rewind

I know, I know. I’ve been remiss. It’s not like I’m not aware of my lapses, my delays, my tardiness. As someone who feels obligations heavily, I’m always aware of my absence from this space, my space. But I’m also always aware of returns, of homecomings, of starts and restarts.

In the spirit of a restart, I’m going to take it in reverse. And in reverse I end up at yesterday, a day in which I awoke to the sun in my eyes in the downstairs bedroom at my Mom’s house in Michigan. She has a new pup, an almost pathologically shy poodle named Lucy.

Lucy is the kind of dog who seems to understand that there are things in life that are preferable to slavish adoration of her owners, like half-heartedly chasing a ball or lazily lounging in the sun. I think it’s fair to say that Lucy has really no interest in me. Nevertheless, she and I set off for a mid-morning walk in an old, maybe abandoned, orchard. I couldn’t help musing about Arlo, the pup whom I really got to know during the year we lived with my Mom close to another orchard nearby. As I was remembering how much Arlo loved playing a little game I used to call “chase me around the tree, please,” Lucy bolted. Took off. Made haste. She was done with me. I didn’t worry. She wasn’t chasing a deer. She wasn’t chasing a car. She just decided that she’d had enough and so she left. When I got back to my mom’s, she was happily snoozing in the sun, just where I knew that she’d be. The strange thing is that I like a dog that clearly doesn’t really like me.