Treasure Hunt

 

Scout spends more time outside since the weather is warmer.  He makes up for it when he comes inside.  On a rainy Tuesday afternoon, he expressed no desire to go outside.  Instead, he spent the afternoon on a treasure hunt.

Any open, or partly open, box is an invitation to browse.  A collie’s nose is designed to stick into small places.  On this particular day, he found a tube of antibiotic ointment, a long plastic pipe from some unknown project, a pair of sweatpants, a stray sock, a Christmas bag, two plastic hangers, a package of screws, a small Tupperware container and something I didn’t recognize by the time I retrieved it.  He also got the shoes I had kicked off and pulled the insoles out.  He has a particular fixation on insoles and no interest at all in the old shoe I gave him for his very own.

He loves tools, and is ecstatic when he finds an open toolbox or bag of hardware items.  He once brought the electric drill into the living room and poured out a box of screws.  I don’t know what he was planning to build, but I put a stop to it before he figured out how to plug in and turn on the drill.  One morning when I got out of bed, I heard a noise that sounded a lot like water rushing out of a faucet.  My heart skipped a beat, and I went on a search for a broken water pipe or malfunctioning faucet.  I had visions of a flooded laundry room or a lake in the kitchen floor.  When I reached the source of the noise, I was relieved to find that it was not water.  Someone, and I’m confident in my assumption that it was Scout, had turned on the cordless vacuum, which was in the laundry room on its charger.  I don’t know if he meant to use it or take it apart.  My guess is the latter.

The real Aladdin’s cave for Scout is my closet.  He lurks outside the door constantly, checking to see if by chance I have left the door open.  I do that more often than I like to admit.  Even if it’s open just a crack, he knows how to use his big paw to fling it open.  Once he does, he has a wide variety of choices for treasures.  Shoes, pants, sweaters – what to choose?  Usually it’s shoes.  Not just one shoe, but several shoes.  His particular favorite right now is a yellow dress shoe.  So far, I’ve been able to rescue it without damage, but he keeps trying.  I can’t figure out why he goes for that one shoe every time.

Treasure hunting is exhausting

Low open shelves are fair game too.  He can wipe out a row of books in no time.  Fantasy seems to be his favorite flavor – he shredded 3 Mercedes Lackey books one afternoon and ate the cover off an Anne McCaffrey dragon adventure.  He enjoys pulling the rubber chair leg tips off and somehow has figured out how to do that without upending the chairs.  He is trying to pull the ends off my exercise bicycle, but so far he hasn’t succeeded.  He has learned that he can pull the flap on the back of the couch open (it is attached at the bottom with Velcro, which makes a satisfying noise when he pulls it loose).  He doesn’t try to tear it up – he just likes to lift it up over and over.

It's not because he’s bored, or because he has nothing else to play with.  The dogs have their own toy box and they keep all the toys neatly piled inside.  They have a large collection of sticks and bones in the yard, which they occasionally try to bring in the house.    The main reason they don’t get in with the sticks is that they are too long to fit through the door.

Sophie doesn’t participate in the treasure hunts – she outgrew that a year or so ago.  But she does like to reap the rewards of his finds.  They almost came to blows over the plastic container when she came in out of the rain last Tuesday.  She has no interest in the dog toy box either.

Scout’s most stunning achievement was a couple weeks ago when he ate a pie, all but the one slice  I had eaten.  It was a darn good pie.  He threw it up in the living room, which is what gave me the clue that he had eaten it.  Raisins are not good for dogs, but I don’t think they stayed with him long enough to hurt him.

He never holds it against me when I take things away from him, or when I chastise him for his misdeeds.  He is a cheerful dog who forgives me for what he must see as my obsession with things like shoes, tools, clothing, books and Tupperware.  And he has those endearing collie eyes that melt your heart.  He has mastered the art of coming to my chair after a particular egregious transgression and laying his sweet face on my knee and lifting his paw to shake my hand.  (I think Sophie taught it to him because she used it before he came to live here.)   It makes me think I really didn’t need to eat all that pie anyway.

As I finished this story, I got up to let the dogs in from their last potty trip.  Phoebe, my very old Sheltie, is having a hard time getting up the front steps.  Tonight, she finally figured out that it is easier to walk around to the end of the porch and come up the ramp.  As she was walking around, Sophie and Scout came back out the door.  I thought they were were going to go on a last minute patrol and started to call them back. Instead of rocketing off the porch as usual, they went to meet Phoebe and escorted her up the ramp and through the door.  Everyone got extra treats tonight.

They call this the "collie expression," also known as "sorry I ate the pie."

Which Way?

 

Late last Friday night, I finished my stint as a volunteer for a local fundraiser and said goodbye to the other volunteers in the room.  I was in the high school, which is a warren of corridors and rooms lined with identical doors.  It’s like a maze. When I stepped out of the room, I realized I had no idea which direction to take to reach the door that would take me to my truck.  I looked in both directions and could not summon an idea of which way brought me to this room four hours before.

I thought about going back inside and asking for directions, but when I pictured the laughter I would endure, I thought again.  “I am 68 years old,” I told myself.  “Surely I can figure this out by myself.”  How lost could I get in a small-town high school?  The answer, if my history is any indication, is pretty lost.  Thank goodness the school I went to decades ago only had one hallway.

I can’t count the number of times I have come out of a hotel room and turned the wrong way, ending up in front of a blank wall or in another wing of rooms.  My friends who travel with me can describe it better than I can, because they usually just watch me do it and laugh about it later.  I have absolutely no sense of direction or any understanding of left and right.  I can cause a GPS to go silent by turning the opposite of its directions. 

I once spent the better part of an hour wandering about the conservatory at the Opryland Hotel carrying my suitcase, trying to figure out how to get out to the parking lot.  If you haven’t been to the Opryland Hotel, believe me when I say that’s not as crazy as it sounds.  There are towns that could fit in that monstrosity and I’m pretty sure it covers two different zip codes.  I’m pretty sure there are people in there who never figured out how to get out and have to live there now, just wandering up and down the hallways.  It was one of my more traumatic hours; I finally promised God that if he would get me out of there, I would never go back.  I kept that promise for years and only agreed to go in one night to have dinner as long as we didn’t get out of sight of the door. 

It used to drive my mother crazy.  She was one of those people who could be placed in a dark room and distinguish  north from south, east from west.  I can only do that if I am at my house, or if the sun is coming up or going down.  And left and right are a total mystery.  I can hear her now.  “Mary Beth, you just know which is left and which is right!  It just feels different.”  No, it doesn’t.  Unless I am writing something, it doesn’t feel different.  I only know that if I hold up my hands and extend my thumb at a right angle from my index finger, the left hand makes an “L”.  There is no such trick for east and west, north and south.   Mom eventually got used to it, after a few times of watching me leave a parking lot and turn in the wrong direction.  “Where are you going?” she would ask.   I remember one night she, my dad and me were leaving  Nashville and I was going to drive home.  I got to a stop sign and stopped.  “Which way do I go?” I asked.  My dad promptly said, with misplaced confidence, “South.”  My mom practically shouted from the back seat, “She doesn’t know which way that is!”

  "Which way now?"

I had sort of the same reaction when I let a horse trainer friend take my horse, Bullet, for a month of fine tuning in his training.  Bullet and I were in his arena having a lesson and Bruce kept saying, “Lift your left rein, lift your left rein, lift your left rein!  Why aren’t you doing it?” he finally shouted.  “Because I don’t know where that is,” I wailed.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of left and rights in the horse show world.  Of course, you get on the horse on his left side, but that one is pretty easy because the mane is supposed to fall on the right side, so you mount on the side where the mane isn’t.  But when you participate in things like trail class, obstacle driving and reining, the pattern you have to ride has instructions that involve left and right.  I used to mark an “L” and an “R” on my hand so I could glance down and know which way to go.  Reining was especially challenging because the pattern called for things like, two circles to right, stop and perform 3 spins to the left, followed by two circles to the left and 3 spins to the right.  Gallop down the side of the arena and do a right rollback, and so on.  Once memorable time, Bullet and I ended up on the opposite side of the arena from where we were supposed to be.  All the time, I was happily galloping around, thinking we were doing pretty well.  I was mystified why we ended where we did.  Neither me, my confused friends who were watching, or the judge could figure out how I got there.  Bullet may have known, but he wasn’t saying.

I recently had a drive a friend home from a doctor’s visit in Nashville.  I’ve known her for years, but she had never witnessed my handicap.  “You’re going to turn right up there at that light,” she said.  I held up my hands to see which way that was and promptly moved over into the left lane.  She gave me a strange look and I suddenly realized my hand trick had failed me.  Luckily she had a sense of humor and she knew a way to wind around and come out where we needed to be.  The following day, she had to give me directions to her office and she laughed and asked me if I could tell the difference in front and back.  I didn’t blame her.

I got curious and googled “can’t tell left from right.”  Apparently, this condition has a name.  Dyspraxic.  They aren’t sure what causes it.  Someone told me once that it can be caused when parents try to change small children from left to right-handed.  They need to study it more and come up with a cure. I will volunteer for the study.

Last Friday night, I did find my way out of the high school.  I flipped a mental coin and chose a direction and it turned out to be the correct choice.  Once I got a little way down the first hallway, I recognized a picture I had seen and knew I was on the right track.  Or the left track – I’m not sure which!  Maybe I need to start leaving a trail of bread crumbs.

Sanctuary

I was at the local hamburger/live music hangout last weekend, and someone came up to me and said, “You live in a sanctuary.”  It took me a second or two before I replied, “Yes, I do.”  She went on to explain that she had been at my place with my cousin when she brought her two horses to live in my pasture.  “You have a sanctuary,” she repeated.

It’s not the first time someone has told me how peaceful it is here, or how lucky I am.  They don’t have to tell me – I wake up every single morning with a sense of gratitude that I live on this particular spot of ground, just a few miles out of the small town where I have spent my whole life.  Sometimes I feel guilty at how lucky I am.

When I used to travel every weekend to horse shows and return home late at night, I would look forward to turning “off the main road” for the last short leg of my trip.  As much as loved the horse shows and the fun I had, it was still a relief to end long drives in the dark in front of my barn.  When I came home after a frustrating day at work, I looked forward to feeling all the negativity slip away when I reached the shady lane that means home.

It’s not that everything is always calm and peaceful.  An assortment of dogs, horses, cats, wildlife and resident cows and pigs insure plenty of excitement and more than a little frustration.  Chasing horses in my bathrobe, being startled awake by a cacophony of barking at the wildlife I mentioned, chasing pigs back where they belong and occasional encounters with the skunks that live under the barn are common occurrences.  But those things are trivial compared to the nights spent with dogs sprawled in front of the fire, the sound of horses  munching hay and snorting softly in the dusk, the sight of deer browsing the edge of the pasture, the flight of a hawk, and the sound of birds welcoming the dawn.

I’m not sure how I feel about the existence of ghosts, if you are talking about the common idea of gauzy creatures that appear and disappear in the night.  But I do believe there are energies, good and bad, left behind that permeate certain places.  This place has seen its share of bad times – death and disappointment, hard times and broken hearts.  But on the whole, the good has outweighed the bad and the atmosphere has a spirit of contentment.  I joke about my front porch being a magic place, but I am only half joking.  Sitting in the porch swing can cure what ails me quicker than anything I know.  I spent lots of time on that porch with my grandmother and my mother and I think their spirits are still there.  Friends tell me they feel it too.

My barn is another special place – perhaps it’s the memories it holds of my childhood.  I spent hours there, brushing my horse, braiding his mane and tail, saddling up to go for a ride.  So many adventures we shared.  In my back pasture, he could be a race horse, a cowboy horse or Robin Hood’s horse roaming with me in the Sherwood Forest.  Stories tumbled out of my head and we acted them out before I ever thought of putting them on paper.

Maybe a big part of the feeling I get here comes from the fact that my parents taught me to be happy.  I have just now really put that thought into concrete form – it wasn’t something I ever thought much about until now.   It was something I absorbed - wildflower walks and blackberry picking with my mom, music with my grandmother and my daddy, reading by the fireplace in winter or under the shade trees in summer.  I remember so many of the books my mom read with me.  The Thornton Burgess West Wind tales, Wind in the Willows, Uncle Remus tales, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. 

My grandparents read me Raggedy Ann and Andy – I remember my grandmother giggling with me over Ann and Andy’s silly adventures.  As I grew older, I graduated to The Hardy Boys, The Secret Garden and every horse book I could get my hands on.  And I can still lose myself in a book for hours.

Granddaddy taught me to love the land and to appreciate being in a farm family.  He shared stories of his family’s history here, and he shared his philosophy of stewardship and giving.  “The service we give is the rent we pay for the space we occupy,” was his motto, and his example taught me to find happiness in giving back to the community.  I don’t do as well as he did in that area, but I try.

 My family gave me a lot of opportunities, but even more importantly, they let me have a lot of experiences, watching over me without smothering me and letting me find my own way to adulthood.  In light of today’s obsessive protectiveness, I am thankful that I was never told not to read a certain book or watch a certain movie.  I played with the lambs, kissed puppies and let them kiss me, rode horses all day and jumped out of the hayloft. 

I learned something important from every single one of those things. And I learned to be happy.

Somehow, I figured out that you don’t have to depend on another person to bring you happiness.  You can find it within yourself and your response to what’s around you.  The last two years or so have been tough, but even during a pandemic, I found joy in things like music, books, walks in the woods, playing with dogs and looking up at the stars. 

There are hard times, disappointments, lonely times,  blue days and mornings when I feel like covering my head with a pillow and staying in bed all day.  But my sense of home always brings me back to a feeling of gratitude.  And there’s always my magic porch swing, where troubles drift away with the breeze.  My friend was right – I do live in a sanctuary.