May 5, 2012

It’s an odd thing to mourn the loss of a dog not your own, to confront that pain circuitously. Our friend’s gargantuan & idiosyncratic & incredibly well-loved buddy, at rest & gone from us down in Palmer. & Solo in the meantime with three staples in his head where T’s teeth gnashed & gnawed. In wrestling them apart in a willow copse mottled with snow to see his eyes stretched back under the ceaseless pressure of jaw. A dog’s screaming is nothing you forget. & in the end, it’s another in a long series of dog fights we’ll break up & the wounds are relatively small & will heal fine, but there is the part of me in which these things coalesce to demand an attention to inevitability & time. You forget with dogs sometimes, when they are pleased & you are pleased, when you all fall into your natural cycles together, that their care is such an earnest & ongoing responsibility. That you will pour your love into them & that it will crush you when they falter, or fight, or when their muzzles grey, or their gaits stutter. But we know their happiness enduringly, & their pure joy, & their uninflected love, & our hearts would feel such a cutting lack were they not our constant companions. & so. & otherwise, the snow recedes in fits & fights the slow murmuring of spring. The road to our cabin plowed only yesterday, which spares us slogging through sun-shot snow & mud puddle with our every last drop of water. There toward the end, alternating between the sled & the cart, shifting contents back & forth to suit the level of melt. This, I think, will be much easier. Either way, the cabin remains a refuge, tucked away. The dogs run back to the bluff with us each night, overlook Panguingue, roll in the lingering patches of snow, dart around our feet. The lumbering sun hesitates greatly in its setting already. We have switched to hoppier beers. I have started looking at ridgelines again, even though my running is languid if it exists at all these days. The looking is a good start though. We have taken the sled bags off of the sleds & hung them for the summer in the shed, leaned the sleds against the back of the house, stuffed the harnesses away into a bag. Time to play in the mud a while, I suppose. & married life a wonder. People suppose too often that marrying the one you love does little to affect how you feel about one another, if you’ve lived together & loved one another already some time. This is entirely untrue. To be wed seems comparable to having some comforting, beautiful song playing in a quiet loop on some warm record player in a chamber of the heart—always faintly audible, always somehow vital, visceral. There is something about it that suffuses me simultaneously with the enduring familiarity of my wife’s love & with the kind of candescent joy that spurs one toward Whitmanic proclamations. A volcano that simmers warm & always verges on overbrimming. I couldn’t have guessed it would feel such. But I’m sure glad it does.