The Dog Door

 

I recently had to replace my storm door.  I decided while I was at it to go an extra step and get one with a dog door built it.  There are advantages to this door – it saves me a lot of getting up and down to let dogs in and out.  But there are disadvantages.  This morning I looked out and saw Scout and Carli playing with their stuffed monkey, a toy that is supposed to be an indoor toy.  That was just the beginning.

It has been a goal of Sophie and Scout ever since they came to live here to escape outside with shoes.  Thankfully, I have learned my lesson about keeping good shoes out of reach, but the old, already tattered shoes I let them play with are now scattered around the yard.  Tim, who rents most of my farm, told me that he found a tennis shoe over in one of the cattle fields last week.  He said he didn’t bother calling or bringing it home because it was way beyond repair.  One shoe is resting on the sidewalk right now as I look out the window.  And this morning, I found a dress in the yard.  It was not a good dress; it was one destined for the rag box even before its trip to the yard.  I’m not sure where they got it, but they can be pretty resourceful when they see something they think would make a good toy.

All the dogs caught on quickly to the idea of going in and out on their own.  Scout was the first one through, christening the new door before the handyman got his tools put up.  Carli was next, right behind him with only a little hesitation when the flap slapped her in the face.  Bear followed.  My neighbor’s dog, Judge, who thinks she lives here too, caught on next.  Sophie – well, let’s just say that Sophie prefers the old way of waiting for someone to open the regular door for her highness.  I think she objects to being slapped on the nose when it swings back.  Sometimes she will go out with the other dogs if she is quick enough not to have to push it open on her own.  The only other problem has been a few instances where two dogs tried to go through at the same time and got a little stuck.

Outside my front yard fence is a little rise that my neighbor Clay calls “the grassy knoll.”  It is a favorite lookout point for all the dogs and they spend a lot of their days there.  I guess you could say it’s their playground, and they have been busy collecting entertaining items.  I walked out there the other day and found multiple large bones, scavenged from the woods and pastures, an inner tube, towels and other cloth of unknown origin, several pieces of rope, plastic bottles, large sticks, old shoes, and a torn-up book they stole from the recycle box.  I don’t know what people think when they drive up to the house.   I will eventually get out there and pick it all up so they can start another collection.  The good thing is, if I’m missing something from the house, I know where to start looking.

The warnings I got from my friends about the dog door involved what might come in the door.  So far, nothing strange has wandered in and the dogs don’t seem to be eager to bring their treasures inside.  They seem to think it’s a toy in and of itself, going in and out and repeating the process several times.  I have to learn to be quicker about closing the inner door when I want them inside.  Sophie still thinks it’s a trick and that she just might disappear between worlds if she uses it.  And I think Scout is using it to play tricks on the other dogs.  Just this morning Bear and Carli were enjoying a nap by the fire when Scout suddenly set up a volley of barks.  Immediately, the two dogs jumped up and burst through the dog door to join him in repelling whatever invaders might be imminent.  There was absolutely nothing that I could see going on and nothing that they could find when they got outside.  They looked around for a couple of minutes, looked at Scout, who had resumed his resting place on the porch, and came back inside.  I can only imagine what they were thinking.

Speaking of Scout, he is the only dog I’ve ever had that will just lie out in the rain, perfectly happy.  Sophie refuses to even go out when it’s raining and the others take refuge on the porch.  But I will look out and there is Scout, in the middle of yard during a rainstorm, just lying there.  I guess it is his heavy coat – the rain probably never gets down to his skin.  Then when he does come in, he is a mess.  And I have noticed that a dog loves his person more when he is wet and muddy than at any other time.  The amount of affection seems to increase with the amount of water and dirt, multiplied by the cleanliness and color of the clothes the person is wearing.  I tell him he is nasty and wet, and he just grins at me and rubs his head on my leg that much harder.  That’s why I never buy white clothes.  Just ask Anne, my friend who wore white pants to my house during a rainstorm for a visit with Sophie’s puppies.  It did not end well for the pants, although she tells me she was able to eventually get them clean! 

 

A Second Slice of Pie

 

Sunday lunch is an event I look forward to every week.  No matter what kind of mood I am in, I always leave the table in a better place.  There are five of us “regulars” who meet at Homestead, a local restaurant with an extensive buffet that includes desserts – soft serve ice cream and various cakes, pies and banana pudding.  Fried chicken is always one of the choices, usually baked ham, and homemade yeast rolls and cornbread muffins.  We each have our favorites, especially in the dessert category and some of us have been known to eat dessert first.

Last Sunday buttermilk pie and fudge pie were on the dessert table.  Margaretta and I love buttermilk pie.  We love caramel cake too and Japanese fruit pie, but on this day, it was buttermilk pie.  Brenda loves chocolate and always chooses the fudge pie when it appears.  We all like ice cream.  Face it, we all like dessert.

Our lunchtime includes not only heaping plates; it also brings out the latest news around town, storytelling and lots of laughter.  It’s not a lunch hour – it sometimes stretches to almost two hours, unless there is an important football game on television.  There were no early afternoon football games Sunday.  Margaretta and I made short work of our buttermilk pie, Brenda enjoyed her fudge pie and John was eating chocolate ice cream.  “That pie was so good,” I said, licking the last bite off my fork.  “I could eat another piece.”  Margaretta made encouraging noises.  I decided to have ice cream instead.  When I returned to the table, Danny decided he would have some too.  “I wasn’t going to get ice cream,” he said.  “But Mary Beth’s and John’s looked so good.”  Someone else mentioned a second piece of pie and the next thing I knew, Brenda was up and back with another piece of fudge pie.  “Y’all kept talking about it, so I just decided to do it,” she said.

Margaretta pointed out that the slices were really small and I agreed.   I suggested that we could split a second piece of pie, but that idea was quickly shot down.  They were small slices, after all.  I finished my ice cream and got a second piece of pie.  “Do you want me to bring you one?” I asked Margaretta.  She shook her head.  But when I returned to the table, she was the next to get up, returning with her own second piece of pie. 

We were laughing almost too much to eat by then, and a couple of people stopped to mention that we seemed to be having way too much fun.  This is not the first time that comment has been made to us.  It’s not the first time I’ve had two desserts either.  And I might have eaten pie for breakfast once or twice.  Hey, it was strawberry pie, so it was fruit.  Right?  You only live once – sometimes you just have to do what makes you happy.  Eating a second piece of pie is a very small thing in the grand scheme of things.  But if you can’t break out of the norm with small things, how are you going to ever break out with larger things?  Extra dessert is just practice for bigger adventures.

Some of my best memories are from times I stepped out of my comfort zone.  The first time I took an airplane flight, I traveled to Denver for a livestock related competition, as a high school senior. (I expect this was a little out of my parents’ comfort zone, too, and I am grateful that they had the courage to let me do it.)  I flew to New York, alone, to a writer’s conference, where I knew not one single person.  It was a week full of new experiences, learning, getting feedback from successful authors and meeting people who shared the same dream.  I took my new horse, one I was still not quite comfortable with, to a show and decided to enter a class I had never tried.  Musical sacks, it was called, the equine version of musical chairs where you had to race to a sack on the ground when the music stopped, jump off your horse to stand on the sack, and repeat until only one horse and rider were left.  Sometime during the chaos of that class, I forgot to be nervous with her and won a good ribbon.  I drove to hundreds of horse shows, many times alone, and drove back late at night with only the radio for company. I made some of my best memories with friends I would never have met in my other “normal” life.  I was in my first play when I was almost fifty and uncovered a skill I didn’t know I had.  I drove to Memphis to visit a high school friend and see a concert.  I hesitated at first because it was a non-seated concert and it was a long drive, but we were captivated by experiencing the show from the edge of the stage.  I was inspired to go to another concert just like that one, this time alone in a strange venue.  I scored a spot on the edge of the stage, sandwiched between strangers, and had one of my best nights in years. 

 I have learned a valuable lesson from all these things. Don’t hesitate to eat the second piece of pie, or the extra cookies. Have birthday cake for breakfast, even if it’s not your birthday.  Take the trip, buy the new dress, use the fancy towels you got for Christmas, go to the concert, even if you have to go alone.  Ride your new horse in an untried event, jump in the deep end.  And be sure to hang out with people who will join you in a second piece of pie – those are the people you need in your life.

 

It's Going to be Cool!

 

I have noticed over the years how themes recur in our lives, sometimes just when we need them.  The last few days have been like that.  I’ve been suffering a severe case of writer’s block, or whatever you want to call it.  I’ve started a dozen things, gotten stuck, started more things, stared at the computer screen and walked away. 
Sometimes it’s like that – a flood of words gives way to a period of drought.  As Willie Nelson says, sometimes you have to wait for the rain to fill up the well again. So, I resigned myself to waiting until something opened the sluice. 

I saw an interview with Ashley McBryde, just after her Grammy win.  The last question was an interesting one – if you could go back to a time in your life with the knowledge you have now, what would you say to yourself?  Obviously, she has already given this some thought because she has a pretty quick answer.  She mentioned learning guitar at age 9, and then she said, “I would go back to my 16-year-old self, when I was angry and frustrated and trying to figure out how I was going to do all this.”   She went on to say that she would not tell herself what was going to happen, but she would tell herself that it was going to be cool.  She would say that she was going to get a text from Reba McEntire and she wouldn’t say what it was about, but that it would be cool.  (Ashley had gotten a text from Reba saying congratulations on her Grammy.) I thought this was a great answer.  All 16-year-olds need to hear this – all teens are wrestling with their future.  They all need to hear that it’s going to be all right;  it’s going to be cool. 

Just a few days earlier, I saw the documentary just released about my great-aunt Ophelia, better known as Minnie Pearl.  Facing the Laughter looked at her life and her career and included a whole bunch of her peers who spoke kindly and emotionally about their memories of her.  Almost every single one talked about her advice and support and the love they shared.  Ophelia has been gone from this world for almost thirty years now, but they still treasure the things she brought to their lives.  What better legacy can you leave?  She grew up in a small town, in a family that had never had a member in show business.  They didn’t know exactly what to think when this plain little girl announced that she was going down that path.  It was an unusual and treacherous journey for a young woman, especially in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  But she never looked aside.  Her path diverged, from a career as a dramatic actress to a flamboyant country comic.  I wonder if she ever thought of those words of Robert Frost, “Two paths diverged … and I took the one less traveled by.”  She took what she thought was a road that was not her final destiny, a road that turned out to be just the right one for her.

Her childhood dreams came true in a way she didn’t expect, and she not only became famous, she became an inspiration and an encourager.  Amy Grant told the story of Sarah Ophelia Cannon speaking at her eighth grade graduation.  She said it was the first time she ever remembered a speaker turning around to directly address her and her classmates about their future and their dreams.  She said that with her attention to them, she made them feel “seen” and that they were important.  Years later, they met again, when Amy was becoming a star herself, and they became so close that she named her own daughter “Sarah.”

As I was thinking of all these things and trying to get them in some coherent form on paper, I saw a Facebook meme from a page I follow – “some of the best days of your life haven’t happened yet.  Keep going.”  I think this is advice Ophelia would have given.  And I think Ashley McBryde would embrace it too.  Two very different women from different generations who both have seen their dreams come true, in the same industry, on the same stage, but in very different ways and at very different times.

I was lucky to have a lot of people who encouraged my dreams and plans.  Even if they didn’t tell me in so many words, my family always made me feel I could do anything I set out to do.   They encouraged me to try things, and if they had private misgivings, they never let me see them.  I had teachers that encouraged me, even though they thought I was making a mistake when I chose marriage over college. 

I wish all young people had someone to tell them these things.  I wish someone would tell them to try all kinds of new things – to not be timid or unsure.  Not to worry about failing or not measuring up to perfection.  To keep searching for the thing that can ignite passion and bring joy.  I wish I could tell every sixteen-year-old to hang on - that it’s going to be cool.