life and stuff

Posted on episode 228

spayed

This morning I made a heart-aching drive to the veterinarian clinic to drop off a one-year-old puppy who, over the past almost-a-year has filled that same heart with joy … and for whom I’m returning the favour by having her reproductive organs surgically removed.

As per our agreement with the breeder, and in consultation with my friend-now-vet, the day finally arrived for this simple yet important procedure. We’re having her spayed.

spAd

It’s for her health. It’s for her happiness. It’s for her well-being.

I had thought the term was common, but my next door neighbour had never heard the term before and I had to spend a few minutes explaining it.

Any time a friend or family member (and a puppy is both, isn’t she?) goes under the knife it gives one pause for reflection and soul-aching empathy. My (very human) daughter has had minor surgery twice in her life and both times, even years later, are etched into my memory as if carved into steel with a diamond chisel.

The risks are, of course, the surgical process itself and the lingering feeling that I’m surgically altering my friend for what (at this exact moment) feels like a bit of a selfish, very human reason.

The benefits as I understand them are important: lowered risks of infections and cancers, and simply a life with fewer hormonal fluctuations. Plus, she can then safely attend daycare or local indoor dog parks and play with other dogs in a warm indoor space even as the winter rolls into a deep, immovable cold.

In the next few days we’ll be resting and recovering, chilling with lots of attention and careful pets … and maybe a few less belly rubs for a week or so.

Posted on episode 226

Short: Dusting

The inevitable happened.

We woke up this morning to the first snow of the season.

True, it wasn’t much more than a light dusting, bits of white clustered onto the outdoor furniture and holding stubbornly onto the shady places in the still-green grass.

But it was snow.

Just a little bit.

Though enough to signal the end of something, and the start of something else.

Something a lot chillier.

Posted on episode 213

Last Day of Summer

And just like that the leaves turned yellow, the air felt crisper, and another summer drifted into memory.

In three short months we managed to squeeze in quite a lot of action, particularlly considering that the world was still fairly locked down with this pandemic.

We visited the mountains for two weeks across two separate trips, completed a modest list of hikes, kayaked on a couple mountain lakes, photographed glaciers, and enjoyed the wilderness.

We cooked outdoors on our new backyard fire pit, roasting a crazy variety of meats, a garden’s worth of vegetables, and too many marshmallows to count.

We hosted friends in our backyard, spending lovely afternoons or evenings with (on different occasions) family for elaborate meals, co-workers for beers, friends for campfires, and my running crew for a brithday party.

We met our neighbours in the park, new friendly relationships spurred on by the magnetic conversation starting magic of a cute puppy who makes pals with anyone and drags me into it at the other end of a leash.

We ran as I hosted at least a dozen weeks of adventure runs around and just outside the city, encouraging a dozen (give or take) of my running crew to join me in exploring new trails and unfamiliar routes, often with an ice cream or beer at the end of it.

We enjoyed our own backyard.

We toured our own city.

We lived in our space, not always by choice, but making the best of the situation.

The summer of 2021 ends in a couple short hours and it may not have been perfect, but it certainly was not wasted.

Posted on episode 202

Friday Finds: Pressed Flowers

Fatherhood is funny.

Finding honest and interesting things to do with a young child can lead one down all sorts of previously unfollowed paths of creative exploration and into all kinds of time-filling follies.

For (nearly) fourteen years I’ve been nudging my daughter to try new things, to explore her creative self, and find fanciful ways to fill her mind with fabulous experiences.

For whatever reason for which I can’t quite recall, I was recently exploring something far less fanciful: the closet in my office… which is in itself an archeological site dating back to my having moved into the space well over a decade ago.

Finding my old university textbooks was not surprising, but finding those same textbooks stuffed full of dried wild flowers was something that I had obviously done long ago but almost forgotten about.

Foggy though my memory was on the exact timeline, I recall spending the day with my toddler-aged daughter in the local natural areas of the river valley, filling our days with simple delights and effortless fun.

Frolicking through the tall grasses and between the poplar trees, I remember that we picked flowers and I’d promised her that we would dry them and “make a present for mommy.”

Fascination is an emotion so easily overwhelmed by impatience, especially for someone only three or four years old, and I assume the flowers were stuffed into some conveniently fulsome tomes, my old microbiology textbook for one, to begin the drying and pressing process, then…

Forgotten.

Fast forward to this week and the aforementioned archeological dig through the back corners of my closet revealed a small stack of flagrantly outdated text books filled with the feathered edges of wax paper pressings, and a dozen or so samples of decade-old dried flowers.

Finding something meaningful to do with these fragments of my shared history with a daughter who is growing up and out so quickly may be a fruitless effort, or…

Forcing some kind of nostalgia into something so fleeting, a single day from a forgotten timeframe shared by a father and daughter my prove old-fashioned to her teenage eyes.

Faithless as that may seem, I almost stuck those textbooks back into the dark corners of my closet to wait out another decade.

Flowers, dried and brittle, imbued with some kind of narrative for a long lost day would likely age further and form an even more fortified link to that flipbook past given a few more fleeting years of passing time, or…

Forgotten again.

Frail and lost to time.

Famous to no one but my fleeting recollection of a fragile moment.

Fatherhood is funny, and fumbling my forties with emotions and curiously fading memories in unforeseen forms on an otherwise quiet Friday morning.