The Next To The Last Morning Of Vacation

Cool and rainy nights are good for sleeping, especially with the warm dog. If the cat wouldn't drool and suckle, he could join us, but the drooling and suckling really bother me, reminding me of a past bad relationship I want to forget, especially at night in bed. 

Although Dobro has lived here over a year, his company in the bed is much more recent. As you can see in the picture, his large scars are dry. The last open area finally closed over in August, exactly one year after his nearly fatal experience being hit and dragged on the highway. No bones were broken but large areas of hide were gashed, ripped, sheared, loosened, mangled, and otherwise damaged. I'll be forever grateful to the officer of the Centerville Police Department who stood by him at the bottom of the embankment while I drove to the site; he then helped carry Dobro up the embankment and led me to the emergency veterinary clinic. The Troy Animal Hospital calls Dobro their "Miracle Dog" because he survived shock, infection, and a long recovery requiring treatments similar to those received by victims of serious burns. He suffered through repeated vet visits so his many wounds could be cleaned and repaired. For months I gave him multiple medications taken by mouth and also applied to his skin. He had to stay on a special high protein diet to aid in the massive regrowth of new tissue and to replace the protein continuously seeping from several areas over his body. In a nutshell, that was why Dobro didn't sleep in the bed until just recently. He seems very appreciative, and usually pauses and looks at me as if asking permission before jumping aboard.

There was no creamer of any kind in the house this morning, no soy milk, no almond milk, no hemp milk, no flaxseed milk, no canned milk, no powdered milk, no ice cream, so I had to get creative with the morning coffee. I ended up putting the coffee in the blender with a huge dollop of Greek yogurt, adding a huge dollop of locally-produced honey and the last of the old cinnamon that had been my mother's. I blended it instead of whipping it so it wouldn't be too foamy. It was okay, and I mean that not in a dull, disappointed tone of voice, "it was okay," but in a perky, pleased tone of voice, "IT WAS OKAY!"

Sipping the coffee creation in the pre-dawn darkness with the faithful hound curled up against my flank, I found a new blog online: http://redwineandgarlic.blogspot.com/. In spite of all the cruelties revealed daily in the media, my faith in the goodness of humanity remains uncrushed because of the growing number of softer voices, sharing their observations, their poems, their images, their gentle souls. Alongside his blog, Black Pete offers the following quote, reflecting so much that is wrong in our society but fixable:

"Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left."                                                               -- ecologist and writer Aldo Leopold

He also blogged a surprisingly lovely poem describing damp laundry hanging on the clothes line: 

The Hanging of Clothes

I am pleased to be hanging

the damp clothing in the welcoming morning,

laundry remnants of closeted life,

our privacy laid bare in the sunlight.

The sheets, clouds of white floating

downward onto my naked body 

but an hour ago, zephyrs like benedictions

before I dared the day,

now shielding the flag-coloured shirts

and sturdy pants, the ribbony socks,

and the underthings--

just clothing, no more than shadows

of the bodies they cover,

no more than suggestions of the reality

of our being.

For reason of this last, I do not linger

over my wife's underthings, hanging them

as casually as my own, though her body

revealed is beauty as terrifying

as the Biblical army with banners,

stopping my breath.

No more than shadows of our bodies,

yet there are old country people 

who will not hang men's and women's underthings

on the same line, perhaps because they are shadows

of that which stops my breath

and pounds my heart. Maybe they are right.

But the ordinariness of this damp clothing

arrayed, pinned, spinning gently in the breeze,

is no shadow, but itself a glory

as the moisture rises like released spirit

into the sunlit air, in which I marvel

at the extraordinariness of the pairing 

of us two many years before, 

on just such a morning.

The morning darkness outside is giving hints that the sun is on the way and I already feel that the day is good.