The Road

Today is Sunday and I've just posted this week's column which you can see here. It’s about the time my sister Nan here and our old dog Penny met a momma-bear on their way to the lake. Penny was such a silly dog: Once when the priest came to call, she came down the stairs with a mouthful of our mom's underwear in her mouth and dropped it in the startled man’s lap. Whenever guests left the room she would tilt her head sideways and v-e-e-e-r-y carefully extend an anteater’s tongue to score bonbon after bonbon from the little dish on the coffee table, giving the neighboring bonbons a good once-over in the process.Ah, she was a good dog and no dog do I have now, nor have had since Penny took that last trip to the vet at the end of her bouncy grateful life.I did have three cats, all gone now, one to traffic, one to a coyote, and one to a fast-growing tumor last April. For more than ten years we brought them with us on weekends away, I with one in my lap and another at my feet but today? Today my lap is as empty as a priest’s lap.David and I have a drive to make in a little while, two hours in the car. But instead of cradling Abraham and reassuring Charlotte I will sit in the passenger seat and snap the beans for supper, and write in my diary, and keep David company as we go, the road ribboning on before us, taking us who knows where.

when they were new, a gift from our children