Say Goodbye, Walk On

Bearing the unbearably sad: it's a thing. Loss, a constant theme. Who knows why it's all coming at once? Sometimes it feels like a pigpile on my heart.

I walk out the miles, trying to make sense of all of it, or rather, of any of it, and I have to conclude that the Universe is sending me the strongest messages it can. And I'm not bewildered by it. I expect it. I know perfectly well what it is telling me.

JULIE: Nothing is permanent. Life is fleeting. You're 58. You have a limited time on this planet. Let's make it good. Wake up and take the wheel. Find your road and drive it to a new reality. 

All right. I will. I am. I AM. 

What was there to do after finding Ellen but walk on, east, into the sunrise?

There's a red-tailed hawk just left of the sun, perched and beckoning, but you're going to have to click on the photo above to see him.

He held his ground until I was fairly close, then flew toward the light. I get it.

All right. I'm coming along. 

Twice more he landed, and twice more took off. And then his tail fanned cinnamon, backlit.

A mockingbird gave a sharp Twerp! as it clambered in the briars.

I looked at the beautiful tracery of black raspberries on the sunrise palette and smiled at one of my favorite birds, so saucy. Come on over a-my house, willya?

The 7:30 AM school bus rumbled by, and I thought, well, Ellen's dead, but life sure enough goes on for us, for everyone.

I paused, lost in thought, and Chet took that opportunity to light out for home. He does this on our morning walk now. I don't know what he's thinking. No, I know. He's thinking if Bill gets up, there will be bikkits and bits of breakfast. Little matter it that Bill's not here. Maybe Liam. Anyway. Food. We're close, I know the way, I'm gone without a backward glance. Ahh Chet why.

Because of course I can't call him anymore (think about life without being able to call your dog!) I had to chase him down, running hard with my big camera, and that wasn't such a bad thing, to get my own blood flowing through my numbed brain and body.

I snapped the leash on his collar and made him come along. Bikkits could wait, dammit. I even had several in my pocket and had been bribing him along, but the promise of bikkits/eggs/sausage bitties at home was evidently better. He's such a little old man.

Finally, we got down to the game feeder, and sure enough there were a bunch of wild turkeys pecking at the corn. Oh boy. 

I was glad I had brought my long lens. You don't get very close to turkeys.  They took off like overloaded 'copters, their wings whooshing, colored leaves flying in their wake. It was magnificent.

Wild turkeys in flight have a rather distinctive profile.
To quote the Stokes' bird guide, in one of my favorite bits of helpful prose, you can't fail to recognize a wild turkey due to their "distinctive turkeylike shape."

Wait. What?

 The best part is the heads, inclined downward with the effort of lifting 15 pounds off the ground.

The best part is the colored leaves, and the turkeys taking off.

The Universe is all over the map with me, smacking me to my knees, then chucking me under the chin.

Finally it was time to turn back home, toward the din of machinery, toward Ellen's still form. It was hard to do.

Chet had the grace this time not to run too far ahead. 

He even stopped to wait for me several times. Who's a good boy?

I love this long row of red maples, the way the fenceline curves with them.

And there lay Ellen.

I reflected that it was a good place for a sky burial. And I have spent all day gathering my photos and writing these two posts, and the shadows of eight turkey vultures have crossed and cris-crossed my field of vision as I write. I walked out to check on her about 1 pm, and they are still circling, ever lower, beating upward, circling low, making sure all is calm and still before coming to a bouncing stop in the hayfield to begin the work of burying her, turning her into feathers and carbon, whitewash and bone and sparkling hazel eyes. 

I'm glad these noble birds are still around to take care of her. They won't care that she's at least nine and likely quite gamey and stringy. I smiled to think that one possible punishment for the Homo nonsapiens who shot her would be having to eat her. 

Little Ixodes ticks were walking slowly all over her. I'd never seen one before two winters ago, when I first found them on Chet in February--tiny all-black elongated things. I became concerned that he could get Lyme disease, and started him on Nexgard, an awesome new tick-killing drug with no side effects. Well. I will never give it to another dog. If you already give it to your dog, at least Google it up good. 

Lyme ticks invading my Ohio Brigadoon, well, that fits with current trending topics such as poaching, deforestation, and devastation. Liam, Chet and I have been bitten multiple times. So far, we're not sick. But we are scared. I picked four off Chet just while we were watching turkeys. Which is how many times I've had Lyme disease in my life. I don't want it again.

Creepiest thing about Ixodes ticks is that they seem to be unaffected, even encouraged by cold. November, December, January, February, they'll come out to get you. You can never relax.

Chet had to make sure that was really Ellen. He sniffed her all over. I kept pulling him away, wanting to keep him away from househunting ticks.

Finally he came to me, a look of sweet concern on his dear face.

He is my good friend.

I looked down and found the first pinkbottom of fall!

Agaricus campestris, the pinkbottom or meadow mushroom, is closely related to A. bisporus, the cultivated mushroom. 

But of course it has this deliciously pink set of gills, rather than gray/brown. In flavor, there is no comparison. Pinkbottoms are Bordeaux to commercial mushrooms' Night Train. 

To a Boston terrier, anything held over his head must be seized. This includes hamsters and mushrooms, to name two.

OK, so not such a big mushroom fan. I'm a big enough fan for both of us.

I couldn't stop admiring its salmon gills, all the way up the driveway.

I had plans for this nice pinkbottom. I would make a little feast of it for breakfast, celebrating Ellen's long and productive life. 

Butter. Maybe one minute over a good flame, and the slices stayed white and pink but went soft and indescribably delicious, with a liquor all their own. 

Two eggs over easy, some nice baked ham.  Scraps for Chet Baker.

And the bonsais on fire, beneath the morning glories' firmament.

Love Lies Bleeding

It was a morning, typical in a miraculously atypical October. A warm breeze had played in my bedroom window all night, and I'd fallen asleep to the sound of crickets and burbling water from the pond just below. 

I'd gotten up and made breakfast for Liam, and seen him off to his dreaded Wednesday college chemistry class and lab. (He's taking his courses at our community college in his junior year of high school).

I'd gotten dressed and headed out earlier than usual, to watch the sun rise. It was another warm and breezy morning, another day in Paradise. First stop: the morning glories on the back deck, for obvious reasons.

With short, warm days and warm nights, these flowers get gloriously confused, and they stay open for two or three days instead of closing up on their first night of bloom. I don't understand the mechanism of it at all, though I've thought hard about it. Could it be humidity related? There's no dew on these dry warm nights. What makes a morning glory close up at the end of the day, anyway?

Whatever the  mechanism, they aren't closing. They're staying open for two or even three days.

When they're two days old, a violet hue creeps into them, brightening to fuchsia on the edges. It's...ahhh.

The net effect is an absolute carpet of blossoms in varying shades of true cerulean to cobalt violet. I had worried that my vines would never bloom before frost. Well, frost has been kind to them, and I get to roll my eyes around in morning glories all day long. Here it is November 2 and they're going strong through this fabulous autumn, the most protracted foliage spectacle I can remember. Every day I strive for the perfect, definitive, best morning glory shot. Every day I come a little bit closer. There is no such thing. That's why I keep shooting.

The growl, roar and beep of logging machinery was especially loud this morning, a bit less than two miles to the east of us. They're taking down a large tract of timber to drill a massive oil well.

This is probably the last photo I'll have of Longview Acres' little shed. The house came down weeks ago. 

The house site, straight on. 

I feel compelled to record what they're doing, what was here before they did it, and what they've left us to drive slowly by.

I still can't wrap my mind around this forest being gone. To be fair, it wasn't wilderness. Nothing around here is. Much of it was white pine plantation, that had been selectively logged, and it had grown up to black raspberries, greenbriar, and the happy confetti of red and sugar maple saplings, the kind of riotous tangle that's full of foxes, coy-wolves, deer, raccoons, squirrels, box turtles, American redstarts, yellow-throated warblers, hooded warblers, wild turkeys, and even ruffed grouse and bobcat--I had seen all of these creatures in and coming out of this tract. I'd even released a painstakingly rehabilitated one-eyed smashed box turtle right here years ago, where I found him when he'd been hit two years earlier. I'd sent him in a box poked full of holes by overnight Fed-Ex to New York State where a wonderful woman kept him for a year and a half while she healed his wounds. And then I'd driven 3 1/2 hours to Pittsburgh to pick him up in the autumn so he could go back to his home to sleep out the winter, to have another chance at living.

 So much for him, and so much for his home.

So much for our hearts as we drive slowly by. Looks like we'll have some handsome chain-link fencing to admire soon.

So these mornings I get up early and walk a mile east through the haymeadows and into the woods, where, if I drop below a steep berm, the sound of all this destruction is a little less obnoxious. At that point I'm three miles from it, and I can still hear it clearly, but it's not as bad as it is at the house. There I sit quietly with Chet and watch the birds and animals coming in to a game feeder on our neighbor's place. There's always action there, and it soothes me to see these animals take their corn breakfast. I don't think much of shooting deer over corn, but that's how it's done around here. It's all game cameras and time stamps and figuring out when that monster buck comes in so we can be there on opening day to drop him. Hmmm. However being an opportunist I am not above watching what comes in to their corn, and I absolutely love the beautiful paths my neighbors maintain through the woods, and the fact that they let me walk them whenever I wish. That privilege, I couldn't pay for. These men take good care of their land; they plant food crops for deer, and they are kind and friendly to me, and I respond in kind. They're good neighbors. They've bought a huge tract of land to leave it for wildlife. Far as I'm concerned, they can take all the deer they want. There are always more deer coming up.

This morning I walked out the driveway with Chet and I saw something I thought might be a white grocery bag that had blown in.  I quickly realized that it was the white belly of a deer, laid out in the grass.

I knew right away that someone had shot her, probably from the road less than 200' away. They'd probably pulled into our turnaround to get a bead on her. Oh, the bitter irony.

Disgust and anger welled up in me as I looked down on this little doe, wasted. So small--but nothing about her looked like this year's fawn. No trace of spots on the flanks.  Something about her domed forehead opened a cold sinking drain in my heart.

I knelt and looked closely at her forehead. One eye was higher than the other, an asymmetry I knew all too well.

I fell to my belly and looked at her right eye. Clouded and protruding, sightless, even in life.

Ellen.

They had killed my Ellen.

Blood still pulsed out of a terrible arrow wound that had smashed into the point of her left shoulder, into her heart and lungs. 

I hesitated a long time before I laid a hand on her. The pulsing blood, I could not explain, for she was stiff and still, her eyes already drying. When I touched her, she was cold. There was still a little warmth behind her ears, that had hung at such funny angles in life. Did her heart beat on? No, she was gone. Ah, Ellen. What have they done to you?

 The creep who killed this doe was engaging in a sport, widely practiced in my area, of dropping deer from their cars. What they do--and I saw three of them coming out together, in their loud beater cars and trucks just last night!--is shoot deer from their vehicles for fun. They drive by, looking straight ahead, and they never look me in the face. They are on a mission, but they aren't after meat.  They simply want to kill something. I can see it in their filthy faces as they pass. They leave them to rot and go kill something else. I find the carcasses everywhere, year around. And now I find Ellen, right out my driveway. If I could shoot a gun, I'd shoot out their tires and leave them to walk. If I had a rocket launcher...

 They wouldn't have recognized this doe, the way I could at hundreds of yards, just by the way she held her head. Had they known that hippie woman who lives in that tower house had loved her and written about her since 2009, they probably would have gotten an even bigger thrill out of dropping her and leaving her to lie right where I couldn't miss her. No, this dear little being was just something to sight the bow in with. Not even worth getting out of the truck to take. It takes a lot of skill to spotlight and shoot a half-blind elderly doe from your car at 200'.

The wound was a triangular slice, the hairs along it neatly clipped as with surgical shears, no burning such as you'd see with a bullet wound. So much for my theory that bow hunters take a more sporting approach to it all. 

I laid my hand on her domed forehead, the way I had so often longed to in life. Two tears rolled down. I did not weep. I couldn't. I think I've cried all the tears I have. I feel numb now, but oddly enough, stronger than I ever have. I feel I've been fired in a long, very slow kiln until my heart's crusted over.

I said a prayer of thanks that I had been so fortunate as to know her, to follow her through winter, spring and summer, for seven years. To see her through the terrible pain of losing one eye, to see her come out the other side, to see her grow her hair back, and pregnant this spring, with a swollen udder! at perhaps 9 years of age. A Methuselah among deer.

My first post about Ellen, March 1, 2009.

My second post, March 1, 2012. 

My third post, Feb. 24, 2015. 

My fourth, Feb. 21, 2016.

My fifth, Feb. 23, 2016.

My sixth, Feb. 24, 2016.

My seventh, June 26, 2016.

Here, they end.

The last time I photographed her: May 22, 2016, snorting at me.  I glimpsed her along the driveway once more on a summer evening, and it looked like she had two fawns with her, and she at least 9 years of age. But I can't be sure they were both hers. The only thing I'm sure of now is that I will never see her again.

Ellen was a survivor, until the wrong person rolled up to her and drew back his bow. I pity him, because he never knew her, because, taking it away so callously, he doesn't know that life is a gift.

What a gift Ellen was.

Go now, with your eyes that both work, with your supple neck, no longer kinked and lowered; with two ears that swivel as they should. There is a much better place for you than here. Thank you for everything, sweet Ellen. I'll be looking for your face in this year's fawns.