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Free at Last …

Free at Last …

owie free leg Here he is — Owen with his leg free for the first time in about six months. He’s a little freaked out, as you can see, and the poor leg is pretty irritated from tape and bandaging, but we think the achilles tendon repair is going to hold (knock wood).

The bandages actually came off yesterday, but the vet and I are such chickens about it that he hung out there yesterday and spent the night in a nice, contained little crate. He’s still favoring it, but he’s cruising around the house and yard pretty well, and as you can see, he wanted a boost so he could take a little nap on my bed.

Unexpected Visitor

Unexpected Visitor

Jacques We had an unexpected visitor yesterday — it was early, about seven, and I was making tea when my dogs rushed the back fence, barking. I went out to shush them because it was early, we have neighbors — and who did I see on the far side of my back gate but Jacques!

I let him in and looked down the alley, but there wasn’t any sign of the Mighty Hunter. That was weird. So after I got the three of them to stop barking, I got on the phone. Jacques has been known to go on walkabout every once in a while, and apparently that’s what he’d done. We don’t know if he got following some of the many folks on the levee who had come down to watch the bridge collapse, or what, but somehow he went from the MH’s house on Tenth Street all the way across town to mine on C street — there are some big streets to cross along the way.

I have to admit, he did look, well, hangdog about it all. He sat in my kitchen looking like he’d had a slightly larger adventure than he’d meant to — I knew how he felt. When I was about seven, and Patrick was five (were we really that little? we didn’t feel like we were that little, we felt like perfectly capable people) we were stupendously bored. We lived on a farm then, and we’d been away for much of the summer so we couldn’t find our bikes, and the woods were full of mosquitos, and our parents were busy. So we decided we’d walk to Gigi and Shelley’s farm to play with them. It was always fun there. They had a pool. So we sneaked out the end of the driveway and started walking. It was August. It was hot. What took seven or eight minutes to drive was really far away. We got all the way to the corner where you turned off our road to go over to the one they lived on, probably 3 miles or so, when we gave up. We stuck out our thumbs and decided to hitchhike like the hippies we’d seen on TV (this was the early 70s). Of course, when that big, low-slung American car screeched to a halt we dove into the weeds. Suddenly it all seemed a little scary, especially when a heavy-set black lady came wading into the ditch to retrieve us. What are you two doing out here? she scolded. Where’s your parents? Where do you live? I’m going to give your mother a piece of my mind for letting the two of you out here on the side of this road. Anyone could pick you up. What are you thinking? Patrick and I looked at eachother and I lied. I told her we lived at Gigi and Shelleys. I knew that their mom wouldn’t be as mad at us as ours would be, and maybe we’d get to go swimming. So this nice lady and her son, who was driving, took us to the H’s house. When Mrs. H. came out, she looked at the two of us, in this car with these strangers, who were black (it was not a colorblind society that I grew up in) and sent us into the kitchen. The woman who picked us up just laid into Mrs. H, who was sputtering that she wasn’t our mom, and that yes, she thought we’d made an unwise decision. Mr. H came out as well, and with his famous Australian charm managed to calm this nice, apoplectic woman down. We sat in the kitchen, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, knowing that despite the awe with which Gigi and Shelley were currently looking at us, we were in such big trouble.

That’s sort of how Jacques looked sitting in my kitchen yesterday morning. He was panty. He was a little freaked out. He seeemed very releived to be back inside a yard he knew, with his packmates. The MH left him with me all day as he had a tile job anyhow, and Jacques and I had a long discussion, much like that one in the H’s kitchen 35 years ago, about how he is always welcome at my house, but he has to tell someone where he’s going, and he can’t cross all those big streets by himself.

Stumpy Dog

Stumpy Dog

dog with cast Here’s my boy, back from getting his scary apparatus removed. He has a slick little lightweight cast and he’s stumping around like a champ. Poor guy, I didn’t realize those pins went all the way through his leg bones! The vet wanted to give me the pins as a souvenir but I passed — he was pretty sore that first night after they took the apparatus off, but he bounced right back.
Yesterday my local vet cut it off to change the bandages underneath and as we were lying on the couch watching dopey TV, I realized that the cotton batting had gotten wet in the torrential rains we’re having these past few days. Last time Owen got wet in a splint, his foot swelled up to twice it’s normal size and he got that bad toe rash. So, while we watched a little TV I had to blow dry the foot end of his cast — it took a while and although he fussed at first, eventually he wound up lying back with his eyes nearly closed, dozing as his foot dried out. So today he had to wear a bag on his foot, which made him very surly.

Dog Walk Sutra

Dog Walk Sutra

Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva,
doing deep prajna paramita,
Clearly saw emptiness of all five skandhas,

Ray! What are you doing? Get over here!
Thus completely relieving misfortune and pain.
O Shariputra, form is no other than emptiness,
Emptiness no other than form;
Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form.
Sensation, conception, discrimination, awareness,
Are likewise like this.

Whoa! What are you doing? You’re not allowed in the street.
O Shariputra, all dharmas are forms of emptiness,
Not born, not destroyed,
Not stained, not pure,
Without loss, without gain.
So, in emptiness there is no form,
No sensation, conception, discrimination, awareness,
No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind,
No color, sound, smell, taste, touch, phenomena,
No realm of sight, no realm of consciousness,

Come on Ray — out of there — don’t eat catshit!
    No ignorance and no end to ignorance,
No old age and death, and no end to old age and death,
No suffering, no cause of suffering,
no extinguishing,
no path,
No wisdom and no gain.
No gain and thus the bodhisattva lives prajna paramita
With no hindrance in the mind
No hindrance, thus no fear.

Come on lovie. This way.
Far beyond deluded thoughts, this is nirvana.
All past, present, and future Buddhas live prajna paramita
And therefore attain anuttara-samyak-sambohdi.
Therefore know prajna paramita is the great mantra,
The vivid mantra, the best mantra,
The unsurpassable mantra.
It completely clears all pain—this is the truth, not a lie.
So set forth the prajna paramita mantra.
Set forth this mantra and say:
Gate! Gate! Paragate! Parasamgate!
Bohdi svaha! Prajna Heart Sutra!

Up Ray, through the gate. Good boy. Want a cookie?

(with apologies to Gary Snyder, whose translation this is.)

Scarecrow!

Scarecrow!

So, ever since my ancient calico cat, Patsy, went off to the great beyond I’ve been plagued by neighborhood cats who think my nicely turned and raked raised beds are big litter boxes. Ugh.

Last year I tried cayenne sprinkled on the beds, and finally resorted to draping them all in tree netting. Which was fine, but as the plants grew up through it, it became a pain in the neck.

So this year, I went for more drastic measures. I ordered this fabulous sprinkler scarecrow from Amazon. You hook it up to the hose, and set the sensitivity level, and if anything comes near it it explodes with a blast of tat-tat-tat water and noise. The first night, clearly, I set it up facing the wrong direction and didn’t make it sensitive enough, because the next morning there was a gross horrible disgusting pile of catshit in one of the beds. So I moved it to face the back of the property, toward the alley from which the cat clearly enters my yard, and yesterday morning there were tracks, then a divot where the cat fled, but no cat crap. And this morning — nothing! Pristine garden beds with tiny seedlings growing in them. I love my sprinkler scarecrow!(Apparently they’re also pretty successful for folks who have deer issues.)

The next use for this fabulous device is going to be as a dog training aid — Raymond and George next door have an annoying game they play where they indulge in Very Fierce Barking through the gap in the fence. I think little motion-detector water should solve that, as well as the issue we have when I’m having a peaceful glass of wine on my front porch in the evening, and Raymond thinks he needs to rush back and forth along the picket fence barking at anyone who passes by — like I said. I love my sprinkler scarecrow.

King Corn in My Garden

King Corn in My Garden

A big weekend of gardening — I dug the crabgrass and feral mint (I love my mint, but it was taking over everything) from the perennial beds. It was hard. There was digging, and pulling, and tugging, and sprays of dirt. I have an entire trash receptacle full of roots out there on the parkway waiting for the first yard waste pickup of the year.

My perennial beds have moments of gorgeousness, followed by long periods of bedragglement, caused in part by the weeds. My lawn too, is plagued by weeds — not dandelions so much, I don’t mind dandelions, but by big patches of black medic, which because it does not remain green (or green-ish) falls outside of my very large list of lawn weeds that are okay.

I considered applying a commercial weed-and-feed type product, but every time I tried to buy one I found myself looking at the list of chemicals and well, I just couldn’t do it. The dogs were a worry, for one thing. It was no surprise to me when reports surfaced last week that our pets are picking up alarming amounts of toxins from our environment.

We have a terrific shop over in Bozeman, Planet Natural, and a couple of years ago I read about corn gluten as an organic emergent herbicide and fertilizer. It’s a by-product of the cornstarch production process. When applied to lawns and gardens it inhibits the germination of seeds, and because it’s also very high in nitrogen, it fertilizes as it breaks down. I went to the Planet Natural website but they’re out of corn gluten and said it was on order from the manufactuer. Because it inhibits germination, you want to get it applied before things start to germinate, so time was something of the essence. I stopped at Lowes when I was in Billings last week with the gimpy dog, and scored the last four bags they had. So yesterday, after the great crabgrass-and-mint purge, I used the handy shaker-bag to apply a generous dose of the yellow pellets to the perennial beds, and then dumped a couple of bags in my little push-spreader (which makes me feel like the most suburban person ever) and did the shrinking-but-extant patches of lawn. We’ll see how it works. Luckily it’s nontoxic, since the dogs seem to find it somewhat irresistable …

I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand, it is an organic substance, even if it is a byproduct of America’s love affair with Big Corn. On the other hand, my grandmother and aunt support our family farm by growning corn, so there’s a kind of completing the circle effect. Mostly though, I hope it helps — if it can do anything about the crabgrass problem in my front perennial bed, I will be a very happy girl.

What Lies Beneath …

What Lies Beneath …

We got up early this morning and drove over to Billings to see the orthopedic vet. He said it looks like the tendon is healing up quite nicely, which was an enormous relief. Then he knocked my poor Owie out and re-adjusted the pins so that he’s putting a little bit of weight on the tendon. The pins and rods will stabilize it for another three weeks or so, and then he’ll be freed from the aparatus and will get a soft cast for a few more weeks.

And here’s what poor FrankenPuppy looks like beneath those bandages: frankenpuppy2pc280016.JPG

Back to Boring Normal Life

Back to Boring Normal Life

Well, the dogs are on the mend — Ray’s stitches come out on Friday and I took Owen  off to have his dressings changed today. I wish I’d had my camera with me — that external fixature is quite something. My little FrankenPuppy. His Fenatyl patch is also off, which is making him a little less groggy — thank goodness we have the mysterious “anaglesic elixir” because he’s still intermittently uncomfortable.
In other news — the tomatoes are getting their true leaves down in the basement, although I didn’t have the germination rates with the pepper seedlings that I’d hoped for –there are still plenty of peppers, but somehow, when nothing pops up in a cell I just can’t help but feel a tiny disapointment. This weekend I’m going to start some cabbages and greens — chard, maybe some frissee, things I can pop in once (if ever) it stops snowing.

I’m finally seeing the bulbs start to poke up out of the mostly-frozen ground, and if it’s warm I might transplant those roses that currently live where the new fence is going to go. The birds are finally back at my feeder — chickadees and finches for the most part. And the past few days we’ve started hearing birdsong –oh! and I saw a migrating swan yesterday when we were walking the dogs. They’re so beautiful and so mean …

Dopey Dog …

Dopey Dog …

pc110015.JPGThis better work, because while my boy was really happy to see me when I picked him up this afternoon, he’s not a happy camper. That big square thing on his leg is the external fixature — pins sunk into his bones, and connected to rods to immobilize the whole lower leg joint. Here’s a close up. pc110016.JPG He also came home with a bottle of “analgesic elixir” — narcotics — and thank goodness. I got him home, and set up in his little bed (which normally lives under the kitchen table, but the cone kept getting hung up so I pulled him out into the room), and he started to make this very sad panting/crying kind of noise. So he got a prompt 2ccs of elixir (I’m thinking of him as my own little Lily Bart — with a better ending, of course) and they must have given him some of this at the vet, because he was very happy to lap it right up. He’d been pretty restless and uncomfortable, so I did what any loving pet owner would do — I drugged him. And now he’s sleeping in his little bed. I took the cone off for now — while I’ve got an eye on him and can keep him from chewing at his bandages, he doesn’t need it, but if I have to leave the house, it’s going back on.

At the end of the day, I was very happy to see my boy sitting up and grinning at me in the back of my car, silly cone and all. I just hope this works, because if we’ve put him through all this for nothing, I’m going to feel very very guilty.

Humpty Dumpty

Humpty Dumpty

Yesterday I took poor Gimpy Dog over to Billings to the veterinary orthopedist. Even typing that makes me feel slightly ashamed of myself — we live in a nation in which an enormous percentage of our population doesn’t even have human health care, and I’m spending how much money on orthopedic surgery for my dog? So anyhow, I was really hesitant about this whole thing — not just because of the money, but because the effect of the first surgery, which was supposed to increase his mobility had exactly the opposite effect — he fell apart entirely. But this guy is a specialist, and does a lot of orthopedic work on animals, and I figured he could give me a reasoned idea about what we were facing.

I left Owen there for about an hour or so while they took another set of xrays, and it turns out that he didn’t have the structural problems I had feared he did. His back is fine, his hips are good (one of the other docs thought his hips were arthritic), and his other knee is sound. His achilles tendon on the leg that had the knee operation is almost totally blown, and both hocks are pretty arthritic. But the vet was confident that he could fix the achilles, and that we could medicate the inflammation and pain in the hocks.

All of which was very good news. And so, I left the poor boy there and we’ll know by late this afternoon how the achilles operation went. He’ll come home with a whole external fixature device on (think the kinds of halos they use for broken necks) and we’ll go through another round of recovery and we’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed that he doesn’t blow the other achilles tendon (statistically, there’s a 50% chance).

While I’m enormously relieved that I didn’t have to put my sweet boy to sleep, I’m still not convinced that performing this kind of medical intervention on a pet is entirely warranted. Luckily, I have the money, and with any luck, this vet is a good judge of his own skills — but I wonder how fair is it to do this to an animal? I can’t explain to him what’s going on, or why we keep hurting him. All he knows is that we keep knocking him out and he wakes up with an incision, on drugs, and in this case he’ll have a device attached to his leg.

But on the other hand, I don’t have much faith in medical intervention for human beings either. I grew up in a cancer cluster in the 70s and 80s — we watched 2 kids and 2 moms in our immediate circle die long slow painful deaths, and there were probably another 6-8 peripheral people we knew who also died. When my cousin Dede was diagnosed last fall with breast cancer, her first impulse was to refuse the chemo — from what we’d seen, what good would that do? We had a long long talk on the phone, about how it was better now, how chemo actually works these days. Neither of us come from a place where our default emotional reaction is that doctors can make it better, that medical intervention actually works. I feel a little bit the same about the dog, that’s why I agreed to the operation — as I said to my mother, I can’t just kill my dog because I have no faith in medicine.

I came home from Billings absolutely exhausted yesterday. I was enormously relieved that this vet thinks he can help, and that I’ve got the money to pay for it. I was enormously relieved that I didn’t have to drive back with a crippled dog I was going to have to put down. But as emotional as this decision has been, and as much as I love my dog — I couldn’t help thinking about my one friend whose girlfriend is waging a heroic and drawn-out battle with cancer, or my other friend whose husband is currently sitting at his ex-wife’s deathbed (both, strangely enough, have pancreatic cancer) — and my heart was sore for both of them. I love my dog, and it would be a big sorrow to put him down, but it is not the same as losing a person. As tired as I was from all this, I can only imagine what they’re all going through — it’s a sad way to keep it all in perspective, but it does.