Love me, love my dog

I'm taking a little break from housework, which is unusual for me—not taking a break (that's usual), but housework. I've been washing by hand some pots and bowls that have been in my sink for an incredibly long time. If I told you how long they've sat there, you wouldn't even believe it, but it would be true.

In a little less than an hour, I will drive to the Fred Meyer store in Bellingham to pick up some groceries I ordered online. This has pretty much become my standard method of grocery shopping. I pick out everything I want online, pay for it with my debit card, and schedule a time (an hour window) to pick it up, usually the next day. The nice thing is that I can take my dog with me because I just sit in my car in the specified parking lot, call the store on my cell, and they bring it out, all bagged, and put in in my trunk. They charge me less than $5 for the service.

I have not left my dog in his crate at home alone since we vacated my house more than a year ago. When we lived in a hotel, at first I took him to work with me every day. I had permission to do that for the three months it was supposed to take. After that, I took him every day to doggy day care at the Hyline Hotel for Dogs. I could not leave him in the hotel room because he has separation anxiety and would certainly have barked and howled the whole time I was gone. At Hyline, he has company, which is all he needs. It has made him less neurotic.

When I moved back into my house, I did not have the heart to resume the crate routine we used to follow, where he was in his crate for nine hours while I was away at work. So I have continued bringing him to Hyline. He likes it there. I can tell because he happily jumps out of the car and willingly walks in with his tail up. (As opposed to at the vet, where he nervously jumps out of the car, and has to be coaxed or carried into the exam area, with a droopy tail, and in fear and trembling.)

This close bond between us to some degree limits what I do. If I am going somewhere in the evening or on the weekend where dogs are not welcome, then I have to arrange extra time for him at Hyline. Their drop-off and pick-up hours are 7:00-10:00 a.m. and 3:00-6:00 p.m. So, for an evening outing I have to put him in Hyline's boarding service overnight, which means packing up his medicine and food for them to feed him.

If putting him at Hyline is not feasible, then I don't go wherever I might have otherwise. I know with my mind that putting him in his box for just an hour or two while I would go away really wouldn't do him any harm, but I can't do it. I guess I'm the one now with separation anxiety. Although I don't fear separation for myself, I just feel like I would be betraying his trust. I'm doubtless projecting something on him.

Asparagus fern

I brought a plant to my office. I've had it a long time. I can't even remember when I got it. It used to stand among a number of other plants near my kitchen window, just to the left of the sink. There's a small bit of counter there that's fairly difficult to reach and make useful, so I put my plants there, where they could receive light from the west-facing window over the sink.

My sister used to ask if I really wanted plants there and why. This was when she was helping me get more organized than I usually am. She suggested that, since I had so little counter space to begin with, I should not waste any of it on a bunch of potted plants. When she asked why they were there, I said it's because that's where the light is.

I have one western window (in the kitchen) that gets the afternoon and evening sun. I have one eastern window (in the guest room) that gets very little sun because of trees outside. I have two sunny southern windows (in my bedroom and library), but when I tried to keep a plant in the bedroom my dog knocked over the stand it was on and the pot broke. That was not the first time my dog had caused the destruction of a flower pot. And my library was still in transition from being my dad's office to becoming a library, so I didn't spend much time in there and didn't have a place to put plants. (I have no northern windows, because that wall is underground.)

Then there's my living room. My "front room" as we often call it in Lynden, except my "front room" happens to face the back yard. It also has south-facing windows, but they get no sun, because the upstairs deck overhangs the lower deck there. That's nice for my container gardening on my deck; I have both a sunny, hot south-facing area, and a shady, cool area, so I can grow both sun-loving and shade-loving flowers. But my living room does not get enough sunlight to grow anything. I tried keeping some plants that require very little sun, but even they could not hack it.

Anyway, when my house was torn apart for water damage, my indoor potted plants got shuffled around the place as work progressed. I used to come to my house every Sunday afternoon and walk through to see what was happening. At first, I watered the plants wherever they sat. When they got covered by tarp, I gave up on them. Eventually the pots ended up outside on my deck. Two hardy plants survived this treatment. One was my asparagus fern and the other was a spider plant.

The asparagus fern actually throve once it spent the summer out in the shady side of the deck. This past week, we did go down to a freezing temperature one night. The asparagus fern (let's just call it "Gus") was sheltered enough by the overhanging deck that it did not die in the frost. But the next morning I took it with me to work, cleaned the pot off, pulled and cut out any remaining dead twigs, and set it with my other work plants on the bookcase that serves as a partition for my workspace.



It's a pretty purple pot, as you might see. The glass globe for watering was already in the pot all the whole time since it had been in the kitchen, so I kept it with. I washed it off and filled it up for this fresh start in a new space.

In the smaller, dark-to-light purple pot is a somewhat struggling succulent. It's getting a little spindly, but it hangs in there. And then is my African violet, which does very well in this space and blooms a lot. I believe I bought the African violet to put on my brother's grave at one one time and then brought it into work. The light source here is a skylight in the ceiling above, so the African violet (let's just call it "Vi") leaves reach upward to the light more and don't lie as flat as they usually would. But the beautiful dark purple blooms keep happening.

So, to make a short story long, that's how "Gus" came to live in my office.

It happens that way sometimes

I took my dog out this morning to walk him around the back yard to take care of his needs. It was a lovely autumn morning. The lawn is covered with yellow and brown leaves, and some still hang in the trees, but the branches and twigs are becoming more visible. The sun shone and every dew-covered thing sparkled. I paused, as I often do, near the opening in the shrubs where I can watch the creek flowing by. It's getting fuller and swifter. As I stood enjoying the beauty, my dog suddenly chucked up his most recent meal. We moved on to complete his walk.

Life.

Twenty years after

It's a very rainy Thursday in Lynden, my home town. I've lived in this town, and this house, longer than I ever lived in one place continuously before. Actually, now that I think of it, it's kind of my 20-year anniversary in Lynden. I vacated my apartment in San Jose, California, on October 31st, a Saturday, and I preached a farewell message at my dearly loved church, Friendship Agape, on Sunday, November 1st, and, on Monday, I started the drive up to Lynden, Washington. It was a two-day trip, so I guess November 3rd is really my 20th anniversary of living in Lynden. I moved into this same apartment I'm living in now, in the downstairs of my parents' home.

I had been a part of Friendship Agape Church for seven years, helping out a small, young congregation by teaching and assisting in any way I could. It was thrilling work to see people come to Christ and witness their transformation and growth. The work led me to seminary. I went two years to Fuller Seminary's Northern California Extension Campus. I went to school half time while working full time, which was exhausting. Also, as much as I loved Friendship Agape Church, I felt drained. One day I was sitting in traffic in San Jose. It was the morning commute, and I was in a line of cars waiting for the metering light that would let us on the freeway at 30-second intervals, where we could crawl along at half the speed limit. I thought, Why do I live here? I had moved there a couple years after college because my sister and her family lived there. But I was spending half my wages on rent and putting in almost an extra work day per week in commute time. Meanwhile,  my parents were in Lynden, I had a brother and his family in Lynden, I had extended family in Lynden, and I had always loved Lynden. When I was a girl and moving from place to place every few years, I dreamed of living in Lynden forever.

I considered that I would only go to seminary one time in my life and that to be too worn out to learn well and study deeply was a waste. I remembered that my dad had always told me that if I ever needed a place to live I could live in their downstairs. It has its own kitchen and bathroom, a living room, two bedrooms (one of which was my dad's office), and its own door in and out. So I called my folks and told them I wanted to move to Lynden, live in their house, and go to seminary full time at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. Lynden is just a few miles from the Canadian border, and Vancouver is closer to us than Seattle. Because they were wonderful parents, my dad and mom were actually thrilled by the idea. My dad immediately went out and bought a gas stove to keep the basement warmer and had gravel laid along the side of the house so I could park there. I told them I thought I would probably move the next spring, around March or April 1999.

But, looking back, I think the Lord saw how tired I was. At the end of September I was laid off from my job. I didn't think it practical to look for a new job when I was planning to move in six months anyway, so I brought my plans forward early. I gave my landlord a month's notice that I would vacate at the end of October. My parents came down from Lynden to help me move.

On October 31st, my sister and her husband, my dad, and kind members of my church packed my worldly possessions into a U-Haul moving van. I had two cats at the time, who both hated riding in the car. Whenever I drove them to the vet, their desperate claws would cling to the lattice of their carriers, and they would yowl the whole way. So I consulted the vet and got some tranquilizers to give them, so they could sleep through the drive.

My church, which was still small and relatively young, was sorry to see me go. When I spoke to them that Sunday, it was the one time when I preached when I really felt the Holy Spirit gave me the message. I spoke more fluently than I can now remember to encourage them to rely on God, the true builder of the church.

The next morning, we started out in two vehicles. My dad and my kind, generous brother-in-law drove the U-Haul. Or, more accurately, my brother-in-law drove and my dad kept him company. I drove my car with my mom as a passenger and my two doped-up cats in their carriers in the back seat. We drove all day Monday, and stopped somewhere to stay in a hotel Monday night. I don't remember where. Then drove all day Tuesday and got to Lynden. I remember bits and pieces of the unpacking.

I put my cats into an unfinished little room that housed the furnace and hot water heater. I didn't want them to be scared by all the coming and going of people with furniture and boxes. My cats were frightened of most people except me. They had been feral kittens when I took them in. Even in the furnace room, they apparently were terrified and disappeared into the walls behind the drywall that didn't quite meet the ceiling. After everyone had left and I was calling them, I could hear them meowing inside the walls. I wanted to keep talking so they would hear my voice and come to it, but I ran out of things to say, so I sat on the floor in the hallway and sang the verses of Amazing Grace until they came creeping out to me, their whiskers full of cobwebs.