Demolition

As a hobby, it has a revolutionary ring.

“What are your hobbies?”

“I’m really into demolition.”

As stress reliever, there are few better ways to refocus the mind from grant-writing and job descriptions, budgets and the details of annual gatherings.

As instrument of history, the crowbar is a surgical tool, prying away layers of cheap building materials, dirt and accumulated crud to reveal the beautiful bones of old houses—instant gratification in which we indulge at our peril. Some of that admittedly substandard material provides insulation—important not to remove more on a sunny summer day than can be replaced by the time the snow flies.

Sometimes the payoff is a startling discovery. When I ripped up carpet from my living room, I found fourteen-inch maple boards. Not exactly pristine condition, but I far prefer their scarred and pitted warmth to cheap carpet and accumulated dog hair. This weekend, the carpet in one upstairs bedroom came up. While not as dramatic, the payoff was still sweet: a painted floor in reasonably good condition. A new coat of paint, and it will be much easier to sweep away the piles of ladybugs. (Can you have too many ladybugs? Oh, yes.)

One more bedroom and a hallway to go. It is such a pleasure to watch the house become mine, project by project. Every owner of an old house dreams, I suppose, of having the money to do it all at once, but I’m not sure we would make wise decisions if we had all that money to spend in a single swoop. And we wouldn’t have any demolition projects left to brighten rainy weekends.

The outright destructive steps—swinging hammer or crowbar—are relatively short, satisfying as they are. Demolition is a process of removing material layer by layer. It requires a fine touch, attention to detail, and always more hauling of debris than you imagined possible. It takes patience. It takes an eye to see where to stop. It takes listening for the house to tell you when you have peeled back to its essentials.

Demolition is more than a hobby, more than raw escape. Demolition is a metaphor.

Love suddenly

Bang bang bang bang bang!

In rural Vermont, it is a shock to hear someone banging on the door at 8:30 in the evening.

“I didn’t know what to do,” said the nice man in the baseball cap. “There is this big black dog in the middle of the road, looking like a deer in the headlights.”

Oh. I see her, and I let out the universal puppy call. “Puppy, puppy, puppy, puppy-eeeee”

And the dog head back down the side road along my property.

“Ah, uh, okay,” says the nice man, who then leaves me to watch for the dog.

Sure enough, I get into the car and head down the side road. There’s the dog, but when I stop, it moves on. I toss my cookies in the dog’s directions—the dog biscuits in my sweater pocket—but no joy. The dog is having none of this. I give up, and turn my car back toward home when the owner meets me on the way.
“Her name is Love,” he says, “I guess she must have followed my truck.”

They say that great new jobs and wonderful love does not come to find you in the confines of your home. Today I wonder.

Faithfulness rewarded

It probably was not lost to Toby. He probably knew right where he put it sometime last summer on a day when I didn't manage to intercept his trip outside with my boot. By the time the snow came, I gave up hope and replaced them.

Somewhere in my psyche there must have been a grain of faith because I didn't discard the remaining boot, the left boot, the one on the right in the photo.

Today the right boot came back. I walked around the house, and there it was between house and dog pen, as if it had just been brought outdoors in the mouth of a boot and rock loving dog.

It is not in bad shape, all things considered. It doesn't appear to be much worse for spending the winter outside under snow--a little algae, a little damp, but it does not seem to have been buried.

There must be a moral here somewhere, but for now I am just enjoying the surprise.

Beautiful girl

Ah, Oceans, it does not take much to get me to post pretty puppy pix. How are your girls (Cassie's sisters)?

Gal pals

Friday I got a message that the puppy was loose, so I came tearing up the hill. I found Miss Cassandra sitting regally at the top of the driveway, all her chest fur fluffed out. Chin level, she panned left and right and back again, scanning for likely intruders. Every molecule of her eight-month-old body screamed, “I’m in charge here.”

It’s a German Shepherd thing.

Digging under the gate is not so much a German Shepherd thing. Cassie’s accomplice was her best gal pal, Lola, who is an escape artist of retriever-ish extraction. Leap tall fences at a single bound—that’s Lola, formerly Sweet Pea, one of the puppies born at my house last year—although my six-foot dog fence foiled even her remarkable jumping capabilities. Undeterred, they went under.

It can be daunting having a smart dog, but I take comfort that I am smarter, sneakier and have the only set of car keys. I put concrete blocks in the holes they worked so hard to dig, and I don’t leave these two alone for long.

But, oh! it is a delight to watch them romp! They take turns rolling each other over, biting at legs, tail and snout. They part covered in doggy drool, but neither blood nor toothmarks appear. The noise Cass makes is remarkable, somewhere between a whine and a roar, something like a low flying jet both in decibels and in how it grates on human ears. I never knew a puppy could make that sound.

Here they are plotting escape. From right to left, it’s Cassie, Lola’s friend Amiga, Lola, and mournful old Toby, who can only take a little of the girls’ society.

Seeking society

A card-carrying introvert, I cherish my time alone. I need it. I crave time to let the many potential responses to colleagues, friends, neighbors and family—especially family—settle to the point that I am measured and calm in what I actually say. I conjure up a stunning variety of scenarios as I try to figure out what is “really” going on. There is no question that I am over-sensitive—my life experiences have led me to where I am, as yours, gentle reader, have led you, although we would all like to think that we can rise above such simplistic conditioning.

All that therapy, all that writing, and I am left with the irony that if I want to respond simply and authentically to another person, I have to spend a lot of time processing, thinking, mostly just musing about not only how I want to respond, but more basically, how I want to perceive the situation and my range of possible responses.

I do have friends and family, some more distant than I would prefer, but that is not in my control. And I understand that my social safety net of human connection is frayed as a result of moving three times in the last decade. Big moves, like divorces, take about three years to re-establish equilibrium. I do have a life, which has many, many satisfactions and much happiness, and I am blessed that I enjoy my own company.

But all that thinking, all that time alone—there is a sense in which it is unhealthy. There is nobody to pull me out of abstraction, nobody to say to me, “Just a cotton-pickin’ minute….you are way off base,” preferably in a loving and respectful tone. Oversensitive, doncha know.

So, I’m thinking I need to meet more people. Can you sense how my teeth are gritted when I say this? It is so much work for me! And yet, I know there is a payoff. Two decades ago, when I was first living in New York, a painfully shy bumpkin, I undertook to conquer my basic shyness by committing to talk to three new people a day. Anyone. The counter man in the coffee shop, people on the subway platform, the person sliding by on the opposite escalator (very safe, that one!) It worked. Very soon, I was talking up a storm to anyone and everyone. I ended up dating someone from the subway--one of my healthiest relationships with a very nice man.

Meeting more people in rural Vermont is tougher, but I refuse to believe it is impossible. Now past the magic three-year mark, I get invited to parties from time to time and I make a point of going. It is time to take up contradance again, and maybe some group hikes. The first step is getting out in the world more, since nobody is likely to come uninvited to my front door to bring me a fuller, brighter life.

The next step will be to pay attention. Again and again in my life, prospective friends and would-be lovers have stopped me, lectured me, whacked me silly to say, “Hey! You! I am trying to be friendly. Could you please notice my efforts?” Who knows how many interesting new people are circling even now, while I make my oblivious march through a good but solitary life?

Rats!

A friend, Vermont born and bred, came by today to help me figure out how to fix the dishwasher. During the last subzero snap, it did a little snapping of its own, pouring water down through the kitchen floorboards into the cellar. Not a pretty sight.

I figured it had something to do with the cold, frozen lines popping free of connections. Maybe even, I mused, it was my own fault for filling that big hole with spray foam. I learned years ago that insulating old houses can be tricky, sometimes blocking warm air flow that kept pipes cozy. Not this time.

“Dear,” intoned my friend, the only man I know who can address me in such a way without being remotely flirtatious, “You have a rat.”

Oh, ick. This is not the pastoral haven I dreamt of in Brooklyn. There were rats there, big, honking, muscled ones, but I thought Vermont had only cute little mice. Maybe a skunk or a porcupine now and then, unpleasant rodents all. But rats?

Behind the dishwasher, the intruder had a superhighway from outdoors, and tasty hoses to chew. He got them all, the water supply hose, the squiggly little connector, and the drain hose—big holes bitten out of them. Over fifty dollars worth of parts, before I pay my friend for his time.

All the holes are filled now, with that trusty expanding foam. I think I will stock a couple extra cans and go on a rampage filling holes in cellar and utility room. A mouse or two or even twenty—I never minded sharing my warm house with them as long as they stayed off the kitchen counters and out of the drawers—but rats? No, thank you.

Now that’s what I call customer service

The puppy loves the vacuum cleaner. She likes to chase it, barking her fool head off. And she absolutely loves to chew on the hose. She chewed the hose so completely that she severed it from the connection into the main compartment.

Sighing, not even daring to think about how expensive it might be, I placed a call to the source, Jeff Campbell’s Clean Team online catalog. Teresa called me back. Imagine that, she called me back. And then today, she called me back again, and she left a detailed message including instructions on how to salvage my vacuum cleaner hose.

It turns out that it is designed to have a chunk of the hose cut away, then it simply screws back into the fitting. I tried it. The repair works, way better than my last repair which relied on duct tape. And I no longer need a new vacuum cleaner hose.

Now that’s what I call customer service. Teresa could easily have sold me a new hose, but I am much happier to spend money on other products from the Clean Team. And yes, the Swedish Big Vac vacuum cleaner works great—I have had mine for at least four years.

Why I write

The most annoying thing about therapy—yes, therapy, I spent a lot of time in New York and learned the value of therapy—is when the therapist tells you something and you say, “No, that’s wrong,” only to realize an hour later that it is right. Humph.

“You use your writing as therapy,” she said. “Yes, I agreed,” while inwardly thinking “It’s soooo much more than that.” Outlet for the rant of the day. Communication with family and far-flung friends in a kind of overarching, ongoing holiday letter. Platform for discussing issues that are important to me at work or in human interactions. Artful rearrangement of the events of my life in a way that might speak to my readers. A way to play with words or ideas, a rollicking gambol through my interior world.

“Doesn’t it bother you that it is so public?” Sometimes it does, but mostly it intrigues me, this border between private life and public, writing for self and writing for reader. There are issues that are not suitable for blogdom, either because they impinge on someone else’s privacy or are not adequately respectful of my reader or myself.

I try to write as if anyone might be reading, particularly the person that I least want to have read my writing—say the person I most annoyed lately, or the person who most annoyed me. I try not to be flippant, which I view as disrespectful, or to fall into the trap of ranting “Ain’t it awful!” which I view as lazy and irrelevant. I try very hard not to use cheap tricks to be amusing at someone’s expense, not to dine out on anyone’s distress. I fail in these goals from time to time, but I try to keep the overall thrust of my writing is respectful and thoughtful.

In the end, maybe the best reason I write is to cultivate that attitude of thoughtful consideration and respect. I’m as quick-tempered as anyone, but when I sit down to write about someone or some situation that is at the top of my consciousness, I am often amazed at what comes flowing out of that process. Many, many times, I have sat down thinking I knew exactly what the issue is—“that so-and-so is a jerk!"—only to have the writing process change my opinion, while I look on helplessly. Or I start writing about one subject that I think is top-of-mind, only to find that I need to change my title at the end. Humph.

Words are treacherous. We keep grasping for the right ones, falling back as we realize that we don’t have anywhere near enough common meanings to be able to communicate, and then in a flash, we do. It is a kind of magic, that moment of insight, just like that scene in The Miracle Worker when Helen Keller first understands what a word is.

Writing, for me, is like that, over and over again.

Interior life

You may have the power to force through the changes you want to see but with Mars and Jupiter at a rather dangerous angle to one another you will encourage opposition and, later on, those you have forced to do your bidding will in some way or other hit back at you. Persuasion is always better than compulsion. Remind yourself of that fact today.

Oh, dear. I am weary of persuasion. I recognize the need for a gentle touch, and I do respect my fellow creatures. But it can be such very hard work.

Communications is hard work for everyone. I keep reminding impatient colleagues that research shows that feckless, inattentive humans (that is all of us) do not hear a message the first time, the third, or sometimes even the tenth time. So we are not allowed to give up on our chosen audience until we have said the same thing ten times. Boring? Yes. We can’t invest in crafting, strategizing and multiple delivery of every message, but we must do the work to achieve the goal for the ones that are important enough.

Those of us who are introverts have so little desire to venture outside our own heads that we must learn technique to make those forays as fruitful as possible. We learn superior communication techniques in self-defense, so that we can spend as little time and energy as possible getting our messages across, with the reward of retreat back to the interior life.

Introverts are not exactly rare, but we are in the minority, some 20% of the population by most estimates. Why should we be surprised if people think us odd? And why should we care? For all the discomforts of standing on the sidelines while others are picked for teams or of being the wallflower at dances or of being the one in the office that people forget to invite out for drinks—for all that, we have the amazing gift that we are happy in our own company.

I tried, and failed, to explain this to my dental hygienist. “Please don’t keep asking if I am okay,” I pleaded. “I need to zone out. There is a lot going on inside my head, and if you talk to me, it spikes my anxiety—not what you were trying to do, I know.” She didn’t understand, but never mind. I will keep trying. Nine times to go, then I give up and change dentists. Well, not really. Why on earth would I accept care from a person who didn’t hear me after three or four times?

Analytical to a fault, I can divide the world into people who think I do too much to explain and communicate, and those who think I do too little. As I age and become more comfortable in my own skin, I am less patient with those who think that I need to do more and more and more to explain who I am or to be different. I have communications skills that are above average, skills in which I have invested to a significant degree—I know that. So I need to accept that people who do not hear my message simply may not agree with me—that’s really okay. And if they disagree angrily, it usually has nothing to do with me.

There were times in my life when I did not like myself much, although others preferred the more placid, people-pleasing version, and I changed. After a lifetime of being put in the wrong, I now take the Popeye position: I yam what I yam. Or more elegantly put, I am as God made me—introvert and all—and I like how I am.

All this self-knowledge does not change the fact that sometimes I just get tired. I have had a few weeks of a lot of demands from clients and colleagues for interaction—it wears on anyone, but especially on an introvert. I need a break.

As I write this, there is a flash of rust color at my vision’s edge. Robins—two of them, a whole flock of little grayish brown birds, and a stunning black and white striped woodpecker with a red head. The birds are back, so is the mud, and it is spring. Can flowers be far behind?

Conflict and stress and tears, oh my!

There may be a great deal of conflict in your life today, dear Leo, and different people and situations seem to be pulling you in all directions. Your sanity is being put to the test. Try not to be too stubborn, for this will only cause more tension among you and the situations that you encounter. You have the potential of stressing out over the smallest things. Try to avoid this scenario if you can.

Sometimes it seems that the world is all too ready to chew me up and spit me out. It has been a week—or more—of days like that. Honestly, where do people get the idea that I need to think and be exactly like them?

I have clients who want more, more, more. I have colleagues who want to second guess my decisions and pile their work on my plate, then other colleagues who are franticly trying to regroup after losing key team members. I have issues to track in the legislature, where they seem to be making a lot of sausage this year (don’t we say that every year?). I have a eight-month-old smart puppy who wants to test every single limit placed on her, working—as we say in the South—on my last nerve. I have an assistant who is home with a sick child. Everybody has their reasons for being where and how they are, and I don’t really think they are conspiring to make my life miserable. Not really.

On the contrary, when life seems altogether too, too much, it is often…well….me. It is time for a change of direction. Time to say no and dance away. Time to let projects slide. Time to disarm attacks with, “You may be right.” Time to do something entirely different. Likely my change of approach will cause yet more anger. Never mind. I can’t control all of them or any of them, but I can get out of reach.

None of this is worth tears.

Frost heaves

First day of spring. Big, long, wavy icicles vote otherwise. New snow last night tempted us out for a round of snowshoeing, just me and puppies old and new. It was a beautiful morning, but springlike? No.

Still, the roads think it is springtime. They have metamorphosed into washboards. Frost, as they say, heaves the pavement up, but not in any uniformity. Just here and there. Others rate the winter’s rigors. My friend over on Stagecoach Road rates spring’s rambunctious turn by how many cars bounce right off the road and into his sugarbush. Four, this year. So far.

It is one of those repetitive, seasonal events that is almost a commentary. Frost heaves. Both noun and sentence whole, the relentless slowing of molecules somehow causes the road’s surface to move further than you would think possible. Frost heaves, causing frost heaves, causing cars to bounce and shimmy.

Careful readers of my blog will have noted that I love a duplicitous title, a name that works two ways or even more. Frost heaves. And when the frost heaves most heartily, spring isn’t far behind.

Life with pictures

Had to replace the umbilical cord for my digital camera. Here as promised is Miss Cassie watching the Westminster Dog Show. She only likes shows with dogs.





And here is what a tired puppy looks like. Tired puppy equals good puppy.

Quiet friendship

The dogs and I had a nice visit with Robert of Beginner’s Mind and his family yesterday. We got a little lost trying to find their house, but once there Cassie and Toby were delighted to meet Cain. They romped and played, then snoozed while we ate lunch and spent hours at the local library’s annual book sale. Baby Ethan watched dog antics and human browsing with equanimity—a cheerful baby, the kind that lures young parents into having more.

Blowout extravaganza of cookbooks and gardening books and crafty guides: total price eight dollars. Who says entertainment has to be expensive?

I meant what I said and I said what I meant

Jola writes,

But do you really believe what you wrote, and what the horoscope said? For example, I think that life here on earth is to be taken very seriously (whether there's nothingness or a form of heaven afterwards or not). Unfortunately, it all too often it doesn't "come right in the end." (I just realized that there's an offcolor interpretation to the latter phrase - and that indeed does happen, figuratively speaking.) I don't view life as a country dance. Collaborative teamwork can be like that, yes, but not my life. I don't experience my own life as a passing through before I become disconnected atoms and "swirling spirit." (Sorry, I don't even buy the swirling spirit part!) I'm sure I'm taking your post too literally, but it started me thinking about what I DO believe.

Karen - you're kidding about Bush, right? You must be aware that he's led the nation on a "glorious adventure" in Iraq and despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, and many slipping into thoughts of doom and gloom, he continues to insist it will all come right in the end...

I do believe what I wrote, although I take no responsibility for the horoscope. I do view life as a contra dance. I do believe this life on earth is only one stage in a much broader existence. While this may be the only part of existence of which I (this particular configuration of atoms) am conscious, it is not all there is.

I agree it does not all come right in the end, that there is pain, heartache and darkness in the world. From a theological point of view, I even believe that darkness is necessary if we are to see the light. That does not mean that I think any individual evil (death, illness, injury, mold and mildew) is sent from God. When evil intrudes into our lives, I believe we should take time to grieve, but that the end of grief is acceptance and return to the dance—which can take a very, very long time.

As you may have figured out by now, I am a card-carrying Christian. I believe that God wants us happy, and I believe that in the end (whereever you measure the end) it often comes out beautiful. I believe that heartache can bring lessons to a listening heart. This is, however, a matter of faith, which is a gift from God, not something that the most talented preacher can convey.

Is life serious? In the sense that we owe ourselves and others respect, yes. In the sense that we have any control over the ultimate outcome—death—no. We might as well dance.

Re Bush, I am not particularly a fan of trashing either political party. It is all our representatives in Washington working together who made the choices that led to the Iraq war, and it is all of us who put them there. I am a registered voter, but with no party affiliation, because I don’t see much to choose from—no leadership on right or left. In fact, I am not—in general—a fan of the “ain’t it awful?” school of conversation. It bores me. I would rather dance.

Yes, I am serious. This is what I believe. Opinions will vary, and many, many people disagree with me. Next!

Glorious adventure

Your naturally optimistic nature will come to your rescue today. As others slip into thoughts of doom and gloom because of what's going on in the world you will go right the other way and see it all as a glorious adventure. And you're right - it is. Nothing in life is to be taken too seriously. Rest assured it will all come right in the end.

There is no question that how we greet the world shapes our reality. Perhaps the most powerful little word I ever learned is “Next!”

When colleagues fail to live up to their part of the bargain, there’s a time to renegotiate and a time to move on. I have been talking to several colleagues who just don’t see the point of collaborating. They would rather moan about how bad things are than get excited about what could be. I think they have given up too easily, missing the dance by sitting it out. But I can only encourage them to play, then move on myself. "Next!"

When family members berate or ignore you, “Next!”

When plans don’t turn out as expected, take a breath, then “Next!”

If this sounds suspiciously like turning the other cheek, it is that and more. It is recognizing that in the long term, our physical bodies return to dust and mold, and our swirling spirit can only brush the cheeks of those other physical bodies we once loved, counseling joy.

Meanwhile, this short time as overly serious, dumpy, earthly physical beings should not get us down. This life is a glorious adventure, a dance. Sometimes we clasp hands, sometimes we let go. Holding on too hard or letting go too soon spoils the dance. Getting it right, using our bodily weight and our clasped hands to counter momentum and free us from gravity’s earthly bonds is a foretaste of heaven.

If I can keep this attitude in my daily practice and in my interactions with other creatures, perhaps when it is time to give up this glorious adventure, I will accept willingly the return to a state of being as disconnected atoms, swirling spirit. Meanwhile, I am called to the dance. Next!

First Tuesday in March

Five Town Meetings today. I work for one of those nonprofits that derive funding in part from a line item in the budget or a specific article. Not surprising, then, that from time to time questions arise at Town Meeting about what we do and why the voters should support us. I am happy to oblige, because I am truly grateful, but even I could only manage five Town Meetings today representing half of of the Towns that support us.

Johnson is the most polite and orderly. Cambridge is civilized enough to take a break at mid-day for chicken and biscuits. Morristown has the biggest turnout in person, but strangely almost no food--dry muffins and watery coffee. Stowe has the best food (chicken pie and carrot cake, yum!)

But Hyde Park is home. I see the same neighbors on the same spots in the bleachers, and when someone calls for a paper ballot, we all enjoy the opportunity to stretch and jabber for a few minutes. Then it's back to the bleachers to knit, nod and whisper as neighbors opine, and solemnly intone "Aye" or "Nay."

As a Vermont transplant, I love Town Meeting Day. My first year I was amazed at the tolerance of diversity of views and the highly developed skills of social discourse. By now, I have come to recognize that what I once saw as politeness is sometimes the Yankee economy of not spending much energy on a fight you can't win or on a fight that has already been held many times over in generations past.

Today in Stowe, for example, the Town decided not to go to Australian ballot to vote on the budget. Recapping the argments, one Selectboard member pulled out an almost identical proposal from the 1976 Town Meeting notes.

Most towns are done by early afternoon, even contentious Stowe. Then it's off for a romp in the sunshine, an afternoon free to play in the snow, spring's advent teased into our consciousness by another Town Meeting Day. It may not be spring yet, but surely it is coming.

Lottery

Step right up. Get your winning ticket. Pick your entry in the springtime lottery. No, it’s not in the raffle for when the ice goes out on Joe’s Pond.

My mother sent me today a big box of spring flowers—daffodils and forsythia and spiny pink flowers and spiky white long stems. One vase on the television, one on a side table, they do brighten my wintry living room.

One of the shocks of living in Vermont is that the forsythia does not bloom. Before Vermont, I was accustomed to the bright yellow cascades as a sign of spring, and even after I learned that the bush is pretty darn invasive, I still welcomed its annual show. In Vermont, where winter temperatures can drop to forty below zero, buds freeze and there is no show. Not forsythia and only sometimes crabapple.

So it is lovely to have some blooming sticks in my house. It hasn’t been a hard winter, not at all, but spring will still be very welcome.

Still you have to wonder how long I will have these flowers. The puppy circles. I fear we may be looking at hours rather than days. Get your winning ticket soon.

Winter ways

I’m getting the hang of burning wood. And I am watching my own perspectives shift. I used to set the thermostat and wait for oil deliveries, like anyone who has an oil furnace. Now I start the weekend with a wood fire in the combination furnace, and I enjoy my house all the more because it is warmer than my penny-pinching would tolerate of the oilman. Actually, I run a three-fuel household, applying oil, gas and wood each in its best use as I see it. The oil is the backdrop, with a small gas stove in the living room for a cozy fire that warms my toes when the north wind kicks up. I have appreciated both, but I revel in the dry, toasty warmth of a wood fire in the furnace.

Now it seems luxury to be able to sleep through the night without stoking the fire. The oil burner kicks in, and I stay cozy under the covers. This morning I went down and found warm ash that sparked when I stirred it. Ah. A little newspaper, some kindling, and a log, and we are in business again.

You have a relationship with a wood fire that you don’t have with an oil burner. A wood fire takes skill to build (learnable), it needs tending, and it repays your care. I can see how burning wood could be an essential element of the Vermont winter experience—its warmth, its fussiness, the daily repetition of task. Not to mention the extended work of getting wood in. City-spoiled as I am, I will order up a couple cords to keep my weekends toasty. I know how hard people work to bring in their wood.

Yesterday at a neighbor’s sliding party, I met a guy who brought a big black sled with a rope handle. Heating his home entirely by wood, he needs to make trips into the forest from time to time, hauling back the little stuff and bigger stuff on his sled. I suspect that despite the gruff exterior, he also needs a slide or two each winter. I gotta get me a sled like that.

The sliding was great to watch, the party a little daunting. I have been here three years, and I don’t get a lot of invitations. Shy to a fault, I force myself to accept most invitations so that I put myself in a position to interact socially—not so bad once you get past the reserve. Fortunately, Vermonters don’t really care if you talk to them or not. You can just stand there and admire the sliding technique, later bring out the puppy on a leash to get her a little socialization, too.

I am here to report to my Southern kin that if these people were magically transported to a Georgia hillside on one of those biennial occasions of four or five inches of snow, they would be amused at how little we warm-dwellers know about sliding. I had been to a sliding party once before, but that one was populated by transplants, who simply do not get it.

Everyone of every age took some kind of trip down the hill in total abandon to the triumph of gravity over friction. The Vermont-born take to the snow like otters to a stream, whooping and falling, going down in groups, then scrambling out of the way before the next slider knocks into them like bowling pins…or sometimes daring collisions and rolling in the snow. Teenagers were present in number, and despite a few moans, “Maaaaa, do I have to be here?” were the most active sliders. One girl, pepped up on cold and laughter, stopped on the way to her parents’ car to flop down and make one more perfect snow angel. I have always thought of sliding as an activity for little kids, but it was clear that they were just learning. The parents were right in there, falling off their tubes and rolling in the snow, laughing at themselves and along with their offspring, demonstrating that sliding technique does take decades to perfect.

Clothing and equipment and party venue all are designed for this kind of an afternoon. When I first moved here, I would not have believed that people can have a party that is mostly outdoors on a twenty degree day. There was a heated garage space to accommodate people who needed to warm up—that’s where the food and beer were—but mostly people were outdoors for hours at a time. Warm boots, snow pants (no fancy schmancy ski clothes here), and peculiar looking but functional headwear make this possible. Sliding equipment ranged from tubes (the ones for sliding are filled in the middle) to snowmobiles to the hot new skateboard-on-a-ski. No making do with cafeteria trays or cardboard boxes for these serious sliders.

In the hours I was there, I eventually unbent enough to consider going down the hill. It helped a lot to see one of my board members demonstrate the superior sliding technique developed over his forty years of life in Vermont, whooping and hollering as he did so. He also confided the important tip that you should never go down the hill with your beer in your pocket. But by then, I was cold and the puppy was fussy. Maybe we will get our own sliding equipment and she can pull me along—I think she would like that kind of work. Or then again, maybe you can only properly slide at a party, laughing and bouncing off your neighbors, warming up with chili and hot chocolate, and going out to do it again.

The curse of February

This morning it was clear and not too cold (that’s 20 degrees Fahrenheit for you non-Vermonters) so we continued the pedometer challenge, again on snowshoes. The calendar has moved forward, renewing the gift of light. By seven, it is now light enough for an enjoyable tramp, a good—no, make that great—half hour with landscape and romping dogs.

Suddenly, I realized: it is March. March, march, march. Tramp, tramp, tramp. If it is March, that means that dreary February is past. Woo hoo! Yippeee!!!!

I have always hated February. How can such a short month pack in so much hatefulness? As a sufferer from the aptly named SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), I know to watch out for autumn retreat of light and to be particularly on guard in February. I know, the days start extending at the winter solstice in December, but my personal experience is that the world is not quite right until February is over. Ever optimistic, I hope every year will be different, but no.

Still, this year it didn’t seem so bad. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention to dreading February, and it slipped right by me while I was doing something else. Or maybe it is because we really have had an easy winter, hardly even any snow and few subzero days. Or just maybe I am actually learning to moderate my own behavior to live with the rigors of the outside world, including February’s call for enhanced indoor lighting, disciplined physical activity, and patience.

One way or another, for this year at least, the curse of February is broken. Let us March forward toward spring!

I once knew a little girl, not so little by now, whose birthday was March fourth. How perfect is that for a birthday?

Please read Julia’s exquisite comment to Dancing on Snowshoes. A woman with her priorities straight, that’s our Julia.

Dancing on snowshoes, with dog

These are the mornings you dream of when you think of moving to Vermont. About four inches of fresh, fluffy snow, bright sunshine, not too cold, and a puppy who wants to romp in the snow. Yesterday was a morning for snowshoes, and Miss Cassandra and I tramped up the field and back, stopping from time to time to do a little work on her “Come!”

The challenge in training for long recall, the experts tell me, is that you have to be more interesting to the dog than anything else in the area. Roast beef works for us, larded with heavy praise. The technique I was taught is to say “Come” only once, stand still and wait for the dog. It’s okay to talk encouragingly, but you don’t keep saying the command or the dog’s name, which are loaded words. When the dog does come, you give a really good treat and praise for a full thirty seconds, which can seem very long when you actually do it.

It is only one command, but Cassie is doing well with this one, better perhaps in the open field than in the back yard where she wants the freedom to roam the yard outside the fence or to visit next door big dog Jake. We are having our little clashes of will over the back yard, but I intend to win, since the big payoff is knowing that Cassie is safe from traffic and pedestrians and wildlife. The big, wide world is no place for an unattended dog.

Toby and Max got very good at recall, with the result that I could take them anywhere and know how they would react off leash. I want Cassie to have this freedom, too, a freedom earned by good manners. So a few times a week, off we go to work on manners.

Yesterday morning, though, did not feel like work. It was sheer joy to be outdoors. This may be the most ideal snowshoe conditions I have ever experienced. Tramping along, feeling long muscles stretch and sunshine on my face, I was a happy girl. If anyone had seen us out there at the back of my neighbor’s field, they would have seen a figure in black and red, striding in time to the iPod, with a furry streak loping lazy circles around me. They wouldn’t, of course have been able to hear me singing along, “You can’t always get what you want….but by and by, you get what you need.”

We might even have danced a little, snowshoes and all.

Painting with puppies

By this I mean “painting with puppies in the house” and not using the little blighters as brushes. Here is my best practice, honed over several houses and quite a few puppies.

Buy a house with blue carpet (I hate blue carpet), preferably aged blue carpet. As you live through either the puppy housebreaking stage or the incontinent old dog stage, remind yourself that you hate blue carpet.

Plan relentlessly so that wallpaper and paint colors flow nicely through the house. You may redecorate one room, but make sure you love the colors. Don’t worry about stains on the blue carpet. Don’t include the blue carpet in your color scheme—like that would happen!

Generally, I like to have one trim color throughout the house, and I use a lot of nice grayish greens, usually a historical blue-green, sometimes a pink but not too much to the Pepto-Bismol end of the scale. Pale lavender is nice. In this house, I may do a deep red dining room since there is not too much wall space anyway in a room with three windows, two doors and an archway to the kitchen. Or maybe a deep goldenrod.

When you start to paint, have a staging area in a room with a door that latches. I cannot stress how important this is, having learned the hard way. Speak lovingly to your puppy, keeping attention focused on your own sweet self and away from the intriguing equipment. Putting the puppy in the fenced yard is cheating.

Once you have completed all your walls--this will take several long holiday weekends, as evidenced by my Easter bathroom, my Thanksgiving stencilled kitchen floor, and now my President's day upstairs hall and half a bedroom--you are ready to call someone to rip out the blue carpet. Then you can do what you want. This step is best timed for when your are between puppy housebreaking and incontinent old dogs.

Meanwhile, don’t paint for too many hours at a time. When you get tired, you stop talking to the puppy. Tired, you are also more likely to do things like step on the can to close it tight and send it shooting across the floor on its side, still open. Clean up promptly and put brushes—which attract puppies—up high. Higher.

Today this worked. It doesn’t always. In the event it does not work, please remember not to apply turpentine or denatured alcohol to your puppy. And do try to ignore the swirls—so beautiful!—left on the dining room wall by the fluffy tail. I wonder if the people who bought the Chattanooga house ever noticed.

What fun!

Is there anything in the world as appealing as a six-month-old puppy? Despite the rigors of housebreaking and cleaning up wreckage, Cassandra really is a love. She is old enough now to learn, and she is attentive, quick, lively and responsive.

Yesterday we did a long walk in the fields, a pre-launch of the winter challenge I am beginning today. Start with 5,000 steps (two and a half miles) a day and work up to twice that over eight weeks. Simple compounding at ten percent each week will do it. The first, perhaps the biggest challenge is to get back to some meaningful level of activity every day.

I am the Queen of Behavior Modification. If there is something I want to introduce into my daily routine, I know how to do it. Set goals, measure relentlessly. No self bashing, but keep measuring. If you don’t get there, analyze the roadblocks and systematically remove them.

For many years that I lived on Staten Island and commuted to work on Wall Street, I had a healthy daily exercise routine. I caught the six o’clock ferry, was in the gym at 6:30, which gave me time for daily aerobic conditioning, weights three times a week, stretching (sheer joy to me), and even a leisurely shower and sauna before I got to my desk at 8:20 or so.

Obstacles that I overcame in designing my workout mornings were many. Here are a few of the solutions.
• Have five sets of workout clothes so that laundry is never an excuse.
• Sleep in them.
• Put your suit on over your workout clothes—nobody on the ferry cares. If you put on your suit, rather than carrying it separately, you are less likely to forget critical items like your blouse.
• Wear your sneakers and keep your dress shoes (black and navy) at work.
• Go to the gym every day. When the clock goes off, get up and get dressed. Don’t even think about the possibility that you might not go. If you think you can’t do it this morning, never mind, go. Once you get there, the odds that you won’t actually do something—even just a little stretching and sauna—are very slim.
This schedule worked for years, until I changed jobs to work on the trading floor where the workday starts at 7:00. I never successfully made the transition to late afternoon workouts.

So I am trying to design a similarly robust exercise schedule that I hope will last me for the rest of my life, now that I know that working on trading floors and in investment banks is dangerous to my health, now that I know I absolutely must manage my daily routine as a matter of life and death.

One approach that is helping me is to think about activity not only in terms of steps but in terms of time. Most people walk at a rate of two miles an hour, so my beginning level can be equated not only to 5,000 steps but also to an hour and fifteen minutes of activity a day. Think of my friend Mary (http://vtdiary.blogspot.com/2006/01/yankee-ingenuity.html ) who walks in her home. She breaks up her ten miles a day into three sessions—so many minutes in the morning, the largest block at lunchtime, and so many in late afternoon. Taking off from her model, I might do forty-five minutes in the morning—lark that I am—, then twenty minutes at lunchtime to learn to take a break in the middle of the day, and then a short stroll to unwind at the end of the day. I put the greatest number of minutes at the time of day I can most control, before other people’s demands have wrought havoc with my schedule and my energy level.

Next week, I will have to add more minutes, miles, and steps to each time of day. This week it is enough to establish a new routine.

My best hope, of course, is that being obligated to go out and play with this wonderful little girl puppy does not feel like obligation at all. As daylight hours lengthen, we will be out in the morning for a long romp across the fields, working on solidifying her recall skills and refreshing brother Toby’s. At lunchtime, I come home to take the puppy out of her kennel for a break, and this enforced schedule has already—over the last several months—pried me out of my office and away from the computer for a healthy mid-day break, to which I can now add a short walk. Evenings will be my new challenge, but maybe not even. As we slink toward spring, it will be no burden to prowl my two acres, picking up sticks and debris scattered by the winter winds, peering this way and that at how the garden might be reshaped, and watching for the first new green shoots.

This is after all why I moved to Vermont. To live closer to the earth. To live a healthy life. To live a happy life.

What dogs really want

We like to think we play an important role in our dogs’ lives, not just a kibble provider and romping companion, but as somehow central. A book I read many years ago put this vain hope into perspective: it turns out that what dogs really want is other dogs.

See Miss Cassandra enjoying the Westminster Dog Show last night. [Sorry, I have a lovely photo, but have lost the cord to my digital camera.] I had to laugh. I don’t think I have ever seen her watch television so attentively in her short six months of life.

Meanwhile, her house-wrecking has escalated. I had a long day Friday, and it was too cold for her to come along, so I came home to an azalea plant flung around the living room—two piles of potting soil ground into the carpet and one pile of thrown-up azalea leaves as evidence—and an almost empty jar of peanut butter. This new assault on items on counter height and above is very alarming, as is the capacity to take lids off peanut butter jars. Pincushion and balls of yarn were easy, expected targets, but the bag of flour and the carton of eggs stolen from the kitchen counter—unexpected and not a good trend.

The new phone ($8 at Big Lots!) still in its armor packaging may have survived its turn as a chew toy, but the old phone did not, its cord wrapped around and around the foot of the guest room bed and chewed to shreds. If you know me outside blogland and you are trying to reach me by phone….leave a message, okay?

For reasons too complex to go into, my internet connection has been moved from one end of my house to the other end—where there is only one outlet. I operate a wireless network at home, so my internet lifeline is unaffected, but it will take some time before I can get an electrician in and have the Vonage phone set up again. It will happen, Mintaining communications in this fast-changing, technological world can be challenging, but it will happen—after all, just as what dog really want is other dogs, what people really want is other people.

Tropical vacation

Honestly, having the house really warm for a couple of days is as good as a tropical vacation. I am wearing only one layer, a long fleecey dress that sometime serves as nightgown without even any long undies. I just passed over the heat vent and thought I would swoon with delight.

Ahhh.

Why don’t we have a warm house all the time, you ask. It’s not easy to get drafty old farmhouses warm in the first place, and keeping them warm requires an unacceptable financial commitment.

As time goes on, I will get accustomed to my wood furnace. I will learn how to manage the amount of heat I generate, which is controlled partly by the number of times I toddle downcellar to add a log and partly by the thermostat that controls air flow to the fire. Again from T the wisdom, “There is a fine line between keeping the fire going and letting your wood heat go up the chimney.”

Ayuh. Right now I see all that wood downstairs as a free resource, but as I learn to manage it, I will see each log as an hour (or so) of heat and will be able to trade off the cost of wood against the cost of oil in the furnace.

So far I really like burning wood. I am off today to buy an ash bucket. Ask me again next year when I am weary of hauling and stacking wood, doubly weary of hauling ash up the stairs. But I am fortunate that I can burn wood when I want and let the oil come on betweentimes, so I am not as tied to the daily clean and burn routine as many of my neighbors.

For today, I am enjoying having enough warmth to do some sorting and organizing, moving from room to room without having to worry about keeping warm. I am making bread without having to coddle the yeasties in the oven with a pan of hot water. The dogs will likely entice me out for a run later in the day, and when I come home I can luxuriate in warmth all over again. I might even take a bubble bath.

Toasty

Three degrees above zero, that’s what the weather says it was this morning in my town. When the temperature dives, things start to go wrong at my house. The clothes washer’s drain freezes so water backs up all over the utility room. The dishwasher freezes, and this time it is sending sheets of water cascading into the cellar.

Oopsie.

But I have been waiting for a cold weekend to try burning wood in my combination wood-oil furnace. When I first bought the house, I was intrigued by this large metal contraption in the cellar and by the even larger stack of wood down there. But then I saw this episode of This Old House, the one where the plumber’s brother burns his house down, and—to my dismay—he had the same model furnace as mine. Of course, their strategy was to build the fire up high in the morning, then leave the house, returning only after the fire had burned down to nothing and the oil had kicked in. Not a good idea to stuff your firebox full, then leave the house.

Living alone, it takes a long time to get accustomed to new systems in the house. Like what to do when the washer drain and the dishwasher freeze.

So I waited, biding time until I could have the chimney cleaned and the furnace serviced. Each professional who came through counseled me, Be careful! Don’t build the fire too big! But each one encouraged me that burning wood was just fine. Better than fine. It’s the Vermont way. Of course, you want to burn wood.

The man who sold me the house knows wood well. He makes furniture for a living, and left the cellar lined with neatly split logs as well as bags of small stuff from the factory. I always figured I would have to haul it out of there. But then again, why not try burning it? The former owner always said how nice it was on a very cold day to have a wood fire to keep the toes toasty, and being a native Vermonter, he meant a day like this when the temperature drops toward zero and below.

An hour after I started, I was still struggling with newspaper and kindling trying to get them under the big logs that I had thoughtless chunked right in there. I have built fires before, but somehow it is easier in a fireplace, when the whole operation is in front of you rather than deep in a metal firebox…and you have been warned not to build above its doorsill. Hours later, I found the directions, online—honestly, isn’t it amazing?—and another set in my file cabinet, thoughtfully left by the former owner. Oh, yes, perhaps I should read this. And what does a water softener do, anyway?

The wood in the cellar is as nice as you could possibly want. Cut to the proper length for the furnace and split, oh so nicely. Big logs. Piles and piles of them, three layers deep against the cellar wall. Aged for at least two years now, nice and dry, well aged.

It’s five o’clock now, and I have been luxuriating in warmth all day long. This is not the way life is for me when I burn oil. I keep the thermostat at an aerobics-encouraging sixty degrees when I burn oil, but when I burn wood, the thermostat serves only to provide more or less air to the spectacular, intense blaze down there in my furnace.

I had to call my friend, T, and exclaim, “My house is warm!” She understands. She knows far better than I do the cold, clammy, insidious fingers of Vermont winters, creeping in through mousehole and crevice, but in fighting them off, she is a pro. A lifer. She heats her house with wood all the time, or rather with wood and several golden retrievers. It’s generally pretty cold there, because like other native Vermonters, T’s response when the temperature drops is to put on another sweater. Now it is my response, too.

Today, she was ranting about another friend on the end of a telephone line, a friend who was complaining about how cold it was. “Only sixty degrees!” (Yeah, right…) “And last night, it was down to twenty-five degrees! How do you stand it up there?”

At the very instant that T was relaying this lament, I was walking with my trusty cell phone (911 pre-programmed just in case I need the fire department) to the front porch, where I was mightily encouraged to see that the temperature had risen to a bearable twenty-five degrees. I burst out laughing, then had to explain, “I was just thinking. Now it is twenty-five degrees, so it is warm enough to take the dogs out for a run.”

It’s all in your expectations, isn’t it?

Still, being able to take a day to be toasty—and better yet for free—as you burn cheerfully through the wood left in the cellar. That is a day of riches.

I might do it again tomorrow.

“Half your wood and half your hay by Groundhog Day.” T intoned this piece of Vermont lore over the cell phone today. I think I’m okay. Plenty of wood for a few more toasty days. And no hay eaters to put us off, to cause anxiety to intrude in our slow, steady passage to spring.

Night out, damage minimal

“We do this every Friday night,” my friend said. “You just haven’t been since you got the puppy.”

“Oh.”

She’s right. I have been tied close to home, checking in for crate escapes every few hours since the end of September.

And all my mental, emotional and psychic energy has been drained away as I kept watch over old Max. Somewhere in the archives of this blog is a piece inspired by a friend who counseled me not to worry so much over old dogs, that their end days would come all too soon without the aid of my anticipation. She was right in that comment, and also right that all the worry ahead may ease the shock of parting, but not the pain.

Love and parting are like light and dark. Experiencing the one makes the other vivid. I, for one, would not give up light for fear of the dark, nor love for fear of parting. Still, there is a time, sad but blessed, when grief recedes, and there is room for a giggle again.

I sat around the bar last night with some old friends and some new ones, having done a hard, good day’s work, and we had a giggle or too. We made bitchy comments, bemoaned our politicians’ labors, allowed as how they (politicians) were probably well intentioned, nattered about local characters, compared Yankees and Southerners, and generally chewed the proverbial. It was a night out.

Driving home under the stars, I considered the price I would have to pay. Since I knew it was a long day, I had left Cassie out of her crate to terrorize Toby and entertain herself.

A sock, a roll of masking tape, and a library book. A roll of paper towels shredded on the stairs. Not bad.

And a mournful puppy who needs a lot of attention today to make up for my night out. But with a little practice, we both might be able to handle mom’s night out again, if only now and then. I’m really not a social creature, you know. But a night out, now and then, is good for me, I think.

Busy, busy

I am looking out the kitchen window watching my six-month-old German Shepherd puppy dig to China. Cassie desperately needs something to do, having spent way too much time in her crate yesterday. Her much older brother, Toby, steadfastly refuses to allow her to chew on his heels. He plays with her more than I have ever seen him play in his nine years with me, but really, enough is enough.

I have been busy, too, trying to organize my office, trying to meet the needs of my clientele as they churn through their resolutions to change their lives and start new business ventures—this is a busy time of year for us—and also trying to re-establish the blessed rhythm of my daily routine.

In a wave of synchronicity, I have been encountering all kinds of advice that people like me need to pay attention to daily rhythms. For people like me, too much difference day to day is dangerous, causing anxiety, stress, binge eating, and flaring temper. My personal daily prescription for happiness consists of seven or eight hours of sleep; a diet rich in high quality, low fat protein, vegetables, and whole grains; an hour’s walk and then some more activity; laughing and talking to someone I love; good productive creative work; and a romp with the pups and some time writing. Now it appears that science supports what I have found to be true for myself, at least for people like me.

Who are people like me? Introverts. People who react badly to too much stress. Women who tend to gain weight around the middle. Middle aged women. That’s about as much self-disclosure as I am up for, but there are many people who are like me, and there are enough who are not like me that my daily prescription is not universal. I have had to learn to be firm about my requirements for my life, even in the face of skepticism and downright disapproval.

So, as much as I loved traveling, it is not for me, or at least not often. And as much as I loved living and working there, New York City became like an addiction to a highly enjoyable, ultimately toxic and fatal drug. My soul craves the peace of rural Vermont. Here I am healing.

Busy times intrude. From time to time, we all have to rise to demands of others. Holidays are a challenge, and loss—however carefully anticipated and prepared—takes a heavy toll. Too much clutter overwhelms me. Meaningless chatter is toxic to me. But the sweet repose of a quiet life beckons, and I am grateful for every day I have it.

Too many days are spent in mindless chatter, and really, why should I bother? There is a reason the puppy is named Cassandra. It is to remind me that people will make their own choices, and that no matter how I rant, they are unlikely to believe what I say. Now I practice saying what I think, then letting people absorb my message. More and more often in this new regimen, they come back to ask my opinion. It is easier on everyone.

The puppy has work to do, but it is not the excavation project that she has undertaken. Her real work is to distract me, to drag me out for walks and romps, to help me live a happy life. Toby’s life work, not assigned but chosen by him, is to love me. They both do their jobs well. I can never repay their joyful industry. A romp or a walk every day is just a start.

Animal communication

Mary Beth’s comment brings back vivid recollections of a cat I had years ago. She was named Walden to pay homage to the part of Massachusetts where I lived at the time, and also because she was a bit simple. A simple life, in many ways.

Walden took as her mode of communications a small stuffed snowman finger puppet that someone gave me one Christmas. Mr. Snowman sat on the mantle in the living room, but every day it seemed, I would find him face down on the floor. Finally, I gave in and allowed Walden to claim Mr. Snowman as her own. It was then that I began to suspect that I might have underestimated her intelligence.

On the occasional day when I was home at eleven in the morning, kitty Walden would go hunting for Mr. Snowman and beat the stuffing out of him. She would throw him in the air, leap up and catch him between her front paws, then kick his belly with both hind legs, claws extended. Ow.

Mr. Snowman was not only her favorite playmate, he also became a mechanism for communication with me. When Walden was hungry, there would be Mr. Snowman, face down in the food bowl. And every evening at my accustomed bedtime, she would pick up Mr. Snowman, bring him into the room where I sat, and drop him at my feet. Then, like Mary Beth’s old cats, she would lovingly sing us all to bed.

Missing parts of my brain

The good thing about having a laptop computer with high speed access and your own blog is that you have extra processing capacity and storage….outside one’s own feeble brain. If I want to remember something, I send myself an e-mail. If I want to think something through, I blog. If I want to touch base with someone I love, there is always e-mail. If I need to expand my horizons, Google is there for me. My computer and the internet are vital links to a whole wide world beyond the small, sometimes parochial, town where I live and work.

Oh, the sadness! Oh, the woe! that piles on day after day of constrained, restricted, intermittent internet access. Some people find e-mail a burden; for me, it is a lifeline. But entropy is the way of the electronic world as of every world, and we have been down, disconnected, debilitated and depressed at home and at the office for about ten days. Not sequentially, but intermittently, and that is almost worse.

Today, Saint Keith and his acolyte Chris came to visit at the office and at home, and I do honestly believe that the wireless networks are working. Going to work. Soon. Really. I believe it.

Technical glitch begat dark cloud, which the radio signal could not penetrate. It’s mythical and mystical, and—-we trust—-it is almost beaten.

Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, back in dogland. Toby continues to grieve for Max, as we all do, but it is Toby’s job to carry emotion in our little mixed-species family. I honestly do not believe that Toby wants to be the number one dog. He wants Cassie to take on that role, but he knows she is still growing into it. It’s transition time here on our Vermont hillside. We are getting better, getting older, decaying and exploding, all at the same time.

Max was a good dog

I wrote this on October 31, and then the miracle of steroids gave us another two and a half months to say goodbye. Last Friday, I took Max for his last trip to the vet, although I did not post this until later when the first wave of grief had passed. We were both surrounded by friends. Friends who talked me through a very hard decision, and friends who stayed with him to the very end, as I could not.

We are all bouncing back, although I have been surprised at the puppy’s distress. She knew him only three months, but she learned her job. Toby purely grieves, but he is eating again now. We miss Max, but we are learning new rhythms for life after Max.

I’m sorry to say that the photo I mention at the end is not available in digital form, so you will just have to imagine Max and Toby herding the border collies. But here is one of Max lecturing, his favorite pastime.

Yesterday, he had even more trouble walking than has become usual. A dozen times I had to help him stand up, and often his back legs collapsed again immediately. There was a note of panic in his whine as he struggled to pull himself forward on powerful shoulders, scrabbling for traction. We have bought a few days by putting rugs down over the slippery wood floor.

Last night, he couldn’t get up and peed in his bed. I panicked when I saw blood where he peed, and called the vet, only to call back when I realized that he had torn off one entire toenail trying to get up. How frantic do you have to be?

This morning he was quiet and regal, out for a last walk in the back yard. He reminded me that a dog who cannot bear to poop on a leash or even within view of anyone he doesn’t love really is not a dog to lie in his own waste. He wasn’t hungry, not last night and not this morning. Neither was Toby or even baby Cassie.

People always say you will know when it is time to let go. I have always believed it and lived through it with other loves, animal and human. Still, I was afraid that with my dear Max, my selfish wish to keep him with me would overwhelm my ability to see when the moment had come. This was not the hardest thing I ever had to do—those had to do with men in my life—but it was very, very hard to let Max go.

Max was a foundling. I don’t know when he was born or what happened the first nine months or so of his life. I first saw him on the Staten Island Ferry, barking his fool head off at the ferry workers who were trying to convince him that Manhattan was not the place for a puppy. He had apparently made the rounds of the ferry, bumming cookies off passengers who, soft for dogs, carried them always in their pockets. I was standing on the upper deck, wearing a purple raincoat and flirting in a half-hearted way with one of the deck hands. “I like that dog,” I said. In the way of men, he puffed out his chest and said, “I’ll get him for you.”

But I was on my way to work and the ferry had left the dock. I made arrangements with the man. Later, I cut my day short and stopped in at the ferry office to pick up my new best friend. When the deck hand slipped a rope over Max’s neck, he walked home the mile to my house like a lamb. Clearly, someone had trained and loved this dog.

The next day, he ate a sofa.

His worst prank, though, was the day he took the bag of worms I had bought for the garden and thoughtlessly left by the back door. How hard do you have to shake a bag of worms, I wondered later as I tried to re-hydrate them and scrape them off the lower cabinets on either side of my little galley kitchen, how hard do you have to fling worms to make this happen?

He wasn’t perfect. He had an unfortunately strong prey drive, which has meant the deaths of several cats including one I loved dearly. He knew it was wrong, but he truly could not help himself. “Max thinks cats are snacks,” I always used to say.

And later, when we spent hours every day in the park in Brooklyn, I often thought of writing an article about the words we say so often to our dogs that they inadvertently take on the impact of commands. For one therapist in the park, it was “Rudy, self-soothe!” For us, it was “Max, don’t lick that baby!”

It was always enthusiasm that got Max in trouble. He loved people, all people. In those early days when I used to wonder where he came from and how anyone could have given him up, we would walk the esplanade on the north shore of Staten Island. People often commented on how beautiful Max was, and occasionally he would take off, dragging me behind as he tried desperately to catch up with a black person, particularly if there was a small child or an open car door in the picture. Can’t you just imagine the young family who found themselves unable to manage a nine-month-old rowdy German Shepherd puppy, particularly if they had small children, who decided that the best solution was to drop him at the ferry where everyone knows that the guys are a soft touch for dogs?

As my brother put it on that first day, “You won’t ever go anywhere alone again, not the bathroom, not anywhere.” I haven’t. I have had more dogs—up to four—and fewer dogs—down to two. We made an unsuccessful move back South, then moved again back to Brooklyn. From there we watch the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center. We moved to Vermont, where we have all been happy, especially Max and Toby.

Toby is the dog that has loved me more dearly than I ever expect to be loved by anyone in my life. And I love Toby. But it is Max who has the first, best dog claim on my heart, stronger even than the claim of Bruno, who was my father’s dog when I was a baby and who watched over me like a guardian angel until I was eight and he was almost nine.

Max was about eleven. He had a good life. When he was four, he and Toby stayed a couple of months with my mother, who knew it would break my heart to give up my dogs while I was between houses. Grandma spoiled them both, but particularly Max who never after that could come into the house without asking for a cookie. She laughed when Toby tricked Max out of the choicest spot on her bed, and she took them both, alternately, to obedience school, chuckling when people couldn’t figure out why her big dog looked different each session. Such a big dog for such a small woman! Max did not graduate, his interest in his world overwhelming his intellect and his willingness to come when called. He knew when he disappointed anyone, but would come over and lean his head against a thigh and talk about it.

Ah yes, Max was always a talker. He would discuss, he would scold, he would lecture.
When he was five, he had a hip replacement. With a foundling German Shepherd, hips are always a concern, and both of his were so bad that the doctors had a hard time deciding which one to do. He lectured them the whole time that they put him through the tests, including one that had him walk on a floating plate. In the end, they flipped a coin, did the operation, and he was up and walking in his crate the same day. A week later when he came home, he was like a puppy again, so happy to be able to walk without pain. The doctors advised doing only one hip; with his powerful shoulders, he gets the stability of a triangle, they explained.

That operation made me decide to buy Cassandra rather than taking a risk on another foundling. Cassie will have other challenges to face, as will I. As Sir Francis Bacon put it, “He who has a wife and children has given hostages to fortune.” I’m sure he meant to include she who has dogs.

The operation also bought me six more years with Max—the Brooklyn years (“Don’t lick that baby!”) and the Vermont years. This photo is one of my favorites of Max and Toby at dog camp, relaxing after herding (yes, herding!) border collies in the Little River. Toby did most of the chasing, and Max lectured them. It was around then, sitting on that river bank, that it occurred to me that we could live in Vermont. We have all had a good time here, barking at turkeys and digging up moles, porcupines and skunks notwithstanding.

If at the end of our lives, people can say that we lived well and were good representatives of our species, well, that’s the best epitaph of all.

Max was a very good dog.

Radical redesign

Why not radically change the way you behave toward others, dear Leo? You are in the process of orienting yourself toward establishing relationships that are more fraternal, with far fewer risks involved. This wasn't the case before. When you don't try hard to seduce and impress, your audience claps louder. Haven't you noticed?

My horoscope for January 14, 2006. Sounds right. Don’t know what it means. It is probably worthwhile to stop and think about what I would be like if I were completely different.

If I could, I would be less ruled by moods.

I would be kinder to everyone. (First, I wrote “nicer” but that word has overtones of rigid, brutal social judgment to anyone from the South, intimations that you will do what is good for another person no matter the cost to yourself. I choose a different word and a different rule of life.)

I would have a stronger sense of my own right to my own world and my own decisions. (Less engagement with people who try to further their own agendas without regard for others, more workarounds.)

I would really, really forgive all the old hurts.

I would continue to ask forgiveness for all the hurts I have caused, but I would accept that forgiveness is a gift, not something I am entitled to.

I would stop reaching out to people who see me only as a role, any role. Why can't I stop? Don't I get the message?

I would simplify my life even further, getting rid of more and more excess stuff.
I would find a church again and get involved.

I would dance more.

I would take better care of myself.

Maybe I will. The thought is the first step, then comes prioritization—since I truly believe we can only work on one or two things at a time—then strategy. The queen of behavior mod and a change junkie, I can do many things, but the first step is the radical redesign.

Structured networking

A tool for all kinds of situations. Just as when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, when you master this tool, it seems to apply everywhere. Here are the basic steps:

Figure out what you want and write a script.
Call ten people a day and ask for their help.
People will be helpful. When their advice works for you, circle back and thank them.
Offer to respond in kind.
Keep notes, keep expanding your list, keep calling.

That’s pretty much the outline. I learned to do this in the context of job hunting, under the general heading of “Looking for a job is a job.” My counselor reviewed my script, then insisted that I make those ten calls a day, which really doesn’t take very long once you have the script and a list of people to call. A shy person, I went in kicking and screaming, but I didn’t have a lot of alternatives.

I was blown away by how helpful people were, how much more helpful they wanted to be. My script wasn’t even particularly focused. It went something like this:

“Hi, I don’t know if you remember working with me on ___ project. I have been working in credit analysis—both for bond deals and bank lending for the last several years—and I am thinking that I would like to do something a little different. I like the analytical part of my job and the human interaction. I wonder if you have heard of anything that you think sounds creative and interesting, something that would use my kind of skills?”

And later in the conversation, “Can you think of anyone else that I should talk to?”

Depending on the person, I might disclose that I had just been caught in one of the waves of layoffs that battered Wall Street in the nineties, but I would note that the most important thing right now was finding the right opportunity—that I was fortunate to have a little time now to look for what I would like to do for the next few years. When I started writing the script, I was furious at the counselor. After all, the truth was that I was desperate for a new job. But by the time we polished every word of the script, I believed it. And I was able to approach the people I called without pressuring them, to assure them that I was delighted to have this opportunity to catch up with them, and that I valued their suggestions.

The hardest part of structured networking is getting your head straight in the first place. You don’t have to believe the story all day long, but you do have to believe it for the hour or so it takes to make ten calls a day. You don’t want to pressure the person in any way. You don’t want to ask for a job or an interview or even an informational interview. You just want them to apply their creative intelligence to help you expand the number and quality of opportunities available to you. You don’t, after all, want to have to rely on the dreary postings in the newspaper, and you don’t have to.

When you wrte the script—and even more when you review it with someone who can help you polish it—you will see all your secret insecurities come out.

“But people won’t want to help me.” Actually, people love to help.

“No, I mean, they won’t think my skills and talents are adequate.” Maybe, maybe not. Start with the ones you have confidence will want to help you and work up to the cold calls. You will be needing to make cold calls, and it will not kill you. It’s only ten a day.

“Ten sounds like a lot.” Okay, start with five. But the more calls you make in a day, the faster you will get to a wide variety of opportunities to change your life in a positive way. Some days you will hate to pick up the phone, just as some days are tough on any job. But now you are working for yourself and for your future. So pick a minimum number you can live with, and get moving.

“I don’t think there are any jobs out there.” Oh please. Get real. There are always jobs. If you are willing to do some networking, there are more jobs. If you are flexible enough to consider consulting and short term opportunities, worlds open up. The downside is that it may seem you are always looking for a job; the upside is that you don’t mind so much because you are always expanding your opportunities.

“I don’t know enough people to call.” Talk to everyone. The other members of the nonprofit board you serve on, the other mothers in the carpool, the soccer coach, the guy you run into at the dry cleaner, everyone you ever worked with, old school friends. You don’t know who they know until you ask them. Many, many conversations take a turn at “Well, actually, I do know this one guy who said something about….”

“I just don’t think I can do it.” Okay, so your shyness is more important to you than finding a job that makes you happy. Your choice. But do you think you could write the script? And once you do, ask yourself whether you think you can make a few calls. Make a list of who you would call if you felt strong one day. Say your spiel out loud until it doesn’t sound stupid to you any more. Then one day, you will pick up the phone and ask for help from friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and strangers. And you will be amazed that you ever let shyness get in your way.

There are a few important guidelines. Don’t whine. Don’t pressure. Do say thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your ideas. And when something pays off, call back the person who gave you the lead and say thank you again. And don’t be surprised when in a few months, your phone rings, and you hear, “Hi, I don’t know if you remember calling me…but now I am looking for some new opportunities….”

That is structured networking. I grant you that learning it is painful, but it is a skill that can be applied to all kinds of needs. Now, whenever I need anything (where to find a good puppy kindergarten, who should I ask to paint my house, what innovative programs in workforce development can we develop, what seminars would be interesting to the business community, how do other single women manage large household tasks, what can be done about an obstreperous board member, why can’t I keep staff….and so on), I just ask everyone I know until I generate a robust range of alternatives. What a difference from relying on my puny brain!

Structured networking is good, I think, for a shy person, because it gives us a controlled way to tap into the riches of the outside world. At the same time, I think it would help an extrovert to focus on the goals of interchange. By marking progress against an objective, an extrovert would be able to take that social interchange that is so easy and focus it on a desired outcome. I’m just guessing that for an extrovert, the organizational parts of the process might be harder and the calling easier.

In any case, according to my outplacement counselor, this is a technique that works for a broad range of people in all kinds of situations. After kicking, screaming, and trying it, I know it works for me. I came out of my first, supervised experience with structured networking with two exciting job offers, numerous interviews, a lot of very interesting conversations with people I didn’t know, a lot of wonderful reconnections with people I had not seen in years, and a new confidence in myself and humankind. Not bad for ten calls a day.

Who’s teaching who?

An old friend and I have started back up an e-mail correspondence just recently, and she writes happily, “

OK, bed time. We have way too much going on, and still not enough hours in the day. I hate that! I WILL write more, I promise. It's just WONDERFUL to be back in touch with you!!!!

This is a woman with the gift of being happy, married to a man with the gift of taking on the world on his own terms. Job transitions have her thinking about making some life changes, and she imagines that I have some wisdom to share. I do, but some of it gets handed back, since it came from the two of them. Since I make a habit of keeping my friends anonymous in this blog, let’s call my friend Doreen and her husband Douglas.

I met Doreen at an arts camp in Maine, a spectacularly beautiful place where I had retreated to make pots for three weeks, while she made baskets. We had a bond immediately. Neither of us, for the life of us, could fathom the intensity with which our classmates viewed the search for the perfect “vessel.” It took only a hint of the v-word to send us into giggles.

It was a period of weird and wacky life connections, too. Doreen had gone to high school in Cincinnati with a guy I was seeing at the time, and also with Sarah Jessica Parker (not that that matters to any of us but I wonder what including a celebrity name will do to my blog stats). I was taking pottery lessons from a potter who was having a feud with my pig farmer cousin in Georgia. Doreen and I took a day trip one day, and we visited a fort in Maine that is built on the identical plan of one near Savannah, where my mother grew up. Maybe that fort is a metaphor for our lives, two identical plans executed in worlds far apart. Me Southern and shy, her Jewish and bubbly.

We remarked that day on the poignancy of fortifications of such exquisite design, but both outdated by advances in armaments. The invention of spiral bores in rifles made their walls vulnerable in unforeseen ways, and they had to be abandoned. It was not, thank goodness, necessary to abandon our lives as we went back to the real world of difficult jobs.

Doreen also went back to Douglas. She had told me stories of his rather unusual approach to life, and also his zest for life. While we were potting, weaving and giggling in the woods, Douglas was on a bike tour to China. Listening Doreen talk about Douglas, it was one of the times that I recognized that when people are really in love, they see the other person as absolutely unique, as if he or she exists with an extra dimension. They even speak the name differently, with a kind of hushed expectance. It’s a dead giveaway, just as one of the ways you know that someone is checking you out is if they ask your age.

The one that really got my attention, though, was the description of Douglas recruiting a new secretary for his office. It was a tough market, it seems, and the usual routes of advertising and interviewing had not worked well. So Douglas wrote up a resume for the office and went out into the crowds at rush hour to try to get more applicants, maybe ones that were happy at their jobs and hadn’t even considered a new opportunity. What an idea! If something is not working, change the approach. Don’t settle for what you can get, change the rules. When I went back to my difficult job and difficult boss, I changed my approach. And I have remembered that lesson.

One of my favorite true stories of how people really manage life transitions—as opposed to how we all think we do it—is the story of how they decided to get married. “It was a slip of the subjunctive,” says Doreen. “One day he said to me something about when we get married and I almost dropped my teeth.” But it was too late to take it back, or he really didn’t want to, and neither did she. They were married in a garden, as Doreen put it, “of late blooming flowers.” And they were happy. She has a gift for happy, and he has the sense to organize her into his life.

A couple of years later, I saw Doreen briefly at the airport. She was on her way to Russia. She was so excited about the trip, but it was the first time she was leaving her baby son. I think it took a lot of courage to make that trip. Not long after that, Douglas and Doreen moved from the northeast to the South, a dramatic cultural change on so many levels.

And this is the woman who wants to know how I have gone about making big changes in life? I have watched her and learned from her, among others of my dear good friends. There are some specific skills I learned, too, like the value of structured networking, a lifesaver for the shy person. It gives you a tool for being outgoing when you really would rather not. And I am told that for the outgoing, it can offer a way to organize all the information that you gather without even thinking about it. Maybe I will blog about that tomorrow.

Oddly enough, Douglas’s parents live in the same retirement community near Burlington as one of my best friends. So perhaps I will have visits from Doreen and Douglas and their children to look forward to, as I also enjoy J’s visits to Vermont with his daughter and his girlfriend. I could end up with more friends in Vermont than I had in other places I lived. Ain’t life weird and grand?

Because we can

A friend of mine, lets call her Jay, asked me a question at a Christmas party, and I have been chewing on it in the background of my mind ever since. At least I guess I must have been, because I woke up yesterday, or maybe it was today, with an answer.

This question is pretty intense for a woman that I only know slightly, and with whom I don’t always feel I have much in common. I struggle not to be too casual in dress; she loves shoes and gets manicures. She is social; I’m an introvert. She has a grown son; I love my dogs. But we are both of an age, and we like each other. More than once, casual conversation has abruptly shifted, and we find we are talking about things that matter to us deeply, things that usually take a lot more care to introduce into polite conversation. Things like mental health and what it is really like to be a woman in the predominantly male world of finance and our shared love of hands on home improvement and our bemused appreciation of men.

“Why is it so hard for me?” she wants to know. This is not an insecure person, and I understand that she is not asking “Why doesn’t anyone want me?” She is bright and beautiful and funny and good company and financially secure. She is asking a different question, and I am flattered that she considers that I might know any part of an answer. The fact is I have the same question: “What is wrong with me that I think it is okay to live alone? Shouldn’t I want someone in my life? Shouldn’t I want people closer to me? Am I being too hard on the people who love me? Am I shutting out relationships that might bring joy into my life? Have I failed to grasp the tradeoff between working on a relationship and avoiding loneliness?” She is asking the question in the context of an insistent potential lover, while I am not--at least not at the moment--but I can see that my question is what has kept me in bad relationships.

Even at Christmas, I knew part of the answer. If there is no magic, if there never has been that spark of connection in the attraction to the other person, it’s not worth it. Relationships that start with magic are hard enough to navigate, and we are long past the age of arranged marriages. I am grateful that it is not now as rare for women to live alone. When I was first divorced twenty years ago, I had to work hard to accept my new state. As a good southern girl, there was very, very few single women in my extended family who weren’t perceived as having a little something wrong with them. It took a long time for me to decide I would rather have something wrong with me than stay in a bad relationship, and I have repeated that wrenching decision a few times now.

Eventually, I may get it right. It seems that the challenge of my lifetime is to learn to let go once the magic has receded. Despite my deep fears that I give up too quickly, the truth is that I give up far too slowly. Too little self respect or over-responsibility for the other person keeps me stuck until I wake up one bright morning and realize that I can just walk away. That’s what I am trying to learn. Again and again. Still.

Why do I live alone? Because I can, at least right now. I can afford my own house and I can pay my bills As life goes on, things change and I may not always have this luxurious option. I may need to have a roommate.or move to lower cost housing, maybe even give up my well loved dogs. For now, I am happy.

There are downsides to living alone. Aside from the expense, there isn’t anyone to share chores, and it often takes me a long time to figure out how to accomplish some household projects. At the end of the day, as we would say on Wall Street, it is a business decision. Do I give up what I have for a risky prospect? These kinds of decisions take analysis of pros and cons, then a leap of intuition and faith and love.

When I married at nineteen, I made that leap. It paid off big time. I had several years of joy before things changed, then a few years of struggle to accept that my world had changed. Would I make the leap again? In a heartbeat. But only if the magic is there.

I am pleased to say that one of the things I love about Vermont is that I see hints and whispers of magic everywhere. Almost everywhere I go, I meet interesting men that show real promise. Nobody yet for whom I would give up my current life….well maybe one. Or two. The riches of possibility enliven my life. And if nobody comes along, the downside is that I live alone in the luxury of my own home until old age or illness requires otherwise. The long term future I imagine is an apartment or one-room house, but as age advances, I may have to live closer to services and dogs will become increasingly problematic.

To answer Jay’s question. Why do we live alone? Because we can. Because we are financially and emotionally secure enough that we have that option.

Love thy neighbor

I love my neighbors. I really do.

Right now I particularly love the guy up the road who plows my driveway. Only last month I learned that he plows only for me and the guy on the other side of me. Still, for a guy with his own excavating business and a couple of small side jobs, you could not ask for a more committed and responsible service provider.

I am a happy customer, whose response yesterday tipped over into sheer joy and exhilaration. I have been struggling with a big pile of ice in front of my garage, and after days of shoveling and chipping, I gave up, leaving a barrier the size of three stacked speed bumps—or sleeping policemen, as they would say in Jamaica—still blocking the entrance to my garage. When I came home for the puppy’s lunchtime break from her kennel, it occurred to me that if I left the garage door open then the plow guy might be able to whack the icy barrier. Or shove it. Or something. I even thought about placing a phone call, but, as usual I got distracted.

When I came home last night—oh, joy!—it worked. There was a clean, flat surface where three policemen used to sleep. I drove my car into the garage, closed the door and called to leave a message that I am sure my neighbor and his family will giggle over. Why shouldn’t they giggle? And why shouldn’t they share my delight that I have figured out one more little thing that—with my neighbors’ help--makes winter in Vermont a little easier?

I am also pretty fond of the couple down the road who brought me the most spectacular platter of Christmas cookies that I have ever seen. Something of a cookie snob, I was impressed with the variety of shapes, the amount of detail work, and the use of real butter. We cookie snobs can tell. These are people I have met once, but in Vermont proximity can be enough to make neighbors, and thoughtful care and simple kindness are often offered without thought of return.

Yankee ingenuity

I’m trying something new. Not, you understand, because it is the New Year. I am an innovation junkie. I just love trying something new.

My friend Mary just returned from a scary surgery in which a golfball size tumor was removed from her brain, just behind the bridge of her nose. Death and blindness averted, she is enjoying the fact that her exceptional fitness has enabled her to bounce back. And to what does she attribute this exceptional fitness? Walking.

Mary walks several miles a day. I wish I could remember exactly how many, because you would be impressed. She walks in the morning, at lunchtime and in the evening. If you are in Montpelier at midday, you may see Mary logging miles. But in the morning she walks at home.

In casual conversation at some Rotary event or another, I asked Mary how she manages to fit in so much walking. I really like to walk, but when I wake up it is dark and by the time I feed dogs, sit under the therapy light, do Pilates, answer e-mail, read horoscopes, blog, make breakfast, wash and get dressed...well, not all of those even get done every morning.

“I walk at home,” says Mary.

Still not getting it, I ask another way, “But isn’t it dark?”

“No, I walk in my house,” she says. “We have TVs in the kitchen and in the living room, so I turn them on and open all the doors and I walk in a circle around and around my house. Then I turn around and walk the other way.”

“Doesn’t it wear out your floors?”

“Silly, I wear sneakers!”

Worth a try, I say. So this morning, after doing Pilates under the therapy lamp (another experiment!) I set the timer for twenty minutes and tried it. If I open the doors to the bathroom and the study (normally shut off for dog control and heat retention), then I can walk in a circle around and around my house, although I suspect that my house is somewhat smaller than Mary’s—one TV covers the territory. I have taken to recording the morning news so that I can fast forward through ads and seemingly incessant coverage of high school hockey, and now I actually feel informed about Vermont events, or as informed as Channel 3 can make me.

But back to the walking. It works great. I go around in one direction five or six times, then when I start to feel it in my hips, I go the other way. I switch the remote from hand to hand. The doggy barriers just add variety. Either I jump them or I shout “Excuse me! Excuse me!” and they comply. I add in a little bending and stretching to pick up yesterday’s dog-shredded items for more variety. Toward the end, I bend to get a pan out of the cabinet, eggs from the fridge, and lifting my knees high, keep walking back and forth, back and forth. By the time breakfast is ready, the timer goes off. Twenty minutes walking, finished!

Minor adjustments are required. I am a little worried about my living room rug, a good Oriental that is a relic of the days when I had more money, so I will put down some runners. Somewhere along the way, the puppy snagged the goats milk soap in the bathroom, from which she is normally shut out. The total schedule needs to be tightened up a bit—it is almost time to walk out the door and I still am in my jammies—but there is promise for this indoor walking.

Thanks, Mary!