Curtis Loew in the Snow

Dogs in the snow... So many times I'd yearned to take our sweet Boston terrier Chet Baker sledding; I had a feeling he'd love it if only he'd try it, but having no hair at all on his little belleh, he was not terribly tolerant of cold, and would have been miserable for the hours we usually spend trudging up and flying down the bowl. So we never got to see what Chet Baker thought of it all. 

Mind you, Chet loved a good romp in the snow, but I never wanted to take him out for a long time, without the option of taking him right home when he got too cold.  I love this photo. And this one...he was such a wonderful little beast, especially in his letter jacket. 

Curtis is another animal altogether; he's clearly spent his life outdoors and he adores cold and snow.    

Here he is in the Dec. 17 2020 snow, one of the most beautiful we've had. 

He's a mile from home and feeling no pain at all.

So off we went down the driveway to see what would happen. We thought he needed his coat since it was in the teens and still snowing. He donned it happily and frisked around, clearly appreciating its extra warmth. He's no dummy!

He is a FIRST CLASS sneak, though, and I was apprehensive that he would tiptoe off and go on a hunt while wearing that coat. If he snuck off and dove into the briars wearing it, he could get hung up for hours in freezing cold, perhaps needing rescue. I was worried and unsure that we could keep close enough tabs on him to prevent that from happening. Well, as it worked out, he DID sneak off in his new coat as soon as we got to the slope, and I was both exasperated and concerned for him. I envisioned him getting hung up somewhere in the noisome multiflora rose tangle that surrounds the big field and goes deep into the woods in the holler. 

Way to wreck a sledding outing, Curtis! As soon as he disappeared, I started cussing, then walking the nearly half-mile back to the house to get the tracking unit so I could go find him if he got snagged. In the time it took me to get home, remove the snow and ice from my car, grab the tracker and a trek stick and some clippers (for briars) and drive back, the prodigal cur showed up and started romping with the kids as they took their sleds down the slope. They took this video of the first run with him beside Phoebe.

 

                  

 This is the genesis of Curtis' interest in sledding. You can see that he's highly excited and amused by Phoebe's first, mostly failed, flying saucer run.

                   

 Liam is Curtis' touchstone. I absolutely love how that dog willingly climbs on the sled, and Liam gently steadies him as they go down the slope together. "I got you." And at the bottom, Curtis skips free, but turns right back to the sled and Liam with wagging tail, ready for more fun! 

 When I finally got back to the slope, the kids and Curtis couldn't WAIT to show me his new trick! I just could not believe that he loved schussing at high speed down a very steep slope. But knowing Curtis, with his need for speed, and his spirit-- adventurer to the core--it shouldn't have surprised me. I guess I figured him for a dog who would run down beside the sled, but wouldn't deign to be carried on it. Wrong! Look how he climbs aboard! As I go down the hill, you can hear me say, "I have a sledding dog!!"

                    

 At the bottom of the hill, Curtis jumped off the sled and began digging madly in the snow. He was just SO excited and happy he had to release that somehow. People roll around on their backs laughing after a great run. I guess Curtis digs!! 

 Of course, it didn't always go so smoothly...This is a particularly cute look at Curtis' face as he passes me on down the slope.

           

 And when he was done for the day, he was DONE. He communicates perfectly without a word, just stands his ground with a no-thank-you look on his face. Oh, how we love this dog. It was about 17 degrees, snowing hard, and despite his fabulous sherpa coat, a gift from our friend Mim, he was feeling the cold at last. We turned toward home.

                 

 Feeling especially lucky to have a dog who loves to sled, and a thrilling huge slope within walking distance of our house. Oh, and having my kids here to sled with...how lucky can you get? 

Happy New Year! May it be EVER so much better than OLD YEAR was! 

Hope you've enjoyed Curtis Loew in the SNOW!!

Calamity Days

After a perfectly ridiculous winter in 2009/10 (who ever has seventeen snow days?), the State of Ohio voted to put an end to the madness by granting her schools only three so-called "calamity days" for this winter season. Surely, if we grant fewer calamity days, it won't snow as much. Well, 2010/11 is shaping up to be a carbon copy of last winter, and we've already used all three allotted days, which means my kids will be in school, making up unallotted calamity days, until the tomatoes come in.

Pink indicates where to kiss.

In principle, I'm all for fewer calamity days. It tones up the school superintendent, makes her really think about what to say in those 5:24 AM robocalls that tell me whether I'm going to get a lick of work done in a given day or not. "Good morning! Abandon hope; once again your kids will be underfoot all day. Working parents: Go to Plan B."

 I'm one of the lucky ones. My Plan B is always ready to be deployed, because I'm always here. It simply involves a shift of focus from listening to Pandora with a parrot on my shoulder while blissfully finishing the illustrations for my book to muscling myself into a ski suit, going sledding, making hot chocolate, and dealing with the resultant mountains of outerwear (Sara says be thankful it's not underwear!).  It involves surrendering to my now, living my reality. Resistance is futile. I know that. I've been fired in the frigid kiln of 2009, a winter when I fought snow days, heroically struggling to accomplish something, anything while searching our miasma of a hall closet for even one pair of matching gloves, boots that don't pinch and apparently do not exist, and making Three Cheese Macaroni, popcorn and minty hot chocolate with organic milk and snowman marshmallows on demand.

There are perks. First, I love being around my kids. Second, with enough I-am-serious-now bossing around, their energy can occasionally be redirected from the glowing screen and turned toward real-time good, such as picking up and vacuuming, scrubbing sinks, toilets and tubs. Third, we have a ridiculously gigantic snow bowl right at the end of our driveway, a geologic feature that serves up screams and thrillingly fast rides. And this year there are no frozen cowpies in it to shatter our tailbones.

This is quite a sledful, one that will travel with tremendous moment all the way to the bottom of the Snow Bowl.

The hill goes on and on, starting with a thrilling berm that power-boosts your ride, and terminating in a barbed-wire fenceline and screams of BAIL!! BAIL!! BAIL NOW!!

The endorphins involved in sledding help bust me out of Cranky Frustrated Artist mode and back into Somewhat Fun Mom mode.

The Canon G-12 admirably captures the rosy beauty against a sere landscape. Yes, I know I have a G-11, but this is the new version which does all this and more.

Note fenceline beyond my Celtic fairy. It's a heck of a ride down to it.

A few fiery strands escape her hat. Ahh. There is great beauty in calamity.

 

Live your calamity!

Snowbound!

Welcome to my new bloghome!

Thanks for all the great feedback on the blog redesign. I'm cackling, thinking of all of you loading this page for the first time, no warning, just boom! New look! That's how we do things around here. No fanfare until the fanfare. If you missed the prior post explaining what has happened here, scroll down--I put up a little howdy-doo Thursday morning.

It keeps snowing and snowing and snowing here. I looked out this morning on our seemingly permanent foot-and-a-half of snow, with more drifting down. Considered the fact that the kids have been out of school almost a week. And thought that this is kind of like being in a hospital. You look out and think, man, I'd love to go for a long walk in the sunshine!

but no. You have to stay in your room, and there is no more sunshine. You can't have sunshine, and you can't have a walk. Egad--just getting around to all nine bird feeders in this crusty, powdery, slushy/slompy stuff makes me huff like a steam engine. It is decidedly un-fun to walk outside. It isn't actually walking--it's more like controlled staggering.

Chet Baker has taken to peeing in the snow right on the front porch, or right on the back deck, less than three feet from the door. He minces out and unloads and then expects to come right back inside. The next time he does it I'm going to smack that little black rumpus of his. I shovel out pee alleys; he'd darned well better use them. I don't know when he last pooped. Not my problem. It is not yours to tell the world about my elimination situation, Mether. A Boston terrier has no fur on his underside, and he must be excused all manner of rule infractions when the snow is so deep that it hits his most tenderest bits when he tries to walk in it. You try going out naked on all fours and see how you like it.


Chet hates the snow. I mean, he's happy to romp for oh say three minutes and then he's on the front porch bouncing up and down like a kangaroo needing in NOW. NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW. As I write he's clawing all the blankets on my bed into a huge Jedd-like pile and circling five times before flopping into them.

He is a dog of comfort. I would like to discover his secret for staying sane without putting miles of trail under his boots. I would like to bottle it and drink two quarts of it. I'm trying the sleep cure, and it does help to konk out with a book on my chest at 8:30. Just get this winter over with. My God, the woodcocks are due this week. I hope they stay in Alabama.

Back to our regularly scheduled program:

Bill of the Birds is good at talking girls into things. However he is good at talking men into things, too.

This is the Testosterone Express. David, Sherm, and Bill in a never-to-be-repeated lineup on the Green Menace. Zane wisely decides to race alongside.



Look OUUUUT BELOW!!! It's the BeefSkid! Oh, the manly grunts of pain that emanated from the Express as it hit the bumps.

Unfortunately there are no photos of the Estrogen Sled, which bore me, Margaret, Mary Jane and Beth in one epic ride. Wouldn't you know we went into the groundhog burrow. ow ow ow.

Phoebe and Liam ready for a run.

Daddy gives them a mighty shove.


And they trudge back up the slope. Sledding is great exercise; you have to climb that awful hill each time you want another ride. And hooting and hollering and laughing your head off is the ultimate cure for cabin fever.

Girlfriends in the snow: me, Mary Jane and Margaret. Mmm.

Phoebe takes a breather. Her groovy hat-scarf from Taos is a snow-caked liability now, offering weight and wetness without much warmth.

Liam readies some snowballs. There are always snowballs, especially with Daddy around.


Dusk falls on the pasture.

The kids are exhausted. So are the adults. And we've been down and up the slopes half as many times as they have.


There are roses in the snow. You have to kiss those cold lips to bring them magically back to life.

We go to say goodbye to Abby and Veronica

who watch and wonder
the snow collecting on their backs.

Veronica snorts and shakes her heavy little head

and turns to get a little warm comfort in the gathering dark. She's a little old for it, but Veronica has nothing better to do.

We head for home to do the same, but ours is spaghetti and firelight.

Sledding!

Sledding is a very intimate way of appreciating the landscape. You can look at a snowy hill, and think how beautiful it is, but putting your nether bits in direct contact with its contours is a whole 'nother thing.

It's a hugely exciting thing to hurtle down a steep slope, feeling every bump and groundhog burrow under a too-thin covering of snow. Our fastest sled is thin plastic; it cost $6.99 and it fits four people on it. We were given another by a neighbor that cost $130 and while the thick foam insulates from some of the crueler bumps, it's not as much fun as the Green Menace. Saucers generally suck; I don't like going 30 mph backwards and being dumped off without warning. The inflatable, inner-tube style has a lot of potential and is a lot easier on aging tailbones than the aforementioned. There's a lot of spinning with those, too, but it's a cushier ride.

I love the processional out to the slope. Out the driveway, under the drooping snowy pines.


The sumac branches are laden with snow.


Oona tells Liam to MUSH!!
And David carries his homemade sled. David can make anything, including a sled with real downhill skis as runners. David and Mary Jane (here's Mary Jane, a wonderful artist and art teacher, with your blogger)
keep Chet Baker when we go away. They are Chet Baker's West Virginia parents. David and Mary Jane are always hoping we will go away, because they love Chet Baker. And when they visit us, Chet Baker always gets in their car, hoping he can go to Camp Baker. He comes and asks me to go get his bed and food and leash and toys, because he's ready to GO. We always get such a laugh out of his eagerness to go to Camp Baker, where he gets a couple of walks every day, and the chipmunks are naive and there for the taking. Couldn't invoke the doggeh without a photo to slake the Baker thirst. We call this photo Christmas Sweetness. Unfortunately you won't find Chet out on the slopes. He is perfectly happy to stay home by the fire and greet us as we come in, not being a fan of prolonged outings in the snow. The problem has to do with his sparsely-haired undercarriage, well displayed in the photo above. Brr!

The slopes are prime for sledding. That's a big bowl of a hayfield. We are most thankful that the farmer who leases it didn't pasture cattle there last fall. Frozen cowpies are incredibly painful when they connect with your rump through a thin plastic sled.

Sez who?
This is Abby. Abby and her daughter Veronica like to watch us sled. Our sledding parties are probably the most exciting thing that happens to them all year long.

This is Veronica.
Veronica is sort of a bovine Oona.

The common denominators being crippling cuteness and a sturdy build.


It's hard to get Oona to go down the slope on a sled or saucer. She much prefers to give people a mighty shove and send them down, then watch from the top.

The only person who can consistently coax Oona onto a sled is Bill of the Birds. He is very good at talking girls into things, any girl, any thing.

The Amish Wii

Living in the country has its drawbacks. When the power goes out in an ice storm, you're in for three days, minimum, which is what we dealt with this past week. I'm watching it all melt off now, enjoying reading by incandescent light and the resumption of my electronic addictions.

When it's snowy and cold and the power's off and all your favorite toys need to be plugged in, it's time for the Amish Wii, Bill of the Birds' new term for amusing oneself in a power outage. (Is it any wonder I leave the pet naming to him? He's a genius.)

We chose Sledding on our Amish Wii and off we went.

While walking with the kids this month in a dusting of snow, we took a route across the hayfield/cow pasture near our mailbox. And it hit us that for 16 years we have been living on top of the best darn sledding hill on the planet, and didn't even realize it. We'd always taken the slope in our yard, which ends abruptly and painfully in a tangle of multiflora rose and sumac. Yow! Nothing like a face full of Ninja stars at the end of a thrilling run. The kids and I looked at this smoothly mown hayfield and resolved to make it ours in the next decent snowstorm.

I made them pull me out to the end of the driveway. It's good for them.
Then we hoofed it across the flat until we reached the Bowl. You can see the dropoff at the left side of the picture. We followed their track from that morning, when I was busy doing something else.
It's a heck of a hill. The huge oak tree is on the very southeast corner of our land, which is doubtless why nobody has cut it down. It's a line tree, and it's our line tree. It will stand until it decides to fall down. I smile every time I see that tree. Although we have only a pie-slice of land that it stands on, I also put a bluebird box up near the oak, further marking our territory in a gentle way.
Bye, kids. Be careful. Just remember Mommy loved you.We loved you, too, Mommy. Farewell.

Talk about a long run...you go and go and go.

There's a wonderful steep berm that gets you really moving. Here, Liam's trudging back up.
It's the long trudge up that limits the number of runs you do. I'm usually good for about six before I start thinking about popcorn and hot cocoa.
And roses and freckles.
We always draw a cowd.In this particular episode, we hit a frozen cowpie that stood up about six inches--a deadly mogul, taken at speed. I took it right on the tailbone and wasn't right for two weeks. It's finally better today and we're going for one last run before the snow melts off. I am going to stuff an Ugly Doll down my pants just in case.