Interacting with Nature.
8 Feb
Winter ~ Random Observations
Winter in North Carolina has been strange this year. The days have been mostly warm. A few recent cold snaps are a reminder of the season and we even had a bit of snow. I like snow.
People in the south say it’s bad for your health when weather is funny like it is; one day like springtime and the next biting cold. I didn’t believe this as a child or even in early adulthood, but the older I get, the more truth and wisdom I find in the things my parents and grandparents said.
In Memory of Tiny
Our first snow of the season came only a day after our beloved dog, our friend and companion, passed on.
I was glad when the snow started to fall. I wanted the ground where the grave-site is to harden. I wanted it safe from predators.
I had also been wishing for snow, as I do every Winter.
I called it Tiny’s snow. I immediately felt a connection to his spirit.
Perhaps it was the closeness I felt that prompted me to take part in the bread-buying ritual that happens in the south when we get, “weather.” I’m not much on shopping, but I found myself enjoying the anticipation and excitement going on at the local grocery store.
For some reason, I wanted and even felt that I needed, an onion. I didn’t have plans as to how I would use it, but I sure wanted one. Plus, bread is never on the top of my list of things I need in snow. Wood for a fire is usually a first thought.
Onions are normally abundant at the grocery store, but strangely, there were only a few onions in the bin and they were larger than the size I wanted. I walked to the other bins. A woman was rapidly filling her bag with the smaller ones. I felt sure she intended on taking every single onion.
“Pardon me,” I said politely as I approached the bin. The woman was friendly.
“What is it with onions?” she remarked with curiosity. “There’s only a few left. Everyone is buying onions.”
Her remark made me sure that I needed an onion.
“Happy is said to be the family which can eat onions together. They are, for the time being, separate, from the world, and have a harmony of aspiration.”
Charles Dudley Warner, ‘My Summer in a Garden’ (1871)
“Well, more weather is on the way,” my mother called to report several days after the first snow. She’s my personal Weatherwoman.
“Sometimes,” she continued, “They (weather reporters) know about as much as we do. I remember when they said we might get five or six inches and we got (she always emphasizes the inches), twenty-four!”
I knew what she was going to say next, which comforted me in a way.
She started talking about the time she and my late grandmother, along with my aunt and uncle, huddled together for more than a week without power.
Twenty-four inches really is a lot of snow for the southeastern United States.
Mother tells about the soup they warmed over a burning candle and how they all went to bed, “with the chickens,” since they didn’t have lights to turn on.
There’s something about the way it feels when she recalls the little things that happened that week, and she remembers them in great detail. I feel a bond of belonging and togetherness in her story. They needed each other and I think, they must have surely experienced their likenesses above and beyond any differences.
There was something about having one of the wanted onions that sparked in me a sense of belonging. I wondered what other people might be cooking with their onion.
The next day my son sautéed the onion to go with eggs. Our home was warmed by the sweet smell.
Later that evening, I heard the roar of Thunder Beings. How odd, I thought, to hear thunder just before snow. I called my Weatherwoman.
“They say it’s Thundersnow,” she reported. “It’s very rare.”
31 Jan
A Dog Smile
Dear Human Mom,
Thanks for the hike! I had a great time.
Love,
Your friend,
Sweet Ruthie.
16 Jan
Thank You, Tiny.
Returning to Nature
Before you go, I want to tell you how grateful I am to have known you. I want to say thank you, my four-legged friend.
Thank you for being such a dear loyal friend to my son. Thank you for communicating with me during times when he, and you, needed me. Thank you for loving him.
Thank you for your tremendous patience. You’ve lived a life of many stories, my dear friend, and I will never forget them. I will never forget you.
I will however remember the fun times, because my girl Free, who lives where you are going, taught me this is the best way to let a beloved Dog go to, “The place that’s the best,” with, “The Spirits in the Sky.”
Thank you for loving my son, especially when he wasn’t well. Thank you for always thinking of him, letting him know you loved him, no matter how far away you were from each other. Thank you so much!
Thank you for making people laugh with your playful antics. Thank you for sticking by us through thick and thin. Truly, you have, and I am in tremendous gratitude.
Thank you for never biting anyone. You scared me a few times, but it is best that you didn’t act on your instincts, even though they were correct and the people may have indeed deserved a nip, or two.
Tiny, thank you for loving me. I wasn’t sure if you would like living with me, but you did, I could always tell.
I know you feel closest to my son and I love you for that, but when he wasn’t here, I always felt proud that you followed me around, watched out for me and slept at the end of my feet. You were such a great little, “Foot-Feller.”
Tiny, I will always love you. Always. You will live in my heart because there is a place in it shaped exactly like you.
I’d also like to say thank you for loving my girl. She was afraid of so much when she first left that stinky shelter and came to live with me. She sure wasn’t scared of you!
I’ll never forget what it looked like to see two dogs fall crazy in-love with each other. I did and it was beautiful. My new girl’s eyes widened big and her mouth literally dropped open when you walked in our door. She was stunned! It was so funny. I could see the love she felt for you! It was amazing.
Thank you for always treating her like a Princess. She thinks she is one now, I guess.
She sure has been a good nurse hasn’t she? Boy, I’ll have to do something really special for her, like take her for a walk where she can pretend she’s hunting squirrels.
She will miss you Tiny. We all will. I will give her lots of hugs and extra love.
I promise, per your only request of me during the past few months, to be here for your true Master. He is my son and you know I love him with all my heart and soul. I’m honored that you asked and very grateful that I heard.
I will do the best I can to keep my head up. I know I got pretty sad when the Vet told me you had cancer. I did and I have cried a lot, but I promise I’ll be okay. I may cry for a while, but you know me Tiny. I do cry.
I will help your best friend get another four-legged companion when the time is right. I promise.
Thank you, Tiny. You are the most amazing boy dog I have ever known and loved. You are my grand-dog! Thank you for being my friend and sweet foot-feller.
I could say a lot more. I could. I could thank you for all the times you’ve been there for us, but I must stop writing. I want to come lie down beside you. I guess, it is our last night together.
We will go to the Vet tomorrow. We will go.
Thank You, Tiny.
We Love You Forever!
Photos of Tiny in this post.
7 Jan
Images of a Blog’s Life ~ 2012
Dogs ~ Butterflies ~ Healing
I hope you enjoy a visual tour of this blog’s life in 2012. Thanks to each one of you who visited my blog, and for taking time to like or comment on a post. I hope we meet many more times in 2013! Happy Blogging and New Year to you!
The Lotus Lily Flower, Closed Petals
Prince Charming?
Baby Turtle (BT)
Buckeye Butterfly
Hello Sunshine
Tiny likes Yogurt!
Truly Red!
Lovely White Lotus
Water Life
Green Healing Merlot Peppers
One Green Healing Harvest!
Butterfly Beautiful
The Elder in the Family
Love…
What’s up…
Horticulture Therapy
I’m listening.
Painted Pretty
When I fell in-love with Garden Critters!
Sweet Ruthie Here!
Horticultural Healing
Butterfly in Blue
Free Girl!
A Green Healing Greeting!
HORTICULTURAL
Gallery images (above) include a link to the Media file. (I couldn’t figure out how to unlink the images). Choosing only a few was simply too challenging! I mean, look at those beautiful photos! 
All images are subject to a Creative Commons Copyright. Please Share Alike, providing a clear link back to this blog, DogKisses, @ http://dogkisses.wordpress.com/.
Thank you so much for respecting my Terms of Use. (See the sidebar in my blog for more information). No Commercial Use.
Related articles (Michelle’s Photo/Journal)
- 2012 in review ~ Green Healing and a Dreamliner (greenhealinggirl.wordpress.com)
27 Dec
The Dogs I’ve Loved ~ Poochie
Poochie
Poochie was my first four-legged friend. He was a small dog with sandy blonde hair. I was three years-old when I knew and loved Poochie.
Memories of my third year are short snippets of time sketched in my mind. Poochie curled up in a little ball, basking under the sun in our front yard is an image that never faded. My love for him is a feeling I’ve never forgotten.
I was temporarily in a wheelchair from a childhood bone disease when Poochie was my dog. I’ve always wondered if I was confined to the little chair when Poochie met his last day on earth.
I’ve always thought it rather odd that I remember anything at all about my third year, but it makes sense now that I’m an adult, considering all that happened and the way things were.
We had plenty of love in my family, but from what I understand, my third year was much like the rest of my childhood. Our lives were chronically hardened with strife. On occasion and unpredictably, fear from violent emotional explosions that led to all sorts of trouble visited our family, yet we were familiar with unfortunate circumstances and that each time could have ended much worse than it did.
I had a boyfriend when Poochie was my dog. He was also three years-old. We spent a fair amount of time sitting on my front porch steps together. I remember the way I felt being around him. I know I loved him.
According to my mother, the little boy and I had deep conversations about life. “Lord, I couldn’t believe the things the two of you talked about. I used to stand there at the door listening and just shake my head,” she says.
A child in our neighborhood had thrown a rock that hit my head and knocked me unconscious. Afterward, even as my mother had made it clear to everyone that nobody would ever hit me with a rock again, my boyfriend and I didn’t play on the days when the child who had thrown the rock was outside.
Upon reflection, the accident may explain memory problems I had for the best of my childhood and maybe to this day, but I was hit in the head again during fifth grade. I had decided to play baseball, but the boys didn’t want girls on the team.
“Easy Out! Easy Out!,” the boys shouted enthusiastically. The pitcher tried hitting my head with the ball every time I approached the batter’s box. Finally, he succeeded, and I quit playing baseball.
The brain is amazing and so is the human spirit. I later found ways to cope with what I thought was normal, like my less than good memory and, “the bad things,” my grandmother said I had seen. “You were too young to see what you saw,” she would later tell me.
My third year was in the late sixties. The place was in the heart of the North Carolina Blue Ridge mountains. We were not poor by the standards of the day and perhaps we were Middle class. The stories I’ve heard about medical treatments I endured during those years sound like we came from a time I thought was in history books before I entered this world, which reminds me of the way I met my first boyfriend.
He and I were born minutes apart, in the same hospital room, delivered by the same doctor, separated only by a thin hospital curtain, which the doctor had left open for the laboring hours preceding our births.
“We talked the whole time we were in labor,” my mother tells me. “The beds were side-by-side. Nurses came in to prep us and that’s when the doctor pulled the curtain closed, but we still went on talking.”
The boy’s mother and mine were best friends. I was due several weeks before her child was, but as it happened, we were born on the same night. The boy came first. His mother, lying in her hospital bed, told them to open the curtain again, which they did.
“What’s wrong over there?” she asked my mother. “Why haven’t you had that baby yet?”
Looking over at my mother, still in labor, the woman noticed that Mother was still wearing her teeth. “Lord God!,” the woman shouted to the doctor. “She can’t have that baby ’til she takes out her teeth!”
The doctor ordered my mother to take her teeth out. “You were born just as soon as I took them out,” she tells me.
“Why did you have your teeth in?” I asked my mother, many years later as she told me the story.
“Well, I can’t remember, but I guess I didn’t want that doctor seeing me without my teeth,” she said. “He was a good-looking doctor.”
I realized I was born in pure vanity, but I come from a long line of women who expect good-looking doctors when they get to a certain age in life. I recently noticed that my doctor is pretty cute. I’ve seen him for years and have never once thought about his physical appearance. I wonder if this means I’m getting to that certain age. Alas. I’ve truly regressed, if that’s possible in this piece of writing.
My sweet boyfriend wasn’t there the day when I was sitting on the porch steps and saw our neighbor back her car out of the driveway, running over Poochie in the process. I wanted to help Poochie, but I couldn’t. I don’t know if it was because I couldn’t walk or if the accident simply happened too fast.
Later, my mother said the woman wanted to apologize and that she had made me cookies. I wanted nothing to do with her cookies and doubt if I understood what an apology meant. My dog was gone. In my three year-old mind, I fully believed it was the woman’s fault for backing out of her driveway at a speed that I was sure had been too fast. By the time she heard me screaming, it was too late to save Poochie.
Mother said my boyfriend and I sat on the steps and talked about what happened for days afterward. “The two of y’all came up with the idea that you would go to her house and poke her eyeballs out like she had done to Poochie’s.” Mother says I pointed two fingers to show her what I had in mind.
My family and I did go to the woman’s house. Apparently, I behaved well, but I didn’t like her house any more than I liked her car. From my point of view, both were way too big for one person.
I did not eat her cookies. I was sad for a long time.
For years, it hurt to remember what I had seen and I did remember. I also missed Poochie in a terrible way. I’m glad the images of the accident finally faded and that today, my memories only include him basking in the sunshine, and how it felt to love a dog.
The next dog that came into my life was a long funny looking Wiener dog. I’ll tell you about him, and my life when he lived with us, in an upcoming post about, “The Dogs I’ve Loved.”
12/30/12 Post updated to allow ‘Likes’
22 Dec
Of Sprigs and Twigs
Of Sprigs and Twigs
Heart Strings and Sisterly Love
Grandmother and Grandson
Weaving Love into a Wreath
Wishing You Peace and Love
In gratitude and special thanks to the volunteers in Horticulture Therapy who donated the awesome twigs and sprigs, prepared delicious food and homemade cider, and brought special people together, including a warm visit from my mother and sister, who joined us in making wreaths and swags.
Our dear friend, Tiny
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