Emails Never Sent

I found this among my drafts, I wonder why I never sent it.

...I was up much too late last night as Pete and Hector pursued a large pine borer about my bedroom. I thought it was a bird or bat at first. They chitter at you when they are pissed off, and believe me, this one was. It also didn't want to go outside, I gather because it prefers its dinner properly sawn and not on the hoof out in my hundred-acre woods. No wonder my house is like this.

If it's not that, it's an elusive singing katydid. So you may blame my effusion on sleeplessness...

All Is Vanity

Ah, vanity! You might think if I didn't spend all my money on dog food and fancy license plates, I'd have a nicer car.

This was my dear Jeep Cherokee, 14 years old and 240,000 miles when it had its last explosion on the Cross Bronx Expressway one fine fall night last year . Fortunately it's not that hard to find a car service that will take you, two spinone, a semi-comatose pekingese and the cat the rest of the way home at 11:00 at night, as long as your credit card still functions.

This wonderful vehicle served me well, carrying dogs and vanity plates (with the help of a bit of baling wire) in style, AND making sure that nobody among my passengers was ever gunshy. I've been driving something newer, and while I can hear the radio over the rattles, I spend much more time worrying about it that I ever did about my Jeep.

Summer Houses

Our house was built by a poet, at the turn of the LAST century, out of scrap lumber from the sawmill where he worked and bits of old chicken coop. It is held up by metaphor, not engineering, and this weather is not doing it any favors, although thanks to a new rubber roof (it's like an enormous inner tube, but white) there are no leaks this year. It occupies a hill at the edge of Bell Cedar Swamp, and is more than just a little damp from the daily rain.

Today, I decided that bad lighting and worse eyesight would no longer suffice, and that I had to vacuum. This is always an interesting process, as you are just as likely to suck up bits of house that have mysteriously disintegrated as you are to suck up spider webs and spinone hair.

I squinted at the bathroom ceiling, which needs a bit of work, and put up my brush to see whether it was a knot hole, dry rot or just stuff, when PLOP, something landed on my head. I hoped for dry rot until it ran down across my shoulder and leapt onto the floor. Fortunately, it was just a snake.

Mice, while inevitable (the inside/outside dichotomy is poorly defined at best, and you can't blame nature for not knowing), are an embarrassment and spiders give me the howling horrors; but I have convinced myself that snakes are interesting and exotic. The ring-necked snakes that occasionally drop in (sometimes onto guests who are just reading quietly on the couch) are very small and pretty, so there's no end to the amusement. (As my favorite sister-in-law—and it's a brave person that marries into our family—once said, "oh NO, there could be an entire nest of writhing shoelaces up there!")

This is a house that some people find reason to never, ever visit again. But others recognize that it is imbued with a charming 1930s Nick and Nora appeal. My grandparents bought the house from the poet (his family had to move to town during the war, the first one, and inexplicably refused to move back) and tacked on a bathroom and hot water. Grandma would come down from NY with the maid and children and Pop would come for weekends then his vacation, and they would have friends visit and ply them with cocktails and dress for dinner and have a wonderful time. Long summer days at the beach and evenings of talk and laughter...

I learned to mix a martini here, aged maybe 8 or 9, and to play bridge, and that I could hear everything that the grownups were saying from any part of the house as I sat up under the blankets reading my book with a flashlight. And really, what else can you ask of a summer?

You are what you eat

Look at this happy, happy face. Come Spring, there's a lot of, ahem, activity over by the horses and my Pete sure knows how to make the most of it. Back when he was an unsophisticated puppy, he'd come home and regurgitate it wholesale, to my horror. He could, in a matter of only moments, liquefy and expand the original materials and get them EVERYWHERE, in a form oh-so-much-more-noxious than the original.

Now that he's older, he takes the time to consider and digest it all and, oddly enough, it seems to help in the formation of a perfect, or more perfect, output. In what some could dismiss as just a load of horse puckey, he finds an essential fiber that helps bind his own contributions; learning to take the roughage with the smooth, so to speak.

As ever, we can learn from our dogs. Happy Spring, and everybody, let's roll!

Nobody suffers like my dogs

Why, when I thwart this creature (as I so often do), does he stretch out his little neck and lay it out across tables, knees, chairs, whatever, like Ann Boleyn across the block? Just look at that expression. It's extortion.

Ominous, much?

I was wondering where the 21st Street pigeons were this gloomy afternoon, but then I looked up...

-

heuugggh, ganache, hhorck

I was awakened last night by the honks of a maddened goose, or perhaps a bull elephant, in bed next to me. (I know, but I'm a single lady, so I was a little taken aback.) It was my sweet Annie, who was either trying to vomit up something truly dreadful, or suffering from aspiration pneumonia from all the recent pills.

So off we went to the vet this morning with Pete in tow as well, as he likes to come along for the fun of it and we never waste a walk.

Even though she had done some excellent honking in the waiting room, Annie wanted to be at her best for Justin (the very handsome vet tech) and clammed up on the table. But the vet, from the noises she had overheard as we came in, and in the absence of busted guts or pill-filled lungs, declared kennel cough. She asked how’s Pete, I said just perfect as I gave him an encouraging thump on the ribs, and gaack, blergh, honk. So she wrote two prescriptions, and told me that this was a courtesy visit. Life is good.

Then she removed some of the rosy from my day by saying that we would be contagious for about three weeks, even after they’re done whooping it up.