44th day

Small snowflakes greeted us this morning, a soft dusting, yay!
Huge snowflakes the size of cheese puffs by midday, oh no!
Wet slush falling from the sky by 5pm, oh god (or goddess)!
Heavy stuff to move, this snowy sludge.  Tim did the lion's share, because he is the lion, after all!

Dogs, to continue where I left off yesterday, have all these wonderful qualities.  There are many books and sayings and memes and whatnot telling us that these are the ways of being to which we should aspire, so I won't do that.  The characteristic I most admire in dogs is their supreme cheerfulness, at the drop of a hat they will do a happy leap, a delighted dance.  We should all do a happy leap and a delighted dance every day. 

My first dog was a mongrel who followed my sister home from school, or that was the story she told.  I'm sure there was some persuasive patting and dog-whispering going on there too.  He was desperately thin and his paws were worn through when he arrived, and the vet reckoned he was about three years old, which was also my age at the time.  He just stayed with us for the rest of his life, in a very independent way.  Dogs in those days had free reign, but of course there were not so many cars then, and no gates to lock them in or out.  My dad guessed the dog's background when he observed Timmy (my brother's name was Timothy, so I really can't understand why my family decided that the best name for this dog was Timmy!) observing the horse and cart of a vegetable-seller and then falling in to run behind the cart for a while, before he seemed to realise what he was doing and let the cart clop off into the distance. (No, I'm not that old, but when I was little, we did have people who drove their horse-drawn carts around selling vegetables off the back of them.)

When my sister left home to study nursing two years later, Timmy became my dog, and followed me everywhere, my protector. 

Anne with Timmy the mutt.

The other dog with a huge character was Sasha, the crazy Lab/English Setter cross.  I got this dog when I was a first-year student at university, such a stupid act.  My mother and father scratched their heads at my shortsightedness.  How would I pay for her food, her vet bills, etc.?  But of course I was utterly in love with her by the time they heard about it and would not consider giving her up.  My daughter did a similar thing, history repeating itself, with her dog Onyx. 

Sasha was incredibly smart and independent, could open doors going inward or outward, knew every store in Grahamstown and was even welcomed by some of the store-holders each day.  The only foolish thing she did was chase seagulls on the beach, but then perhaps she just wanted to run for the joy of it, knew she would never catch them, just wanted to rush them to see them take off into flight.  Sasha could find her way home even if she had been driven 50 km away and sequestered in an enclosure with 3 meter high fences designed to keep deer from leaping out.

As she aged, she developed a horrible allergy to fleas, bearing the skin of the long-haired setter but the short hair of the lab, so she suffered from sunburn and an awful skin condition on her back, which just grew progressively worse until it smelt so bad and she was suffering so much that I had to make the decision to put her down, when she was just ten years old, and I was almost nine months pregnant with my second daughter.  She had lived a huge life, with many adventures, and been loyal and gentle and sweet and wonderful, because she was a dog, and that is who dogs are.

The beauteous Sasha

  So another poem for another death, written three years after she had died.

    Sasha
Fingers of my mind
Picking bones of the past.
The narrow skeleton of a white dog,
Skull - near perfect -
Sockets of fine smoothness.

Listen - the wind shrills -
The bones click and sing -
And almost remember
A seagull's cry - the flowing rush of limbs
In chase along an endless beach.

And almost I remember
Her brown eyes like a cow,
How carefully we watched each other,
Her head pressing my big belly,
As she plunged into the sky.