Day: May 28, 2018

When Maria throws herself into something, she is fierce and undistractible and unrelenting. She has amazing energy and focus. She decided this weekend to work on the gardens at the farm, and she and her faithful companion,  Fate, who has just as much energy and focus, kept watch.

Yesterday, Maria worked on the gardens and flowers on the back porch, today she dug up and began planting our expanded Three Sisters Garden, along the back side of the house. The Three Sisters is one of the great and enduring feminist legends.

The Three Sisters are Corn, Beans and Squash. They are seen as the three beautiful sisters because they grow in the same mound as the garden. The Corn provides a ladder for the Bean Vine. Together, they give shade to the Squash. The Cherokee Indians tilled the mound three times in a season.

My job is watering daily, I am faithful to it.

The Native American legend centers on three close sisters who were separated, and then came together again. The garden symbolizes the coming together of women, a fitting garden for our times. Maria loves this garden, and so do I. It is an unusual day that I don’t give thanks for living with such a proud  strong and loving woman.

She is my Willa  Cather Girl, a goddess of the prairie.

Saturday, we finally met Know, the father of Gus and hopefully, the father of our next dog, a Boston Terrier puppy we hope will be born in mid-July to Hannah, Gus’s mother. We want to do it again, and I want to pick up the small dog journey I began so hopefully with Gus.

Rather than mourn Gus’s loss, I decided the better option for me is get another dog and continue the very lovely journey he began with us. Knox is different that Gus. He looks much like him, and he is a handsome grounded dog, but he is also different.

Knox is calmer and very much at ease, even in strange circumstances.

After he sniffed every inch of our property, he just lay down in the grass to rest. He didn’t mind being photgoraphed either.

KnoxHe reminds me of Red more than Gus, he would make a wonderful therapy dog, he is very appropriate  yet affectionate with people. Knox inspires me to start thinking about training the new puppy, and we are excited about this new promise for the Fall.

We hope to have the new puppy in time for the October Open House, just as we had  Gus last year. There is something healing and natural about this, a way of closing the wound of Gus, of doing it once more with Robin Gibbons, the gentle, thoughtful breeder who was so pained at Gus’s loss.

One way or another, life happens to all of us, and all we can do is move forward and learn and open our hearts to the dance, to the experience of life. There is no one reading this who has not experienced loss or grief or disappointment. That is what it means to be a human, the task for me is to be a good human, or at least, as good a human as I can manage to be.