Category Archives: magic

my life as an idiot, chapter 768: don’t touch that

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One of my coping mechanisms for dealing with Seasonal Affective Disorder, especially right after the time changes and everything is suddenly dark by 4pm, is to add more light to the house. Not overhead lights but rather, candles and strings of fairy lights. Things that give my space a warm and cozy glow. I have a bunch of battery powered candles that run on timers, which is nice – I just need to replace the batteries once in a while and remember to adjust the timers when the clocks change in the spring and the fall. Usually round about the middle of October I start lighting my big pillar candles as well. They’ve lasted a few years, but this year they finally burned down deep enough that I was starting to scorch my fingertips every time I reached down into them to light them with my old standby cigarette lighter.

During one such exercise shortly before Christmas, I muttered something about how when Mark went to pick up stocking stuffers for me, he could get me a long lighter for the candles if he wanted. He, being the ever thoughtful partner that he is, made a mental note of that, and come Christmas morning there was a long skinny box in my stocking. Instead of the standard long butane lighter like you tend to have for lighting grills and such, he had gotten me an electronic lighter specifically for use with candles. I mean, I guess you COULD torch anything with it if you really wanted to, but it says it was designed for lighting candles. The way it works is via a little arc that forms between two electrodes when you push the button. You hold the arc to the candle wick and it catches fire. Science is magic!

I’ve been using the new fancy lighter almost every evening right along for the last few weeks. Every time I click the button and see the teeny little arc form, I feel like some long lost relative of Nikolai Tesla or something, commanding raw electricity with the flick of a finger! It’s more power than a dumbass like me should wield, frankly. As if to prove that very point, this evening when I went to light the candles, I did something pretty stupid.

You may be able to guess where this is going.

Standing there marveling at the teeny little arc crackling between the two electrodes, a dumb thought pinged in my brain:

“Is it…hot? If it sets fire to the wick, it must be hot. But you can’t feel any heat coming off it like with a butane lighter. Welp, one way to find out, I guess.”

And that, dear reader, is when I touched the activated electrodes…YES, BOTH OF THEM AT THE SAME TIME…with the tip of my index finger. It felt like what I imagine a miniature version of being tazed feels like, which made perfect sense to me the second it happened, because DUH. The lighter is, after all, for all intents and purposes, a tiny tazer. I don’t know how many volts zipped through my finger in that split second, but it felt roughly equivalent to when I used to touch electrified fencing at the farm as a kid. Which I used to do for fun sometimes. Which might go a fair way toward explaining some of the things that are wrong with me.

Anyway.

Point being: if it looks like a tiny tazer and it sounds like a tiny tazer, it’s very, VERY likely that touching it is going to FEEL like a tiny tazer. And even tiny tazers pack a pretty good wallop.

I have learned nothing. I already want to touch it again. It’s so pretty and bright. *fascinated cat eyes*

turkey tracking

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Tell me you live in a very small town without TELLING me you live in a very small town. I’ll go first:

This morning on my town’s community Facebook group, there was a post about a “rogue turkey” hanging around someone’s yard. There were a couple of comments asking if the original poster could get a picture so that people could try to ID said turkey, but the original poster couldn’t provide a photo.

“It’s just a huge white turkey”, they said. “There are no markings, it’s white all over from what I can see.”

A little while later someone commented saying they thought they knew where the turkey belonged and posted the address. This was followed by debate over whether that was actually possible, as surely a domestic turkey wouldn’t be willing to travel so far afield, especially with so much snow on the ground. A series of photos and comments then followed which tracked the straying poultry’s progress across yards and pastures all along one end of town.

Someone finally got in touch with the bird’s owner, who joined the Facebook group so that they could arrange a pick-up. There were a bunch of comments expressing relief that the turkey was finally going to get back to his rightful home.

But then, drama! The owner arrived at the last known location of the turkey and it wasn’t actually there anymore.

“I’m here and I can’t see him”, they wrote. “If anyone has eyes on him, please let me know ASAP”.

A photo with a reply that read as quite exasperated in tone popped up moments later:

“He’s in my yard again, trying to get in with my chickens. PLEASE COME GET YOUR BIRD.”

A little while later the owner was back on the thread posting again about how they were at the spot and the turkey wasn’t around.

This started SEVEN HOURS AGO. I just checked the thread again and as of six minutes ago, the turkey still hasn’t been apprehended. It apparently keeps circling this one woman’s property and she (of the COME GET YOUR BIRD comment from mid-day, among others), is getting prettyyyy saltyyyy about it.

The incident has spawned several other spinoff threads with pictures of the wandering turkey, as well. Multiple people have asked for his name. There might be an “I Saw The Stray Turkey” Tshirt in the works. I made that last one up but I would sure as shit buy one if it were true, because this has easily been the most entertaining local social media thread I’ve seen in years.

Look at that magnificent bastard. Free as the day he was hatched. May the road rise to meet you, sir.
PS: this is not my photo, I jacked it from one of the spinoff threads. I live on the other end of town so alas I did NOT get to see the stray turkey.

ditch lily aspirations

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In New England, we have these orange daylilies that are pretty ubiquitous in the summer. They pop up all kinds of places: yards, abandoned lots, fields…and they’re especially common growing in ditches along the sides of back roads. A lot of people actually call them ‘ditch lilies’ for exactly that reason.

My neighbor hates ditch lilies. He has several flower gardens around his house that he tends meticulously, and one of his spring rituals is to find and dig up any ditch lilies that have somehow found their way into his beds. They grow via bulbs, but sometimes they don’t all come up at the same time, so it often takes years of successive diggings to get them all out. The last three springs since we moved here, I’ve watched him ferret out any burgeoning patches of ditch lilies and carefully dig all around them. He pops the whole clod of soil out, (presumably so to not further spread the lily bulbs), loads them into his wheelbarrow, wheels them down to where our driveways merge together, and dumps them down over the bank toward the brook.

The thing about ditch lilies is, they can grow just about anywhere. They need barely any dirt, they don’t need a ton of direct light, they’re pretty drought-resistant. There also happens to be a really nice layer of mulch in the form of wood chips from last year’s fallen tree that was cut down, chipped, and the chips dumped along that bank. So this year, right at the juncture of his driveway and ours, we now have a big cheerful new stand of ditch lilies from all the clods of bulbs he’s been dumping over that bank for the last few years.

I do kind of wonder if he glares at them every time he comes down his driveway, or if he’s fine with them as long as they’re not in his flower beds. Either way, I appreciate the symbolism: something discarded and unloved thrown into challenging circumstances takes root, rises up, and flourishes, waving its bright orange flowers at its oppressor on a daily basis, as if to say “you can’t keep me down, fucker”.

We could all use some help in the resilience department these days. May you find the ability to root where you’re thrown, rise up again, and tilt your face to the sun with a smile while knowing those fuckers can’t keep you down.

I’m a writer, Jim, not a photographer. But you get the gist.

the mechanic

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A few weeks ago…ok, probably a month ago? I’m bad with how time works. My brain reads hours as minutes and weeks as days more often than not.

Let me start over.

A month or so ago, I’m pulling out of my driveway when my neighbor flags me down. Our individual driveways merge into one small road that goes out to the main road, so we see each others’ comings and goings fairly regularly. I roll down my car window and smile.

“Hi there! What’s up?”

“Did’ya know your tail lights are out?” His voice is gravelly from years of heavy smoking. He’s got about four visible teeth in his mouth, presumably due to the same.

“Oh no, are they?” I had no idea. I’m never in back of the car when it’s running, let alone braking.

“Both of ’em. The one in your back window is working, but it’s small. Better get those fixed before you get hit,” he says sternly.

“You bet. Thanks for the heads-up,” I say. We pull away and continue along down the drive.

Of course I instantly forget about the tail lights.

A week or so later, he flags me down again, this time headed into our driveway.

“Tail lights still out,” he mutters. His rheumy blue eyes betray that he’s more disappointed than he sounds. And he sounds pretty disappointed.

“I know it, I meant to stop in at AutoZone and get them fixed but I’ve been busy, and then I forgot, and…you know how it goes. But it’s on the list, I promise.”

He nods and waves me along. As we pull up to park, I say to my husband, “You watch. One of these days he’s going to get sick of my shit, come fix those tail lights, and not even tell us”. We chuckle and don’t think much more of it.

This afternoon I’m sitting here working and my cell phone rings. It comes up with the neighbor’s name so I answer it.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Your keys in your car?”

“Uhh, no. Why?”

“I was gonna come over and fix those tail lights.”

“Oh, I’ve got an appointment at the garage next week, I was going to have them do it then.”

“Not safe to drive around without ’em. I’ve got the bulbs and the tools. I’ll come do it for you real quick.” And then he hangs up.

Well. No sense arguing, I guess.

He’s maybe 15 years older than me, but he looks much older. Decades of heavy drink and smoke will do that to a body. He recently had part of his pancreas and stomach removed, spent six weeks in hospital, and was out mowing the lawn in ten-minute bursts within a week of coming home. Once he was feeling better and moving around more easily, he started in on trimming back the limbs along the shared part of the driveway because he wants to have it widened and re-graveled this fall. His flower garden is extensive and immaculate. The man truly doesn’t know how to be idle.

While he’s here fixing my tail lights, he notices that my tires were really worn down. I say I was kind of putting off replacing them because I’ll need to buy snow tires soon enough anyway and I don’t really want the expense of buying two sets at once. He leans down, brushes the dirt off the sidewall of a tire and reads out the size.

“195/65 R15. I think I have a set of used ones in that size at the shop.”

“Oh! That would be great, I’d be happy to buy them off you.”

“Used. They wouldn’t cost you anything. You couldn’t run them a whole season, you’d still have to buy a new set come spring. But they’d get you through inspection and last you ’til you get your snows put on.”

“Ok, well…let me know, I guess. My inspection appointment is Thursday.”

He nods slowly, then starts walking down the driveway, back toward his house.

“Hey, what do I owe you?”

He turns his head halfway back over his shoulder as he continues walking.

“Nothin’. It was just a couple lightbulbs. See ya.”

So I guess the moral of the story is, if you’re forgetful and not good at car maintenance, get yourself a mechanic neighbor with a lack of boundaries and a generous heart.

garden grace

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Peace has always been hard to come by for me, and even more-so lately. Inside my head is forever a hot mess but the threat of the virus, the carelessness and abject stupidity of our government and its supporters, the constant march of time despite being stuck in this strange wormhole where we never seem to leave the house anymore and where work has become home has become workhomework, plus a whole bunch of other stuff…
…it’s been overwhelming to say the least.
It’s raining today, but not hard. Just a slow, soft, frankly kind of half-assed rain where the sun is partially out a lot of the time.
I went outside at one point mid-morning to get something out of the car. Stepping out into the cool, humid air, I expected to be swarmed with mosquitoes immediately (move to the woods, they said. It will be fun, they said). But, to my surprise, between the slight breath of breeze and the slow drip of rain, the mozzies weren’t chancing it.
Realizing this rare gift for what it was sent me back inside to get my gloves and pruners. I spent the next 45 minutes working my way through the garden: deadheading the big-leaf rhododendron and azalea, pruning back the small-leaf rhododendron, clipping dead wood and sassy bits of yellow loosestrife from where it had insistently emerged in the middle of hydrangea bushes, and chasing down the origins of some intrusive blackberry brambles (don’t worry, I kept plenty). I got to visit with my little garter snake friend who lives under a partially propped up brick near the damp tangled shade beneath the rhododendron.
Chipmunks chittered and birds hollered. Something with some girth to it slowly crunched along through the underbrush but I couldn’t get my eye on it to get an ID.
The whole time I was out there, I just WAS.
I was damp from rain.
I was stretching to reach branches and stooping to pull weeds.
I was moving with quiet and purpose, not having to think about every little thing I was doing or what I was missing inside or who wanted something from me.
And somewhere in the midst of all that, I found some much-needed, if fleeting, peace.

chasing ghosts

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(Let’s just pretend I haven’t posted in six months, mmkay? Mmkay.)

I believe in ghosts. Living things are made of energy and I believe some of that energy can cling to places, objects, and even people. As long as you invest your own energy into carrying the memory of someone, they’re living on in you, even if only a tiny bit.

We’re all haunted, for better or worse, by the people we choose to put energy into remembering, then. I am haunted by my Nana on the daily – whether by seeing a bird or flower she liked, smelling a scent that I associate with her, or thinking of a specific time I was with her. My paternal grandmother, Marion, haunts me often by way of my love for fiber arts and textiles. She was an amazing knitter and seamstress, and had aspirations in her early days of becoming a fashion designer. When I see a beautifully made piece of clothing or I sit down to knit for a while, her energy is there in my hands, if not my head, making me itch to create.

Can you be haunted by someone you’ve never met, though? Someone you have no memories of to feed your own energy into? I think in some cases, yes. Maybe you visit a place where someone’s energy is still clinging for whatever reason, like in a classic ghost story of a grisly death or unrequited love, where someone’s spirit can’t leave. Their energy might not even be trapped there due to bad circumstances – maybe it was a place that person loved so deeply or made it so much their own that they willed part of themselves to stay there long after their body had left. Perhaps there’s an item that was so important to someone that it ended up absorbing some of their energy. Whether a cherished object or a utilitarian one, the things we surround ourselves with and use on a daily basis can certainly carry echoes of us far into the future, I believe.

If you’ve gotten this far you’re probably wondering why I’m even blathering on about this woo shit. It’s not my normal LOL-fest, after all (please read that with the intended sarcasm. On no plane of existence would I have the audacity to judge my own writing an actual LOL-fest. Apparently I DO exist in a space where I refer to things as LOL-fests now, though? I’m not sure I’m ok with that, but I’m quickly sliding headlong into a black hole of parenthetical digression and I need to back away from that particular event horizon before it sucks me in and disintegrates me. I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries about space lately, can you tell?).

Where was I? Oh yes, explaining why I’m talking about ghosty woo things.

So, the reason I bring all this up is that I’m being haunted. The spirit of one of my great-great-grandfathers, Harlan Godfrey, has been all up in my grill for quite some time now.

I’ve always been really interested in old stuff. I was never really great in history class in school because that involved a lot of memorizing names and dates, which put me right to sleep. But old STUFF? Stuff you can hold in your hands, or at least see in the context of the time in which it was created / used? That’s always been my jam. I wanted to be a paleontologist, then an archaeologist, for most of my childhood. Eventually I figured out that both professions a) spend a lot of time doing very physical work in some pretty inhospitable places (or worse, are in academia), and b) are not known for making big bucks. Or any bucks, really. Being physically uncomfortable and being poor have both always been pretty high on my Do Not Want list, so I eventually moved on to other dreams (none of which I have actually achieved either, but at least I learned to be more realistic? That’s a useful skill, surely). My love of old stuff and old stories never really went away, though. Eventually I started channeling it into genealogy. This was especially satisfying to me because it combined my love of old stuff with my ridiculously strong life-long urge to know other people’s business.

For a long time my genealogy fixes came from my Nana. She had lots of old pictures, lists of names and birth dates, and she knew where most of the bodies were buried. Literally. Her husband, my Bampa, was long gone at that point – he died when I was 11 – but she had stayed in close touch with that side of the family and had a lot of knowledge of their ancestry as well. My mom has always been interested in family history too, and with the advent of sites like Ancestry, being able to build an actual family tree and show her all kinds of cool stuff like census records and draft cards got her sort of sucked into my project as well. We ended up going to a family reunion together a few summers ago – NOT something that either of us would normally volunteer for, as we’re both card-carrying introverts – but several very elderly family members were going to be there and we were interested in seeing if they could confirm some details of some people for us. At the reunion my mom’s aunt Jan (my grandfather’s youngest sister) mentioned that she had some books I might be interested in, and that she’d get them to me eventually.

The following summer, Jan showed up one day with a smallish clear plastic tote bag – the kind that gift sets of shampoo and body wash come in. Rather than bottles, it was filled with small books.

“Here’s something to get you started. I want these back eventually, so please be careful with them,” she said, handing them over. I pulled out the first little book, smaller than most peoples’ cell phones today, and flipped open the cover.

‘Diary of Harlan F. Godfrey, 1910’

I went home that afternoon and lost at least three hours reading. The entries are all entirely utilitarian. Harlan was a subsistence farmer in turn-of-the-century Vermont. He used his diaries to keep track of weather, which heifers were bred and which ones were sold, when he bought feed and supplies and how much he paid for them, etc. Not exactly riveting reading for most people, but for whatever reason, I was hooked. I read through all the diaries over the space of a few days, then proceeded to bend the ear of every family member who showed even the remotest inkling of interest about them.

Jan’s words kept bouncing around in my head – “I want these back eventually”. But…but what if I some day had a burning need to know how much Harlan had paid for a hogshead of cracked corn at Chase’s store in Bradford in September of 1910? She wanted the books back, but I couldn’t handle the idea of losing that resource. I needed to preserve my hoard of the most banal treasure imaginable. So I decided to do the only reasonable thing, given the situation:

I decided to transcribe it. All six books worth.

It should be noted that, like with most plans I come up with, I decided I was going to do it and then immediately started four other things, which lead to three further projects, which in turn brought on an avalanche of roughly 17.6 million additional tasks. Before I knew it, a year had gone by. And then another one. That is 100% how I’ve made to to age 39, by the way. I swear the last time I looked, I was 27. This whole ‘time compressing as you age’ thing is pretty fucked, especially if your brain was pre-wired to have no real concept of time passing like mine is.

Anyway. Jan still hadn’t asked for the books back a couple weeks ago when the second anniversary of me having them whizzed past, but I know Jan and she is as dragon-esque with her hoard of precious old things as I am, so I know she won’t forget and I won’t be able to put her off for long once she decides she wants the books back.

So, last Friday when I had something else I really needed to be doing and thus was fair gagging for a procrastinatory escape hatch, I pulled up a Google doc, cracked open the first diary, and started transcribing. It’s going faster than I originally figured it would – it takes me about 30 minutes to get through a month of entries, provided I don’t run into any super scrawly bits that I have to try to decipher. Harlan’s penmanship was pretty decent but he wrote with a pencil, the point of which wears down periodically, making things harder and harder to read…to the point where I’ll find myself muttering ‘sharpen your god damned pencil, Gramps’ like he could somehow hear me from 110 years in the past. His grammar is also pretty suspect, which can be kind of amusing at times. He wrote very much how he would have spoken (must be genetic?), so there are entries like “Done choars this F”, meaning he did the chores this forenoon, and “drawed wood all day”, meaning not that he’s drawing pictures of wood but that he’s dragging it out of the forest with his horses. My favorite is that, almost every Sunday, his entry is “here to home”. Sometimes it’s accompanied by notes of people having visited that day, but mostly it’s just that one simple statement that sounds so…content. Like he’s taking a well-earned day off after a week of hard work. I mean, for all I know he spent his Sundays beating his kids and kicking the chickens…but I’d find it quite surprising if that were the case.

What used to be Harlan’s farm, and then his son Floyd (my great-grandfather)’s farm, is about a ten minute ride from where I live. It’s a spot I have been inexplicably drawn to for many years – since way before I knew which property my ancestors had owned, since before I stopped to look at the gravestones in the little cemetery tucked up on the side hill and noticed many names I recognized from my family tree. All that energy, all that love of place that three or four generations of my ancestors worked into the side of that hill… it’s like someone strikes a kind of cosmic tuning fork and the bits of those people that live on in my blood start singing that haunting note and I have to go back to harmonize for a little while.

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Mmm, so old. Very book.

origins

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I started this blog three years ago today.

cake

OCD brain is annoyed that there are more than three candles in this picture. Calm your tits, OCD brain. We’ll just assume those blurry, far-away candles are for future blogiversaries off in the misty distance. Or past ones from other blogs. Who cares, just make like Elsa and let it go already. Gahd.

It doesn’t feel like that big of a deal to me because I’ve actually had a blog of some sort for close to fourteen years now. My original blog, which technically still exists but is pretty hard to find unless you know what you’re looking for, was started on 1/13/2004. I finally gave up posting there in  2009, then started my half-assed cooking blog in 2010. The half-assed cooking blog also still exists but I haven’t posted on it since July 2015. It was starting to feel like a chore, and it was also making me feel really inadequate in a lot of ways. Like, food blogs are all about good photography, and I had neither the time or the inclination to teach myself how to be a food stylist. I’m also really not good at measuring when I’m cooking, and I don’t always think in a linear fashion, so recipes are pretty hard for me to write…and that’s pretty much what people read food blogs for. There are only so many times someone is going to want to read about how good my meatloaf is before they’re like “OK, prove it. Either feed me meatloaf, give me your recipe so I can try it, or STFU”. In the end, I opted for S’ing the F.U.

I started How Bad Can It Go because a friend drew some casual similarities between my then Facebook-based rants about being a little touched in the head and the way Jenny Lawson (aka The Bloggess) wrote about her own experiences with mental illness. The comparison was wildly flattering. I immediately started envisioning how I’d blog hilariously (but also earnestly) about my struggles with anxiety, depression, and ADHD for maybe a year or so, then be ‘discovered’ by some publisher. I’d be given a book deal and afforded the opportunity to tell my day job they could shove off.

Let’s just say the offers haven’t exactly been pouring in. Or trickling, even. Nary a drip. Not even the merest hint of moisture in the air. Dry as a 5,000 year old Egyptian’s desiccated, mummified femur buried under 47 feet of sand, in fact.

mummy

Ramses was the worst peek-a-boo partner EVER.

But that’s OK. I’ll keep on keepin’ on, because hey, how bad can it go?

level four event

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Over the weekend we had a Level Four Steve Event and it was spectacular. I was standing there at the kitchen sink watching two Steves root around for snacks under the bird feeder when there was a rustle off to the left and a third Steve descended the trunk of the big maple tree and started his own snuffle quest. As I announced to the household that we were in the midst of a Level Three Event, also known as a Triple Blessing, a fourth Steve poked its precious snoot out from the underbrush on the extreme right perimeter of the bird feeder area. It proceeded with caution up the pole to the bird feeder and began stuffing its pouches.

All chipmunks are named Steve, by the way – I should remind newcomers of this.

stevecrop

This was the actual best day of my life. This was OG Steve, who would happily bounce up to me and take peanuts and even let me pet him. RIP, OG Steve.

For context, it’s worth pointing out that Level Two Events, also known as Double Stevenings, are pretty common at our place. Triple Blessings are more rare but they do happen with some regularity. Level Four Events happen maybe twice or three times a summer, tops. We’ve had one Level Five Event in the three summers we’ve lived at this place and I nearly passed out from excitement at the time. Mark still doesn’t entirely believe that it actually happened but I saw it with my own eyes and no one can take that away from me.

The Level Four Event on Sunday was actually the second one we’ve seen this summer. The first one was a few weeks ago, just before what we’re sadly calling The Culling. Our next door neighbors have three cats, you see – two giant ginger tanks and a little smoke-grey ghost. The grey cat is an actual hunter – I’ve seen it launch out of the bushes to pluck song birds out of air in mid-flight. It also regularly catches field mice, voles, and even the occasional mole. The ginger cats are far less industrious but, perhaps out of some small inkling of shame about becoming the sedentary gits that they are, they will sometimes attempt to “hunt”. Since they’re lazy and don’t want to go very far, “hunting” means parking their fluffy arses in the middle of my lilies or daffodils and half napping while they wait for a Steve to pop up from a burrow and scurry past them. I kid you not, I have watched one of the ginger cats doze off while humped up next to a Steve-hole, “hunting”. And eight times out of ten, even when they’re wide awake, they miss the Steves. A couple weeks ago someone had a hot streak though, because we found two Steve corpses over the span of about seven days. Since all Steves look pretty much the same (it has taken me three years to be able to differentiate the adults from the juveniles, and I’m not even super sure that I’m right about that – it’s just that some of them are bigger and have more grey on their  hind ends and so I assume those are adults. Being an adult certainly makes my hind end feel grey, anyway), and since we had only seen four Steves prior to The Culling, we were certain that the population had been halved. To suddenly see four all at once again was pretty fantastic.

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A Steve stuffing his face in the feeder a week or so ago. The audio got lost when I converted the video to a GIF so you can’t hear my patented, based-on-science, soothing sing-songy murmur of “SteeeEEEEeeeeve” in the background. Also, this one won’t take snacks from me. YET.

 

holding pattern

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Keppo just wants to be held.

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Zzzzzz…

Sometimes he tries to eat his feet:

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ANG NYANG NYANG

Sometimes he likes to perch up high and creep on the neighbors:

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“12:30pm. Nothing to report.”

Sometimes he likes a good belly rub:

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“Never stop doing this, ever.”

But mostly, he just wants to be held:

The thing about Keppo is, if he wants to be held and for whatever reason you CAN’T hold him right that second (like, say, if you’re trying to work on the laptop, or you’re eating a sandwich), he doesn’t give a fuck. Your needs are irrelevant to Keppo. If he can’t force you to hold him, he will proceed to find a way to wedge himself up against your body, likely in the most awkward and uncomfortable way, and will have himself the nap he was planning to have before you tried to ruin it by doing human stuff.

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“Oh, you’re busy right now? It’s fine, I’ll just curl up here and look sad.”

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“Why work when we could be making out?”

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It took him a full five minutes of huffing, grunting and repositioning himself dramatically behind my head and shoulder before he finally settled here.

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I had to lean forward. He slid, and instead of going to sit somewhere else, he doubled down. It’s been 20 minutes and he’s still wedged in there.

 

Keppo’s name comes from a character in Legend of the Five Rings, a card game my husband and a lot of our friends play. In the game, Keppo was a resourceful little goblin who liked to steal things. He had a hoard of treasures in a cave, and always seemed to have a special something hidden away that could save his ass when he was in a jam. The Keppo character became a mascot for our playgroup – we’ve even had art pieces commissioned for T-shirts that include the goblin Keppo’s likeness. When Mark and I were trying to come up with names for the puppy, we wanted something suitably nerdy, but also something easy. The shelter had named him Cupid because he was surrendered on Valentine’s Day. The name Keppo had the distinct advantage of sounding kind of like the name the shelter had been using for the pup for the last six weeks. Plus, most puppies are at least a little bit thieving goblin, aren’t they? So far, our Keppo mostly just likes to steal personal space.

a month and a day

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It’s been a month and a day since we lost Junior.

This morning on the way out the door to head to work, I almost turned to Mark and asked him to check if Junie’s water dish was full. The dish hasn’t been in its spot for a month and a day.

I don’t hear him anymore, at least. For the first few days, I’d swear I could hear him snuffling in the living room or at the foot of the bed at night. I think my brain just automatically knew what sounds he’d be making when, and was filling them in of its own accord. My brain only wants to be helpful with remembering things when it comes to me being haunted, I guess. Go figure.

We still have all of his stuff. His bowls got washed and tucked away in the cupboard almost as soon as we got home. His harness and leash are still on the back seat of the car, which seems perfectly fitting as going for rides was just about his favorite activity. Most of his toys are still piled up in the same place we always returned them to on the rare occasion we bothered to tidy them. A few of his special toys got put aside in other places – his little stuffed bantha sits atop the carved wooden box his ashes are in on the table-cum-altar in the living room. LeRoy, the wee squeaky giraffe whose squeaker gave out but who Junie still often picked up and tried to make squeak, now resides on the bookshelf with some other mementos. L’Alligator the stuffed alligator whose head I once had to surgically reattach due to Junie’s frequent, enthusiastic attentions, sits on the desk upstairs in our bedroom. He’s a far quieter night sentry than Junior ever was, but we do feel like he’s getting the job done OK so far.

His beds are still there, all four of them (one for each bedroom and two in the living room), though Mark moved the one from the foot of our bed into the spare bedroom, and I tucked the favorite living room bed under the other, deeply hated living room bed (he took after me and had a complicated relationship with beds), so that we wouldn’t have to see them empty. We really should get rid of at least two of the beds. One belonged to our old dog Buttons and predated Junior by several years. The faux sheepskin atop the other one bears the scars of much scuffing, as Maltese tend to like to scratch up their bedding into a suitable nest before settling down to nap. We should go through the dozens of toys and donate some of them to the local shelter as well…but we’re not there yet.

It’s only been a month and a day, after all.

 

 

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L’Alligator and Junior