she’ll come to you when she’s ready”. My advice was good – it worked. Puppies love treats.

Then it was September, and the conference, and before I could go I had to process a pile of adoption applications for a commotion of chihuahuas we’d rescued from a hoarding situation. So I was distracted, and when Peter Pan mentioned that some of the dogs were off their food I didn’t pay attention.

By the time I received the Hubbit’s text he’d already buried her, and he flatly refused to dig her up again for a necropsy. (Yeah, I’m that wife. But I was right this time.) Peter Pan had found her just before she died, and when I spoke with him over the phone he sounded devastated. Cairo was also sick; they rushed him to the vet, where he went onto a drip and had a bazillion tests, all of which came back looking scary but inconclusive. We sent the food off to a lab to be tested, and I fantasized angrily about the costly vengeance I would wreak upon the manufacturer … but then those results came back negative.

Cairo had a series of follow-up visits with the vet, but remained a sad, sore, floppy puppy. X-rays revealed two broken ribs and a cracked vertebra – an ugly shock; my cows aren’t friendly but they’re not mean – it didn’t make sense that she’d hurt him that badly. The vet prescribed crate rest and various medications, but there was a grim set to her jaw, a look in her eye that told me that, after more than ten years of taking my dogs to her, I had been judged and found wanting.

Cairo’s misadventures continued. He snapped his lower left canine, revealing raw nerves, and developed a hematoma on his left ear. I didn’t know how – snagged the tooth trying to break out of his wire crate? Hooked it in a bone and yanked it out with excessive force? (Everything a Malinois does involves excessive force.) Smacked the ear against something while playing too hard during one of his brief bouts of normal Malinois energy? It was strange and frustrating, but a broken tooth and a hematoma could be identified, diagnosed and fixed. My attention was consumed by more bewildering questions.

The vet noticed that he “walked funny”. “There’s something else going on with this dog,” she muttered. Could he have panosteitis? His face was still swollen, the lesions on his nose weren’t healing properly, and the lymph nodes in his throat were swollen. Could it be juvenile cellulitis? But when I tried to discuss it with her she wouldn’t quite meet my eye. She suggested we hand him off to another, bigger, wealthier rescue, because we’d already run up a sizable bill, we couldn’t afford all the diagnostics she wanted to do, and she wasn’t offering any more discounts.

Back home the other dogs were doing well on their new kibble but Cairo wouldn’t eat, so I started cooking for him – elk, home-raised eggs and veggies, home-made bone broth. He began to get better. I thought gentle exercise might help, so once again he was out with Peter Pan as he worked around our farmlet.

Destra

Then Destra collapsed. Destra is my girl – my first Malinois – an 11-year-old I’ve had since she was a puppy and came to us to recover from the injury that eventually cost her a hind leg. She has an inoperable thyroid tumor wrapped around her throat, so we’ve known for a while her time was limited. She threw up everything in her gut, but once that was done she wasn’t in distress. She just wanted to sleep, wouldn’t eat, and couldn’t really walk. I googled “how to tell my dog is dying”, and all the symptoms checked out. So I made her comfortable, kept her company, and left the care of the other dogs to Peter Pan. Eventually I snugged her up to a hot pillow and went to bed, expecting her to be gone by morning.

She wasn’t. When I sat up in bed and looked at her, she was sitting up and looking at me, and she made it clear that getting her outside to do her business was my most urgent priority. (She didn’t like to be carried but looked very regal in a wheelbarrow lined with blankets.) By the next day she was moving under her own power. I started feeding her the same food as Cairo, and she quickly recovered.

Reading over this I see that I’ve left out so much – but it’s already too long. I just don’t have the space to tell you about the cat Peter Pan found lying dead in the south pasture, or the three perfectly healthy hens that dropped dead without warning. I don’t know if it’s relevant that we brought home a Chihuahua mama and four puppies born by emergency c-section and two of the babies died. One was the runt but the other … I was sure he’d make it. But neonates die, after all – especially after a too long labor, when their mama is still exhausted and too stoned to keep them under the heat lamp.

And then there was Argos. I told you what happened to him. He survived that first night. A test for toxoplasmosis came back negative. The leptospirosis test needs to be confirmed but is a probable negative. Yesterday’s follow-up with the eye specialist revealed that he’s doing well. His eyes may recover fully, but if they don’t … well, he’s a Malinois; he’ll figure it out. Only it makes me crazy that we have no idea what happened to him. We can run test after test, we can speculate about trauma, but we can’t know.

And that’s true for this whole horrible story. We can add 2+2 and pick a number. We can speculate, extrapolate, assume. But there’s not a lot we can know.

Yes, okay … I skipped over the thing that happened last week. Fine. Let’s end this.

I was out, and the Hubbit called and told me to get my ass back home because he’d just caught P beating Cairo. I passed P on the way home and my foot lifted reflexively from the accelerator. He looked so lonely, such a gangly, lost boy walking an empty road on a gray day. “I can take him into town, or to a friend – at any rate, someplace warm,” I thought. “We can talk in the car. There has to be an explanation.”

But then I let my foot drop back onto the accelerator pedal, because the truth is we’d started to wonder about him before that day. The Hubbit had never trusted him but held his peace until I confessed my fears. Then we’d found a private place and prayed together: “Lord, please reveal the truth, and give us the wisdom to know what to do.” We’d borrowed a motion-activated infrared camera and hoped to borrow more, so we could monitor the house and workshop. I’d begun to watch him more closely with the dogs, intervening when they didn’t want to go with him, feeding them myself rather than asking him to do it. I told Kuja, “It feels like we’re cursed. Like there’s something evil loose on our property. And really I’d rather encounter some Halloween-style ghost or ghoul than…” I didn’t want to say it, but she knew. And she knows one doesn’t abandon someone, whether they have four legs or two, without a clear and certain reason.

So anyway, the Hubbit and the Cool Dude walked into the house and heard Cairo screaming. They rushed to him and found that P had somehow folded himself inside the big wire crate to get at the puppy, who was crammed up against the far end. P was stomping Cairo with his army boots. He scrambled out, made some asinine excuse about Cairo having pooped in his crate (there was no poop, and anyway, what the fuck?)

That was five days ago. Since then, I’ve taken over most of P’s chores. One of them was to put out food and water for the invisible barn cats and clean their litter box. I find they’ve gone from being invisible to not there at all. The food and water I put out is untouched, the litter box unused, and mice scurry boldly all over the shop.

On the other hand, Cairo has gone from being a sad, listless puppy to a wonderful lunatic, leaving a wake of destruction wherever he goes.

Cairo. This is from a couple months ago, before he got sick. In fact I think it was taken just a day or two before the horrors began with the wasps. Can you imagine hurting this?

So that’s what happened, and I feel ashamed that I didn’t pay attention when Cairo and Scarlett tried to tell me they weren’t safe. I feel stupid that I was so slow to figure it out. I feel betrayed. Sickened. Abused. Disillusioned. Angry.

I think of the lost boy that I thought I knew, that I thought I could trust, that I thought I could rescue, and I feel bereaved.

Let’s talk. Have you ever trusted someone, and thought you and they were walking the same trail, only to realize the person you trusted may never have existed outside your imagination?

Walking with the Black Dog

The problem with pain is figuring out what to do about it. Do you take a pill to make it stop? Do you fix what’s causing it? Or do you learn to live with it?

The problem with the Black Dog is the noise it makes when it’s tearing your heart with its teeth. It muffles nuance; the tune pain plays on your heart-bones-breath emerges as random notes, dissonant and jangling.

I could take a pill – put the leash back on the Dog. I still have plenty – at least a month’s supply – and my doctor would willingly give more. Here’s how the argument goes (I know it well, having used it often on others): “If you had diabetes or a heart condition, wouldn’t you take whatever pills were necessary to control it?”

The problem with that argument is, it’s specious. If you have diabetes or a heart condition, the first act of a sane person is to change the way they eat, move, sleep, live. The TV commercial narratives – glowing visions of super-sized burgers and greasy pizzas followed without a pause by ads for aspirin and Tums, Lipitor, Prilosec and metformin, always with the soothing reminder to “talk with your doctor” – those are the ravings of a crazy person.

I may walk in the dark of an imaginary tunnel with an invisible black dog at my heels, but I’m not crazy. I’m on a mission to find what’s real – friend or enemy, loss or gain, joy or pain. I’ve rejected the phantasmagoria that lie in pill bottles. I want to grieve real loss, fear real terrors, fight for what’s really good. And laughter – the kind that makes the fat on your belly jiggle … It’s been a while; I need to remember how that’s done.

So here we are, the Dog and I, still walking together and now deep within the tunnel. How deep I can’t say; how much further we have to go I don’t know. Sometimes a crack in the roof lets in a beam of light, a breath of clean air. Sometimes in the darkness the Dog leaps, knocks me to the ground, sinks its teeth into my flesh – and when that happens it makes no difference whether or not I scream, because in the dark we’re alone. So far, I’ve yielded sometimes and fought back sometimes, and I’ve learned that, either way, sooner or later the Dog is sated. It comes back to heel, its breath steamy on my left thigh, my fingertips resting on its head, and we walk on, watching for light, hoping for joy.

Let’s talk. Do you live with depression, anxiety or some other mental illness? How do you deal with it? And, as you deal, how do you identify and give priority to the things that are most important to you?

A man and a dog, on the road home

I picked up a hitchhiker on my way home from the writer’s conference a week ago.

The way it happened was, I left the highway to buy gas, and on my way back to the highway I saw a dog lying just off the on-ramp. As my foot shifted to the brake I saw that someone was already there, so I thought, “Okay, not my problem.”

A dog, a backpack, and a highway.

I was halfway up the ramp before I heard that still, small voice that speaks to all of us, if only we listen. “Go back,” it said.

“What? I can’t reverse down an on-ramp!” I argued indignantly, but I was already braking. I know that voice. I don’t always like what it says, but I’ve learned to pay attention. I reversed down the on-ramp, and I didn’t hit anyone or go off the road or get fined.

When I was close to the dog, I stopped and honked my horn. The man kneeling next to it looked up, and jogged over to my car. In my rear view mirror I saw the dog raise its head, and then move to a more upright position. I realized it wasn’t hurt – it had just been sleeping … but I was there and the man was leaning to peer through my side window so I rolled it down.

“Is that dog with you?” I asked him. “Is it okay?”

“Yes ma’am,” he said, and smiled. I glanced at my rear-view mirror. The dog – it looked like a pit bull – was watching us. It looked healthy, well-fed. I looked back at the man. He was dark, and had gray hair in a long braid down his back, and wore a red bandanna. Even with him outside the car I could tell he needed a shower, yet he looked … well, not clean, exactly, but put together, as though he’d taken some trouble. The air billowing in through the open window was hot and heavy, and I turned up the fan on my air conditioner.

That voice wasn’t saying anything. It didn’t need to; I knew what I had to do. I sighed. “You need a ride?” I asked.

His face split in a huge grin. “Yes ma’am!” he replied. “Are you going near Ellensburg?” I was going 100 miles beyond Ellensburg – further than he’d hoped to get that day. We stashed his backpack in the trunk, and the dog, Bubba, jumped into the back seat and settled down with a sigh.

He introduced himself – I’ll call him Cajun. I’ll pick up hitchhikers when the voice says it’s okay, but I don’t feel obligated to entertain them, so I told him I was in the middle of listening to the final book in the “Wayward Pines” trilogy and didn’t want to stop. I brought him up to speed on the story and we listened together, but every now and again he’d drop a comment, and I’d switch off the CD and we’d chat. That’s how I heard his story – in bits and pieces interspersed with the bloody destruction of the last humans on earth – until I decided his story was more interesting than the book.

He told me he was part Cajun, part Mexican, part African, and two parts Native American. He’s been a mechanic for Boeing and a Marine, and a street preacher to the poor. Now, he does construction work and roofing, and picks up odd jobs here and there when he needs to. He’s a musician and songwriter and has supported himself and Bubba more than once by playing on sidewalks and street corners. At the moment his guitar is in Idaho, but he played me one of his songs that he’d recorded on his tablet. The recording wasn’t good, and I really wished it was. That song sounded worth hearing.

His regular-people life fell apart around 2001. The Man kicked him in the ass, so he gave The Man the finger, acquired a backpack, and hit the road. Since then he’s lived on the streets and wandered the highways of the USA, trusting God to provide, which He does mainly through the kindness of strangers. A few years ago he picked up a job in Sedona, Arizona, and within a few weeks he’d saved enough to rent a home. That job was followed by a couple of others. Life was good. He celebrated Valentine’s Day in 2015 by visiting the local animal shelter, where he found Bubba, and since then they’ve been inseparable.

But things fell apart in Sedona too, and soon Cajun and Bubba were back on the road. I was puzzled that he gave up on a place where it seemed he’d been content. This is not a lazy or stupid or unskilled man. He likes a cold beer at each end of a hot day, but he seemed sober to me. I asked him what had happened and he didn’t want to go into detail, but he said, “I don’t define my work as who I am. My purpose is to live in poverty and share God’s love with the discarded people in this earth.”

He has a grown daughter whom he hasn’t seen for years. He had planned to connect with her when he passed through Seattle a couple days before I met him, but something went wrong and a payment he was counting on was delayed. He didn’t want to face her with empty pockets so he canceled, and now Seattle was behind him and she was pissed.

“You think she’d have cared that you were broke?” I asked.

“I wanted to at least take her to lunch,” he replied.

“You’re an idiot,” I informed him. “You should go back, or at least apologize.” (I am so good at telling other people how to run their lives!) I don’t know that he cared much what I thought – why should he? – but a bit later he was texting with her. He didn’t want to go back, though – he was focused on his next destination.

When Cajun is surfing the net, imagining his dream home, this is the kind of picture he’s likely to save.

Before Seattle, on their way up the west coast, he and Bubba got a ride with a long-haul trucker, who told him all about the trucking life. So he was on his way to Salt Lake City, where he’s signed up for a training course with a trucking company. Not too far down the road he reckons he’ll be able to buy his own truck – apparently trucking companies contract with drivers and help them do that. He was excited at the prospect of having a real home, but one that wouldn’t involve staying put in the same place.

“Do you think of yourself as homeless?” I asked. I was trying to puzzle him out. He’d told me he could not “live the American life”. Some of the things he says sound as though he’s on the road by choice – a hobo rather than homeless. He says he has no regrets. But then he’ll say something else that aches with hurts and disappointments, both suffered and dealt out, and I wonder what he’d change, if he could.

“I can’t afford a home,” he said, and he sounded sad.

“So you’re not like Reacher – just choosing to live on your own terms?” I asked.

“Jack Reacher? Like in the movie?” He laughed. He liked that idea. He said he personally didn’t want a home, but he thought Bubba would like one, and that’s what mattered most.

Just east of the Cascades he asked for a restroom break, so I pulled over in Cle Elum. While he was taking care of himself and Bubba, I texted the Hubbit to let him know I might be bringing someone home for dinner. The way things work with the Hubbit and me is, we each make our own plans and the other accommodates, but each of us has veto power. So I waited an hour or so, until we were near the Tri-Cities, before I said, “Okay, you have three options. I can take the next exit and drop you in town – there’s a McDonald’s, Walmart, etc. Or I can take the exit after that one and drop you there; there’s nothing there but you say you do better getting rides from country people. Or you can come on home with me, and tomorrow morning I’ll drop you at the truck stop.”

His eyes lit up, then he looked worried. “But won’t your husband mind?” he asked.

“I texted him hours ago and he hasn’t said no. And he’s used to me picking up strays,” I said. Plus, if the Hubbit won’t remember to keep his phone with him and check for texts from his loving wife who is driving along a lonely highway through the barren wastes of Eastern Washington, that’s on him, right? “You’ll be welcome, so it’s up to you. It looks as though you could use a shower and a washing machine,” I added, ever tactful.

So he came home, and the dogs weren’t assholes when I introduced them to Bubba, and the Hubbit was surprised but welcoming. Well, resigned, anyway – and once Cajun had showered and dinner was on the table, the Hubbit discovered for himself that the company was good, as promised.

Cajun prefers his tent to a bedroom indoors.

Cajun didn’t want the spare bedroom. He pitched his tent under a tree in the back yard. The next day we offered him the option of staying on for a few days, helping out a little on the farm in return for his keep, and giving himself and Bubba a rest – but he was in a hurry to continue his journey. He repacked his backpack – traded me some cheap dog food that the chickens like for the better stuff we feed our dogs, and left a small blanket and an umbrella on the washing machine. I guess when you have to carry everything you own, you don’t hang onto an umbrella during the dry season.

It turned out that the truck stop near us, that I’d planned to take him to, was on the wrong route, so we drove into Oregon, and he kept studying Google Maps on his tablet and saying, “It’s pretty soon … I think the next turn-off … Or maybe the next one.”

“I’m not taking you all the way to Salt Lake City, you know!” I groused – not because I minded so much as I was worried about running out of gas, and it was nearly the end of the month so I’d already run out of money. The truck stop was at the next turnoff after that, and he put $30 in my tank, because he may be homeless but he’s not a bum.

I texted with him while writing this story. I had to ask his permission to use photographs off his Facebook page, and I wanted to check in with him anyway. He’s in Utah, just outside Salt Lake City, feeling down in the dumps. It seems people there don’t respond to a “Hungry” sign, and no one is stopping to give him a ride. He’s hoping a trucker will come by soon, because they usually stop when they see Bubba. He’s moving on, going to Laramie, Wyoming, where he reckons he has a better chance of finding work. His course is in September and it lasts a month, and he can’t have Bubba with him while he’s training, so he needs to save up for a boarding kennel.

I hope they get a ride soon. I hope they make it home.

Do you pick up hitchhikers? What about hitchhikers with dogs? And … what do you think, when you see a homeless person?