Monthly Archives: November 2011

A Dog’s Life

This pretty, pampered dog is staring at me right now.  He’s peering at me from his princely perch onmy sofa and waiting for me to pet him. Or serve him.  Or whatever it isthat princely dogs expect.
And this dog?  He’stired.  He just wants to sleep.  Willyou people cut out the racket, please?  Hesaid that, he did, I swear.

Wait.  You didn’t knowmy house was a kennel? 
Ah, well.  This week it smells like one, but the truth is that out here in suburbia we are limiting thepack.  These lovely dogs are just visiting for the holidays.
We do have one sweet pup of our own, one year-and-a-half bundle ofenergy and goodness who’s feeling a bit down right now.  Here he is, hiding in his kennel. 

Why the dog reclusiveness, you ask?  No one can be sure, of course.  But I’m going to venture a guess, an I’ve-had-dogs-for-years guess:  He’s pouting.  Look at him.  It’s a classic puppy pout:  the big dog won’t play (too old, too tired) and thelittle dog is allowed on the couch (spoiled pretty-boy).  Nofair.

Life’s tough sometimes, isn’t it?

I have so much more to learn.

photo by armatoj

How can it be?  Howcan I be this many years into life, and marriage, and friendship, andparenthood, how did I make it all the way through high school biology,trigonometry, and AP English to the hallowed halls of my lovely university, andstill come out on the other side just beginning to learn?
If you glanced around my house right now, here’s some ofwhat you’d see: Buy-ology, from the library, on my kitchen counter; dog-earedcopies of Blue Nights and Unaccustomed Earth proudly taking the top spot on thepile of books beside my bed; Sunday’s paper, still unread, resting onedge of the kitchen table.  So there’sthat.  The book learning.
But there’s so much more. There’s the thinking, the wondering, the understanding—or wantingto.  There’s the nuance and the subtletythat I sometimes miss, and sometimes can’t avoid.  It’s the whys and the hows that trip me up,that call to me, that keep me coming back, reaching, grasping for more.
I could’ve stayed in school forever, maybe.  For the book learning, yes.  But more for the thinking, the lengthydiscussions with others, the swirling of ideas, the ‘discovering’ ancient ideasthat are new again, the contemplation: why are these ideas back again, or not.
I have so much more to learn.


I’m linking up with Heather:  check it out to find lots of writers thoughtfully writing in the moment.

In That Yard

photo by AForestFrolic

The tree in our front yard seemed incredibly high to a pair of fifth graders, but we climbed it every day after school anyway.  My mom, a glass of iced tea with mint by herside, sat out front and chatted with her friends as she watched the daredevil girls scale ever higher.  It was in that tree, in that yard, that I watched, helpless and horrified, when mypartner-in-crime fell all the way down and snapped the bone in her arm.

Her arm healed quickly and we played on.  Beyond the tree a large swath of grass gave us plenty of room to run.  On sweltering, humid summer nights we gathered our siblings and played monkey in the middle in that yard, until the street lights finally came on and our mothers called us home.

It was there, in that yard, that I watched sunflowers growas tall as my dad, by the side of the house. It was in those woods that my friends and I celebrated our inner explorers.  We traipsed and tromped.  We walked all the way through to the otherside.  We played in the heaping piles of pebbles used for construction or landscaping or who knows what.  Those piles were like snow mounds for kids in the south and for as much as we knew, they existed for our playing pleasure.

That yard was mine for six whole years, longer than anyother yard of my childhood.  As the daughter of a Marine pilot, I found myself in a new home every three years but this time my dad was assigned back-to-back tours and so we stayed in Quantico, VA for six. I ended elementary school and began high school there.  Big years.

After we moved I returned to Quantico occasionally, weaving my car in and out of the streets and memories of my childhood.  Right there! That’s where I played under the streetlight with Jessica, that night I snuck out the window.  (And got into big trouble with my parents later.) And—there!  That’s the hill where I split my knee open when I tried to ride my bike with no hands.  There—that’s the swimming pool where I morphed, before my own eyes, from a fun-loving kid who played Marco Polo with her brother to a self-conscious teen, worried about what the cool kids thought.

These days I live halfway across the country and I haven’t had the chance to return as often as I’d like. On a recent visit, though, we had some extra time and my mom drove me through the old neighborhood.

As we rounded the bend, my stomach dropped.

Gone were the woods where we ran through the creek and climbed tree houses and pretended we were Lewis and Clark.  Gone were the yards and the duplexes and the trees.  No morning glories.  No sunflowers.  Instead, shiny new townhouses rose in their place.

My childhood, I thought.  What happened to my childhood?

The houses were old, I know. I found out later that more than 1,200 homes were demolished to make way for the new.  The homes we lived in were outdated and quarters were tight.  I’m sure the current servicemen and their families appreciate the fresh new townhouses with their Pottery Barn colors. I don’t begrudge them their new digs one bit.  Life in the military is hard enough—no need to add housing trouble to the list.

But I am left alone with my memories, now.  There’s nothing concrete to validate what I knew, what I know—nothing I can point to and say, There, that’s where it happened.

I wonder if there are other events that leave us with this feeling—this dangling in space.  Have you been there?