Excerpts from Leave the Dogs at Home
But mostly it was Jim’s black-cloaked last days and death that gnawed at me. Images came unbidden. His crossed eyes. His seizures. The sadness of his incontinence. His death-bed struggle. Me being too busy to hold his last look. The awful pooling of his dead blood under his skin. I couldn’t get away from them, they were like burdock burrs that work their way into fur. On my reinstated commute to work, on my walks in the woods, with evening glasses of wine, and, worst of all, in the room where he died.
The spot was just over my left shoulder as I sat at the desk in my office. All that was really there was my filing cabinet, a basket of magazines on Jim’s rotating encyclopedia table, and in a cheerful beaded frame a goofy photo of him peering over a black and orange box turtle. But it felt like an apocalyptic black hole of death, a vortex of horrible whirling behind my back while I sat working at the computer. It made it hard to focus on the projects I brought home from work as I tried to regain a grip on my job.
And then there were Jim’s leftover ashes.
Jim had picked out a tubular sandstone container a few months earlier while shopping with me in a bead and rock store. “This is nice,” he’d said, turning the hollowed-out cylinder over in his hands, tracing its smooth beige and tan sedimentary swirls. “Put my ashes in this.”
Of course I’d bought that sandstone jar after he died. That wasn’t the problem. It sat calmly in the window above my desk. The ashes that were causing the problem were the ones that didn’t fit in the jar. Jim had underestimated how much of him would be left--enough to fill a shoebox, or about half of another sandstone jar. I’d scattered his ashes in all the typical places--where we liked to walk, favorite lunch spots in the woods, a handful into the lake. And still some were left. Emily took all she wanted. And still some were left. His sister refused to take any. They sat in the aluminum mortuary tin on my bookshelf like ignored regret. Every time the encyclopedia-table-black-vortex-to-hell began to spin like the girl’s head in The Exorcist and the images of Jim’s dying washed over me, the leftover ashes joined in.
I wished that the mysticism that makes many people feel protected would work for me, the undead. That a god, shrine, prayer, crystal, candle, potion, herb, or visualization would beat back these unseen evils. Keeping evil out of the house in the first place has long been established as easier than extracting it.
Memorial Hall, over on the Indiana University campus, a Gothic building with turrets over a heavy arched entry, has a quote from Sir Walter Scott: Evil Spirits Cannot Enter An Inhabited House Unless Invited carved in the limestone near the door that I used to walk through to my class on Eastern religions.
With red doors, the Chinese invite good luck and churches signify safe passage.
Lines of salt in the doorstep can’t be crossed by demons until all the grains have been counted, a protectively impossible task.
Horseshoes, lion heads, feng shui mirrors, and Torah verses in decorative cases have long been hung by doors to prevent the crossing of bad energy over the threshold.
When the coyotes started jolting me from sleep every night, like banshees circling the house and planning to attack, their rusty-hinge yowls reverberating in the translucent pale moonlight over the frosted gardens, I decided get some faux protection.
The spot was just over my left shoulder as I sat at the desk in my office. All that was really there was my filing cabinet, a basket of magazines on Jim’s rotating encyclopedia table, and in a cheerful beaded frame a goofy photo of him peering over a black and orange box turtle. But it felt like an apocalyptic black hole of death, a vortex of horrible whirling behind my back while I sat working at the computer. It made it hard to focus on the projects I brought home from work as I tried to regain a grip on my job.
And then there were Jim’s leftover ashes.
Jim had picked out a tubular sandstone container a few months earlier while shopping with me in a bead and rock store. “This is nice,” he’d said, turning the hollowed-out cylinder over in his hands, tracing its smooth beige and tan sedimentary swirls. “Put my ashes in this.”
Of course I’d bought that sandstone jar after he died. That wasn’t the problem. It sat calmly in the window above my desk. The ashes that were causing the problem were the ones that didn’t fit in the jar. Jim had underestimated how much of him would be left--enough to fill a shoebox, or about half of another sandstone jar. I’d scattered his ashes in all the typical places--where we liked to walk, favorite lunch spots in the woods, a handful into the lake. And still some were left. Emily took all she wanted. And still some were left. His sister refused to take any. They sat in the aluminum mortuary tin on my bookshelf like ignored regret. Every time the encyclopedia-table-black-vortex-to-hell began to spin like the girl’s head in The Exorcist and the images of Jim’s dying washed over me, the leftover ashes joined in.
I wished that the mysticism that makes many people feel protected would work for me, the undead. That a god, shrine, prayer, crystal, candle, potion, herb, or visualization would beat back these unseen evils. Keeping evil out of the house in the first place has long been established as easier than extracting it.
Memorial Hall, over on the Indiana University campus, a Gothic building with turrets over a heavy arched entry, has a quote from Sir Walter Scott: Evil Spirits Cannot Enter An Inhabited House Unless Invited carved in the limestone near the door that I used to walk through to my class on Eastern religions.
With red doors, the Chinese invite good luck and churches signify safe passage.
Lines of salt in the doorstep can’t be crossed by demons until all the grains have been counted, a protectively impossible task.
Horseshoes, lion heads, feng shui mirrors, and Torah verses in decorative cases have long been hung by doors to prevent the crossing of bad energy over the threshold.
When the coyotes started jolting me from sleep every night, like banshees circling the house and planning to attack, their rusty-hinge yowls reverberating in the translucent pale moonlight over the frosted gardens, I decided get some faux protection.
When I sought refuge in nursery gardening catalogs, on and offline, things felt better. How could irrational demons compete with such lyrical, hopeful paragraphs? “The show begins in early spring, when the large, oak leaf-shaped leaves unfurl a brilliant gold . . . eventually darkening to chartreuse and finally green just as the huge 6- to 8-inch white bloom trusses--giant snowy wands in the shade garden!--appear to liven things up again.” Stacks of catalogs marked with neon Post-it notes multiplied like rabbits around my reading chair. I longed to sink my hands into black loam and walk down curving pathways between weedless garden beds. If I created the gardens, I thought, I would be cured.
It was my grandmother who taught me to find succor from the things I could not change in the patient, yielding soil of the garden. About being in the now with the pleasures of tomatoes plucked ripe off the vine and heavenly scented, luscious peony blossoms. She was the one who taught me to wait for the dark red fingers of peonies to poke up out of the spring soil. To watch for the day that the shiny green leaves burst up out of the crowns. To measure the advance of spring by the round, bulging buds as they grew as fat as green plums. To watch the big black ants nibble back the sweet edges of the sepals as the pink and red petals peeked through. Pinies she called them.
From the very beginning of my time on earth, I remember following her around in the garden. Photos show me as a big-cheeked toddler with stubby little legs in dark socks and solid shoes on the narrow backyard sidewalk that bisected her garden. I can almost put my finger into the light undulating across the surface of cool water in her silver galvanized bucket and hear the soft shushing of my grandfather cutting their small lawn with a reel push mower. Tender pink and white bleeding hearts bloomed merrily across from the kitchen doorsteps. Her orderly vegetable garden was hedged by pie-destined gooseberry bushes.
When I grew older, she took me out to slice through the base of crisp, ruby-tinged rhubarb with kitchen knives. Lopping off the huge poisonous leaves in the sink and chopping the celery-like stalks into cubes, we cooked up steaming bowls of tangy pink sauce.
On summer afternoons I would sit in the porch swing with my grandfather, running my finger over the thick crease in his thumbnail while he taught me the cheer-up, cheer-up song of the robin and the pretty, pretty song of the cardinal. In the evenings we would drift slowly on the porch swing next to the trellis of honeysuckle, its sweetness flirting in the breeze, my drowsy head against my grandmother’s shoulder, her hands clean and trimmed against her rick-rack-aproned lap.
I had always thought of my grandparents’ house as a trouble-free haven and gave no thought to their difficulties or how death had pursued and wounded them. I rarely thought about the awful death of their son, an uncle I never met, and his girlfriend in an automobile accident when he was just twenty-four. It was a scandal--he had been drinking and was married to someone else. I never considered the loss of my grandfather’s first wife to influenza in her early thirties, scattering their three children permanently to the homes of kin. Or of the tragic death of my grandmother’s father, kicked by a horse and dying as he coughed up blood at the young age of thirty-four, resulting in near starvation for his three young daughters and widow.
It was my grandmother who taught me to find succor from the things I could not change in the patient, yielding soil of the garden. About being in the now with the pleasures of tomatoes plucked ripe off the vine and heavenly scented, luscious peony blossoms. She was the one who taught me to wait for the dark red fingers of peonies to poke up out of the spring soil. To watch for the day that the shiny green leaves burst up out of the crowns. To measure the advance of spring by the round, bulging buds as they grew as fat as green plums. To watch the big black ants nibble back the sweet edges of the sepals as the pink and red petals peeked through. Pinies she called them.
From the very beginning of my time on earth, I remember following her around in the garden. Photos show me as a big-cheeked toddler with stubby little legs in dark socks and solid shoes on the narrow backyard sidewalk that bisected her garden. I can almost put my finger into the light undulating across the surface of cool water in her silver galvanized bucket and hear the soft shushing of my grandfather cutting their small lawn with a reel push mower. Tender pink and white bleeding hearts bloomed merrily across from the kitchen doorsteps. Her orderly vegetable garden was hedged by pie-destined gooseberry bushes.
When I grew older, she took me out to slice through the base of crisp, ruby-tinged rhubarb with kitchen knives. Lopping off the huge poisonous leaves in the sink and chopping the celery-like stalks into cubes, we cooked up steaming bowls of tangy pink sauce.
On summer afternoons I would sit in the porch swing with my grandfather, running my finger over the thick crease in his thumbnail while he taught me the cheer-up, cheer-up song of the robin and the pretty, pretty song of the cardinal. In the evenings we would drift slowly on the porch swing next to the trellis of honeysuckle, its sweetness flirting in the breeze, my drowsy head against my grandmother’s shoulder, her hands clean and trimmed against her rick-rack-aproned lap.
I had always thought of my grandparents’ house as a trouble-free haven and gave no thought to their difficulties or how death had pursued and wounded them. I rarely thought about the awful death of their son, an uncle I never met, and his girlfriend in an automobile accident when he was just twenty-four. It was a scandal--he had been drinking and was married to someone else. I never considered the loss of my grandfather’s first wife to influenza in her early thirties, scattering their three children permanently to the homes of kin. Or of the tragic death of my grandmother’s father, kicked by a horse and dying as he coughed up blood at the young age of thirty-four, resulting in near starvation for his three young daughters and widow.
It was a July summer day spent timelessly in the garden, wandering from bed to bed with a general, but not strict, vegetative agenda. Following narrow leaves and stems down to root clusters, I untangled and pulled thin, weedy grass from the clump of bronze ajuga and lemon thyme that was planted around the blue and yellow flag bog iris. The light citrus smell of thyme drifted upward.
This kind of delicate weeding always links me back to the eons of women with their infinite tasks of details--weaving, berry picking, stitching, sorting grain. There’s a concentration to it that hushes the constant patter of the brain and moves one into a timeless zone. Scooting along inch by inch on my butt, I separated leaves, carefully uprooting only the grass. How expertly the grass wove itself into the roots and stems of the ajuga and tiny-leafed thyme--as if it knew it had a better chance for survival if it was complicated, perhaps thinking I might never get around to such a meticulous task. Unlucky for the grass, this bed was one of a few places I kept weeded. Mostly things were jumbling into one another in the gardens.
And things were complicated and jumbled in my brain as well. Although I was trying to stay in the present, I wanted a new present. A new now. A different house, one in town. A different pattern to my days. A civilized and obedient garden. A different me. Not a recluse on the hick side of the county, but part of the artsy intellectual town crowd who went to plays and sipped wine while listening to jazz. A different life altogether. But that would be moving on, and I was not moving on, or at least not very quickly. I was dwelling in the In Between, whether I wanted to or not.
The house had been for sale since my job swoop, and housing values were falling like whirligigs from maples, twirling down, down, down. If only I had not listened to the advice for widows (you must wait a year before making any big decisions) and sold right after Jim died. If only I had not sunk all that money into remodeling. Even a rock-bottom, handy-man-special price last year would have been more than what I could get this year after fixing it up. That is, if I could sell it at all. The showings had dried up. People were scared to buy houses, afraid of the market free fall. My offer on a cute house in town, contingent on selling this house, had been turned down. I had to face the possibility that it might take more than a year to sell. That I was going to have to stay out here, working alone, living alone, and often unwilling to make the twenty-mile round trip into town. If I was going to stay, how this place operated had to change. I couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t do my chores and Jim’s chores too.
I stopped weeding, brushed the dirt from my hands, and nudged a napping Lila, who was stretched out in the warm sun beside me. “Don’t you wish you had opposable thumbs?” She banged her tail and lazily lifted her head. Jealous Diggity hurried over from her spot under the pines and eagerly interjected her wet nose, smearing my glasses as if to say, “Ask me, ask me! We do, we do! We wish we had opposable thumbs. But if we had them, we’d do better things with them than sit here for hours pulling grass.” Digs danced around me, hoping I would throw a stick; Lila jumped up. The two of them pushed me over in dog enthusiasm.
Stretching my aching back, I got up and wandered into the house, where a pile of real estate files were stacked on the dining room table. The sturdy oak table had been an antique shop find, sold at a tremendous discount due to its terrible condition. I ran my hand along its swirly tiger-grain top. Jim had rebuilt it and sanded smooth its roughened surface and then turned it over to me for fine sanding, conditioning, staining, and finishing. Those days were gone. Any table I got from here on out would have to be in better shape.
This kind of delicate weeding always links me back to the eons of women with their infinite tasks of details--weaving, berry picking, stitching, sorting grain. There’s a concentration to it that hushes the constant patter of the brain and moves one into a timeless zone. Scooting along inch by inch on my butt, I separated leaves, carefully uprooting only the grass. How expertly the grass wove itself into the roots and stems of the ajuga and tiny-leafed thyme--as if it knew it had a better chance for survival if it was complicated, perhaps thinking I might never get around to such a meticulous task. Unlucky for the grass, this bed was one of a few places I kept weeded. Mostly things were jumbling into one another in the gardens.
And things were complicated and jumbled in my brain as well. Although I was trying to stay in the present, I wanted a new present. A new now. A different house, one in town. A different pattern to my days. A civilized and obedient garden. A different me. Not a recluse on the hick side of the county, but part of the artsy intellectual town crowd who went to plays and sipped wine while listening to jazz. A different life altogether. But that would be moving on, and I was not moving on, or at least not very quickly. I was dwelling in the In Between, whether I wanted to or not.
The house had been for sale since my job swoop, and housing values were falling like whirligigs from maples, twirling down, down, down. If only I had not listened to the advice for widows (you must wait a year before making any big decisions) and sold right after Jim died. If only I had not sunk all that money into remodeling. Even a rock-bottom, handy-man-special price last year would have been more than what I could get this year after fixing it up. That is, if I could sell it at all. The showings had dried up. People were scared to buy houses, afraid of the market free fall. My offer on a cute house in town, contingent on selling this house, had been turned down. I had to face the possibility that it might take more than a year to sell. That I was going to have to stay out here, working alone, living alone, and often unwilling to make the twenty-mile round trip into town. If I was going to stay, how this place operated had to change. I couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t do my chores and Jim’s chores too.
I stopped weeding, brushed the dirt from my hands, and nudged a napping Lila, who was stretched out in the warm sun beside me. “Don’t you wish you had opposable thumbs?” She banged her tail and lazily lifted her head. Jealous Diggity hurried over from her spot under the pines and eagerly interjected her wet nose, smearing my glasses as if to say, “Ask me, ask me! We do, we do! We wish we had opposable thumbs. But if we had them, we’d do better things with them than sit here for hours pulling grass.” Digs danced around me, hoping I would throw a stick; Lila jumped up. The two of them pushed me over in dog enthusiasm.
Stretching my aching back, I got up and wandered into the house, where a pile of real estate files were stacked on the dining room table. The sturdy oak table had been an antique shop find, sold at a tremendous discount due to its terrible condition. I ran my hand along its swirly tiger-grain top. Jim had rebuilt it and sanded smooth its roughened surface and then turned it over to me for fine sanding, conditioning, staining, and finishing. Those days were gone. Any table I got from here on out would have to be in better shape.
The blocky woman stuck out her hip between the man I was watching and the row of wooden baskets. He smiled and stepped back to give her room. She solidly established her squat body in front of the bushel of small sweet onions. He had already given way to a determined woman with a huge baby stroller, her clay face puffy beneath the eyes from lack of sleep. But he wasn’t impatient; he simply let the moments stretch. Maybe he loved the push and shove of these women shoppers, their own barely discernible pungent smell a good companion for onions.
Still, you could tell he wanted his turn at the onions. I had been watching him for a while from my sideline seat on the curb. I waved a distant hello at a woman I’d met in the writing class and lazily swung my view around the farmer’s market, a Saturday event that was partly about vegetables and mostly about Bloomington’s social scene. It was in high style on the August morning I stood watching the onion shoppers. The market was full of the August harvest of Flamin’ Fury and Redhaven peaches, Brandywine and Mortgage Lifter tomatoes, Red Knight and Early Sunsation bell peppers, Silver Queen and Ambrosia sweet corn, and Swedish Peanut Fingerling and Adirondack Blue potatoes.
Fiddle cases were open for shoppers’ dollars; musicians leaned together intertwining bluegrass harmonies. My toes tapped as I hummed along to “The Banks of the Ohio”: And only say that you’ll be mine / In no others’ arms entwine.
The lusty bounty of produce stimulated the display of university town eccentricities like peacocks fan their tails. There was the spectacle of footwear--sandals with purple polyester webbing, black ballerina flats printed with pairs of red cherries, and curry-colored cloth loafers. And the earring exhibition—dangling, , layered metal shapes, tiny orbs of glass and stone, silver studs and loops in lips and ears and noses and belly buttons. The competitive collection of sisal woven bags, straw baskets from Africa, and canvas totes slung over shoulders--pink and lime polka dots, swirly geo-prints, and orange and green stripes.
The guy in the onion line caught my eye again as he shifted his gaze to a woman at the nearby egg stand. There a young man laughed lightly as he gave her change for a dozen pricey blue and green Ameraucana eggs. She was a willowy woman in orange print capris, low on the hips. Midnight blue Celtic-knot tattoos angled along her shoulder under the thin, black straps of her tank top. Wisps of maroon hair played along the long curve of her neck, her moist skin translucent, shimmering in the early morning light.
Necks, I love necks. I used to kid Jim, saying, “I don’t really like you; I just love the way your neck smells. Every time I think about leaving you, all I have to do is smell your neck and all is good.” I remembered running my nose along his clavicle to his neck, inhaling him, down the edge of his jaw, falling into a long, soft kiss.
More quickly than I would have thought, I had found myself drawn to the idea of finding another companion. It started unexpectedly the fall after Jim died. I missed being touched, having someone to pal around with, enjoying a familiar conversation style. I thought another guy would be the answer.
Still, you could tell he wanted his turn at the onions. I had been watching him for a while from my sideline seat on the curb. I waved a distant hello at a woman I’d met in the writing class and lazily swung my view around the farmer’s market, a Saturday event that was partly about vegetables and mostly about Bloomington’s social scene. It was in high style on the August morning I stood watching the onion shoppers. The market was full of the August harvest of Flamin’ Fury and Redhaven peaches, Brandywine and Mortgage Lifter tomatoes, Red Knight and Early Sunsation bell peppers, Silver Queen and Ambrosia sweet corn, and Swedish Peanut Fingerling and Adirondack Blue potatoes.
Fiddle cases were open for shoppers’ dollars; musicians leaned together intertwining bluegrass harmonies. My toes tapped as I hummed along to “The Banks of the Ohio”: And only say that you’ll be mine / In no others’ arms entwine.
The lusty bounty of produce stimulated the display of university town eccentricities like peacocks fan their tails. There was the spectacle of footwear--sandals with purple polyester webbing, black ballerina flats printed with pairs of red cherries, and curry-colored cloth loafers. And the earring exhibition—dangling, , layered metal shapes, tiny orbs of glass and stone, silver studs and loops in lips and ears and noses and belly buttons. The competitive collection of sisal woven bags, straw baskets from Africa, and canvas totes slung over shoulders--pink and lime polka dots, swirly geo-prints, and orange and green stripes.
The guy in the onion line caught my eye again as he shifted his gaze to a woman at the nearby egg stand. There a young man laughed lightly as he gave her change for a dozen pricey blue and green Ameraucana eggs. She was a willowy woman in orange print capris, low on the hips. Midnight blue Celtic-knot tattoos angled along her shoulder under the thin, black straps of her tank top. Wisps of maroon hair played along the long curve of her neck, her moist skin translucent, shimmering in the early morning light.
Necks, I love necks. I used to kid Jim, saying, “I don’t really like you; I just love the way your neck smells. Every time I think about leaving you, all I have to do is smell your neck and all is good.” I remembered running my nose along his clavicle to his neck, inhaling him, down the edge of his jaw, falling into a long, soft kiss.
More quickly than I would have thought, I had found myself drawn to the idea of finding another companion. It started unexpectedly the fall after Jim died. I missed being touched, having someone to pal around with, enjoying a familiar conversation style. I thought another guy would be the answer.