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Category: animals

Summer Skin

Summer Skin

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It’s out there, exposed, demanding coverage. Once sleeves are short and legs are bare, invisible  protectors must come to the rescue: the creams and ointments and sprays. Sunscreen, 30, 50 or even 70. Mosquito repellent, too.

These are fine, indeed necessary, but you often don’t have them when you need them. Already I’ve had chiggers, mosquito bites, a touch of poison ivy and two spider bites.

So bring on the remedies: the calamine, hydrocortisone and witch hazel. I’d forgotten about that last one, but dabbing it on itchy skin is not only soothing but also an olfactory trip to the past, to childhood’s itches and scrapes and the more basic first-aid that fought them. (Is there anything else that smells like witch hazel?)

Now, let’s see if it makes me itch any less. It’s summer, and the living is easy. Until you roll up your sleeves.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Lucky Thirteen

Lucky Thirteen

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Just because we had a triple crown winner three years ago doesn’t make Justify’s victory in the Belmont on Saturday any less impressive. He was only the 13th horse to achieve such a feat in the last century. The first was  in 1919, there were three in the 1930s, four in the 1940s, three in the 1970s … then a 37 year drought till American Pharoah won in 2015.

Justify’s jockey, Mike Smith, says the colt has an “old soul.” Not sure about that, but the horse was subtle, sneaking up on us in the midst of other exciting spots news. The Stanley Cup finals, the NBA finals, the French Open, the World Cup. But he didn’t come from behind to win. He led all the way around the mile-and-a-half track, and he made it look easy, which is how all great champions do it.

Celia and I watched the race together in the basement, and we were both whooping and hollering. I like to think I schooled my girls in the important things of life: the thrill of horse racing, especially when a Triple Crown is at stake; the importance of hard work; and the need for enthusiasm.  Especially the latter.

(Photo: This low-res pic made possible by Wikipedia)

Born in the Bluegrass

Born in the Bluegrass

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Yesterday, researching who I wanted to pull for in today’s Kentucky Derby, I ran across a fun statistic. Seventeen of the 20 mounts in the race were born in the Bluegrass. The Lexington newspaper had all the birthplaces, many of them clustered in the Pisgah Pike, Versailles area near where my parents used to live.

I didn’t know all of the farms (though I knew some, most notably Calumet, with its distinctive white and red trim). But I know all of the places, know the two-lane roads that wind to them, the way the Osage orange tree branches arch over their lanes. The roll and tilt of the land is familiar to me; it’s what I grew up with, too.

Reading those farm names, I could smell the tobacco scent that would waft through the air in the fall when I was a little girl, back when the big auction houses were still there. I could smell the aroma of Lexington’s own racetrack, Keeneland, an amalgam of spilled beer and turned soil.

Once these places were part of my external landscape, now they’re part of my internal one.

Year of the Dog

Year of the Dog

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It’s Chinese New Year and the Year of the Dog, the eleventh of the zodiac. I read that the Dog is associated with the earthly branch and the hours 7 to 9 in the evening. When it comes to yin and yang, Dogs are “yang.”

This doesn’t mean a lot to me. When I think of the Year of the Dog, I think of our dog, Copper, and I think of every year.

Copper is treated like a little king in this house. He lounges on beds, has grated cheese sprinkled over his kibble, and is walked frequently. His barks and whines are tolerated well, as are his middle-of-the-night requests for basement access (this only when it’s raining).

When it comes to Copper, much is given … but much is received. Copper is loving and snuggly. His big soulful eyes seem to know all. And when he jumps on the couch (like so many of his antics once forbidden and now tolerated), he pushes his back up against my leg. I’m his security blanket. But often, he is mine.

TC in the Suburbs

TC in the Suburbs

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Late-day walk with Copper, who was begging, pleading with his big brown eyes, not letting me out of his sight. OK, little guy. And so … we were on.

I knew we’d have a fun time of it when I saw a neighbor and her dog (with whom Copper has scrapped more than once) sauntering down to the bus stop. We’d inadvertently timed our stroll with the Folkstone rush hour: 15 minutes of nonstop bus and car traffic back from Crossfield School.

I hadn’t even reached Fox Mill Road before the first text came. That required I remove my gloves and send a return text, followed by a return email. While I was doing this, a sweet-faced boy of 7 or 8 approached us. Copper lunged at him before I realized what was happening. “He bites,” I said to the child, whose expression was suddenly frozen in horror. “I’m sorry, but you don’t want to pet him.”

We finally reached the halfway point, then turned toward home. On the way back, I received a call, a voice mail and another email.

Total elapsed time: 25 minutes.

This is what happens when walking in the suburbs meets telecommuting in the suburbs. Not exactly a walk in the park … but better than the alternative.

(Copper in his autumn bandana. That’s two Copper pix in one week. No more for a while!)

Birthday Surprises

Birthday Surprises

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An email this morning told me a package had been delivered.  I got a kick out of this — the fact that I had come in through the garage last night and overlooked this large item on the front stoop, being informed of it through a bunch of 1s and 0s on my computer. It was a funny way to begin this last day of November, the birthday of two people I love — my daughter and my brother.

But that was just the first surprise.  The second happened when I was lugging in the first — and Copper trotted around the front of the house (where he is never, ever allowed to be because he will run away) and right through the front door. The backyard gate must have been left open.
Whatever the case, it was all meant to be — the package left out overnight so that I could be there when Copper escaped, could usher him back where he belongs. The rescue of a dog that means so much to the birthday girl.
Yes, it’s often a random world — but sometimes it’s not. Today is one of those times.
Sleeping Dogs

Sleeping Dogs

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We all know what we’re supposed to do with them. But in my house they are — or I should say he is — often riled up.

This is not my approach, though. I let sleeping dogs lie. Especially Copper, who has always been and who continues to be a lively pup.

When Copper sleeps beside me I sit quietly, enjoying his company, the presence of another living being. I don’t usually cover him up (!), but I do take comfort in the gentle rhythm of his breathing and his little stretches — even when he kicks me in the ribs. I appreciate the fact that when he’s still I don’t have to let him in or out of the house.

On some days, the company of animals is the only company a writer needs.

Cats and Dogs and Beauty

Cats and Dogs and Beauty

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Dancers are satisfied in a way that dieters and exercisers are not, writes Ursula Le Guin in her essay, “Dogs, Cats and Dancers: Thoughts About Beauty,” which was summarized in the latest Brain Pickings.

Dogs don’t know what they look like, where their bodies are in space. Cats do. Le Guin describes a pair of Siamese, one black, one white. The white one always lay on the black cushion and the black one on the white cushion. “t wasn’t just that they wanted to leave cat hair where it showed up
best,” Le Guin writes, “though cats are always thoughtful about that. They knew where they
looked best.”

Dancers, too, are exquisitely aware of where they are in space, she says. And I think about my tap teacher, Candy, still jaunty and perky in her 60s, knowing exactly how to move her arms, to hold her shoulders, so that every angle and line was a pleasing one.

From these observations, Le Guin takes us to a place of pathos and love. She talks about aging, that it’s not just the loss of beauty that dismays her (“I never had enough to carry on about”), but the loss of identity. It’s that the person she sees looking at her in the mirror isn’t her — it’s an old woman.

Death, though it is the great equalizer, can also illuminate the essential beauty of a person. Le Guin uses her mother for illustration here, and I will use mine. Because even in death Mom was beautiful: the essential beauty, which lives in the bones, never left her.

Summer Serenade

Summer Serenade

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Thunderstorms cleared the air late yesterday and made way for … a frog chorus.  The little guys chirped and sang and puffed their throats out in that way they do. They’re looking for love, of course. Aren’t we all?

But instead of hitting the clubs and trying some corny lines, these guys were serenading their ladies in style. Bright sounds in the big night. A crooning, haunting symphony of sound — the voice of summer, perfect accompaniment to the glimmer of fireflies. They were singing to their own, but their cries soothed the soul of this suburbanite.

Because when I heard them call from creeks and puddles and the undersides of leaves, I felt part of a much larger, elemental world. That these creatures — just tadpoles a few weeks ago, little more than eggs with legs — could now be filling the night with their song seemed more than a little miraculous. It was a perfect way to end the day — with a summer serenade.

(Wikipedia)

Walking Hots

Walking Hots

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Yesterday’s record-breaking heat brought the words “walking hot” to mind. And that made me think about walking hots.

I remember when my high school friend Susan had a summer job walking hots at Keeneland, Lexington’s jewel of a racetrack. It was the first I’d heard of this practice, and I immediately liked the term. It was pithy, and it required insider knowledge to understand.

“Hots” were thoroughbreds who’d just had their morning work-outs, and hot walkers were the ones who lead them around the ring or shed area until they cooled down. Hot walkers hold the animals while they are sponged down, then walk them some more. Thoroughbreds get sick if they decelerate too quickly. Unlike humans, they’re not allowed to go from 60 to 0 without proper attention.

Hot walkers are usually novices or interns, those on the lowest end of the thoroughbred-care team. It’s their job to slow down high-strung animals who are bred to run — and it must be both boring and terrifying.

Much easier to walk hot than to walk hots.