Picnicking in the Pause

Photo: Lucinda Heimer

While I continued to bury myself in research this summer, I ceased writing. I ceased even in this space--my "free zone." I at least took my leave from with a posting titled "Pause" you can say I took leave with metaphoric fidelity. I spent a fair bit of the summer admiring my garden, along with researching "empathy"--which turned out to be a bit of a rabbit-hole (more metaphoric fidelity!).

My beloved mate and I both had wacky sweet work schedules--his due to a remodeling project at his work, and mine due to gross underemployment (in the name of getting writing done!).  It was too tempting:  We spent a LOT of time just being together and talking.  He even went so far as to call it our second honeymoon.  We may be hungry later in life for this carnal sloth, but I keep thinking about what people regret the most as they lay dying and it is not that they wished they'd worked more.  Because he is verging on the age his older brother departed us; we do indeed have the backdrop of mortality a bit more explicitly painted.  As for what I will regret as I lay dying?  It will not be this summer.  This summer will be a smile upon my face, a small softening around my eyes.  Mark was still declaring he was no longer an artist; I was abstaining from even my creative writing, as if gestating--turned inward, feeding a proto-thought with the intellectual equivalent of ice cream and pickles.  But I digress.  Again.

Part of the pause was due to paws (sorry)--our old dog was becoming ever more feeble with each day.  I was his human--he would wait patiently outside the bathroom door, whine when I whined and greeted me after a multi-day absence as if I had travelled the world and survied against all odds.  It was he, of course, who was surviving.  And I knew I was going to have to bid him farewell soon.  This is not the kind of decision I make by creating a lists of pros and cons.  Of course there is analysis and pragmatic concern:  I need to note and prevent as much as possible, his suffering.  But also, beyond all else, it was a relationship and a decision that rested in an animal logic beyond lists, beyond words, maybe beyond thought.

Like the best of love, our relationship operated at a level barely languaged.  This old dog had seen me through a three-year-long arduous martial separation, the sweet roller coaster of new love, the teen years and young man departures of two sons out of three, the full course of my graduate career as well as 3 jobs and the adaptation and blossoming of a mid-life marriage.  He was patient and loyal through it all.  If I travelled, he would wait outside for me. He knew the vibration of my car engine from a quarter mile away.  Even when his legs got arthritic, he would hop with joy at the prospect of taking a walk in the neighborhood.  He was aghast at the ridiculous new pup we obtained, but he forbore our gauche human propensity to forgive that creature's boorish manners.  He was still king of beneath the dining room table and of my heart and that was all that mattered. 

Kodiak was not especially brilliant or sparkly--he was just plain good-hearted.  And bidding him goodbye was a thought I could barely have.  I think Mark and I were somehow practicing with Kody--we were practicing how to witness flesh being so very mortal, after all.  And so we treasured our place together, our little constellation of beings perched on a hillside on an edge of Sanders.  We delighted in the sound of the creek, the sight of the birds, the blossoms in their idiosyncratic parade.  We delighted in being here.  Here.  Surrounded by beings and by vegetation and air and water and....here.

Here was precious to us this summer.  Here was unique to our concentric array of beloveds, our stage in life, our perched-ness between the past and the future. We reveled in having enough to get by (well, honestly, we're a little behind).  We met with our friends travelling spiritual paths beside us.  We gave shelter to a sick friend who would otherwise be homeless.  We entertained a few couchsurfers.  We said to each other: This is home. Wow, we like our home. We don't want to leave. 

Because we might have to.  I want to be a university teacher and I want to be a scholar and I need to get paid for it and, even more so, we need me to have benefits so that we may have health care.  We're thriving in a funky hippie way, but to keep thriving, I must most likely seek employment in another place.  Because that's how the academy works: One goes, not to a place, but to an institution that aligns with one's research interests.  I get it. 

But that's all about the head!  I have a body, too.  And this body LOVES, is aligned with, functions with joy within the environs and the people of this southern Indiana community. 

I have written quite a bit about my refugee status, here. If there is a place I am "from" it is not southern Indiana.  But I landed in Indiana...and in a rather big city. This was not a good match for me. So I drove south pulling my family along with me, returning to a land that had spoken to me as a young woman.  I found where I and my family could breathe--literally. It was not lost on me that my children needed asthma medicine in the city and not in the small town 55 miles away.  This is not irrelevant. This matters to me.

Matter is indeed an issue, here.  Just as Kody's matter was unhooking itself from integrity....so too does a life that unhooks mind from matter, demands we behave as if we are not beings embedded in our environment. What happens when we behave as if we are only minds skating across the surface of breath? When we hold that understanding we eschew, disavow the most insistent evidence of our material existence--our flesh (our sex, our excretions and flowings, our skin, our organs our muscles and tendons...).  These are, despite our best attempts at segregation, the thread that sews us to the earth.  We may flush what falls from within us away but we are then haunted by the dilemma of how to deal with what is now concentrated waste instead of dispersed and enfolded fertilizer.

I am back to messiness, here.  And that's no mistake.  I do have a composting theory of life.   And it is this: One cannot segment matter, ideas, ways of being, thinking, teaching, learning...into rigid categorization in any permanent way and have that be truth.  It just isn't the way the world works.  It is, as philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright says, "a dappled world."  The plat map does not hold in the face of lived experience upon a folded and rolling landscape.

So we unplatted this summer, ironically on the little square of "our" home (I believe it is TWO banks that can kick us out were we to miss one too many payments--I'm sure they'd view my ponds as burdens and the wild abandon of my garden as mitigating our curb appeal.)  We unplatted our being, and Kody's body followed the dissolving entropic dictates of his DNA. 

I was encouraged not to invite the vet in, to let death find Kody, but we were readying for travel--across thousands of miles and weeks of time.  He would not like this.  I could not bear to think of him,, so old and unable to move--somedays even out of his own puddle of piss--waiting outside for my return.  I could not bear to think of him--shivering in a rainstorm out under the Japanese Maple, waiting. 

So a week before our departure, I asked the vet to help him to depart.  I whispered "good boy" and "thank you" into his old dog ear and he simply ceased to breathe.  We all cried. 

My middle son had spent a week digging through the clay and, after leaving him for an afternoon on the living room floor--me hallucinating his rib cage's rise and fall, my youngest finally able to touch him and say goodbye--we carried him out, lowered him down.  And I covered him with a bathrobe that I've worn since I carried my first son in my womb 25 years ago.  It was so worn through at the shoulders you could spy the skin across my clavicle through an emerald haze of thread.  I'm sure it smelled deeply of me.  That loss--the lowering of Mom's bathrobe into the earth, marked Kody's passing most clearly for my sons, I think. 

How can I leave this place, this land that contains his remains?  How can I leave the tree I planted years ago in a spot that would reveal it to weep gently over the pond that I dug 2 years after planting it?  Kody's body is buried beneath its roots now.  And the pond's dark and flashing world companions our gaze with every glance outside our home's windows.  I fell in love with this land--with its recalcitrant soil, with its hidden karst caves, with its geodes, coyotes, hawks and paw-paws.  What to do with a love of land?  How to take leave when it is perhaps not only a nice idea, but a necessary one? 

I think we rebelled against the call of the necessary this summer.  We tested its boundaries.  We got away with something, with working weirdly so that we could love well....and so that we could say goodbye from within a deep dwelling. I do not regret this.  I realize I may come to do so...but I have those days of long conversation with my mate and the halting stroll towards death with Kody. 

When we finally travelled, at the end of the summer, we crossed the border between Maine and New Brunswick and felt the difference. Wonderingly, we explored another land--full of unfamiliar tidal pulls and strange new formations (I daresay the Bay of Fundy is one of the wonders of the world).  We did this and visited with emigre friends and we saw it:  It is possible to move, to leave, to re-settle and love a new land.  It may happen and better yet, we can imagine it, now. 

Every once in a while, I think of Kody's face, his devoted gaze. I have to realize that he was seeing not the "me" that I see in the mirror but a "her" that I can not even conceptualize.  I see, in my mind's eye, the fixedness of his attention, his simple joy in being recognized, his willingness to just follow beside me and see what happened next, running ahead to sniff out a rabbity adventure or prove his territorial prowess to another canine.  He took each day as if that was all there was and he knew that the land he lived on was that of the pack's being, that of the goddess-of-the-pack's heart--mine.  Of course he loved his home.  But--rescued stray that he was--he knew "home" was revelling in the touch of the beloved, the quick nuzzling on the way through the forest, the rest at the end of the day on the hearth of the heart.  He tutors me, still.


by our Couchsurfing friend: Krist Soojung Fernandez-Kim

all photos by Mark Beebe unless otherwise noted