John's Painting!!

Trying Something New...

My good friend Sue sent me a book titled What It Is...the formless thing which gives things form by Lynda Barry. I read it several weeks ago, loved it, made a shopping list, failed to buy any of the stuff she recommended, dilly-dallied over the details of how to begin, forgot most of what I learned/loved/intended-to-do, got sick, got very sick, felt a little better, and then I made this.

The beautiful Juliette before...

In a business is like mine there is a lot of conversation with clients about "the coyote problem." In my experience, though, it's unusual to have much proof that coyotes took the pet.We were called last week on an unusual case in Dallas where the owner had awakened to see two coyotes had her cat cornered on her patio at 4 am. She tried to scare the coyotes away but ended up scaring the cat away, too, with the coyotes in hot pursuit.

She said she didn't hear any signs of struggle so had a slim hope that her cat might have gotten away from them. She was so surprised to find out that there were "coyotes right in the city." The area behind her condo was an extremely steep ravine with a creek at the bottom...huge trees, a lot of brambles and vines. To the left of her patio (the direction the three had run) were other condos and lots of good hiding places under decks, etc.

My dog Murphy was able to find one or more cats hiding under these decks, so our hopes swelled that this cat might be under there too. Alas, I felt compelled to search the ravine area before we left and within 1 minute Murphy found the remains of the beautiful cat. I wouldn't even have recognized her...I was looking for a white cat but needless to say she was hardly recognizable. Only the head and front paws remained and they were so caked with mud, I wouldn't have noticed them without the dog's help.

It was a grim find but I was glad to bring closure to a client who was the type to search for weeks and months if we hadn't gotten this evidence.When I saw the destroyed cat, I called to the client. She came down into the woods and identified the body by turning the head over so she could see the facial features. Then I took Murphy back to the car and gave him every treat I had in there, got a plastic bag and put all that was left of the cat in the bag. I took the bag up to the patio and sat there with the client for about an hour until she calmed down a bit.I think it went okay, all things considered, but I came away wondering if I'd handled it quite right...maybe I should have walked back up and explained what I found...I don't know...does anybody have a better idea?

Anyway, I was so proud of my dog...he really did his job on this one. It's hard to accept money from clients when things turn out as bad as this one did. My husband John, while I was debating about depositing the client's check, said "I'm sure the undertaker feels a little bit bad each time he digs a grave, but he collects the money just the same."

"As a human, and in these brief lives we are given, the job may be to donated blood, time and/or money to those in need.Beyond all of those, there are even more minute jobs: watching the sky, noticing someone's smile, observing a praying mantis, holding a sleeping baby, relishing in a sunrise...or being the keeper of dead baby birds.I am going to keep my job; even if that means I am weird."
This quote is from the blog of artist, writer, Jennifer Stevning, who also happens to be my neice. Her self-described job as keeper of dead baby birds inspired me to write about my weird job...well, one of them.
I sometimes walk with my dogs on some private property beyond the campground. You have to climb over two fences to get there, but I don't think the owner would mind. He or she keeps a wide path mowed sporadically that meanders throughout the property, going no place in particular.
At different times of year, I've gotten to see tons of wild flowers and a few unusual birds. It surprises me every time I go out there. I am also a little afraid of snakes--cotton mouths especially--but I think the wide path is some protection.
The coyotes though seem to like marking the path with their scat. It's so easy to distinguish it from regular dog poop because the ends are quite pointy and they contain a great deal of fur. Usually brown or grey fur...the rabbit they feasted on last night. In any event, I find it is my job to grab a stick and poke through the coyote poop. I'm not looking for rabbit fur but evidence that the coyote had a sweeter breakfast...perhaps someone's house cat or tiny little purse dog. I can picture the coyotes prancing about and bragging to their coyote friends, "Hey, Brutus, check it out, I could put this Yorkie in my purse. But nah, I think I'll just eat him." Hahaha, the coyotes chuckle.
So last week, I grabbed a stick and poked through a pile of scat I hadn't seen before. It lasts a long time because it is made of hair and bone, which is pure white and hard as...well, bone. I poked around a little more and found what I was looking for: a little red nylon collar. Couldn't tell if it belonged to a cat or dog, but it was definitely one or the other. I wished I had something to carry it in and realized I had the perfect vessel in my pocket: the poop bags I carry for my own dogs.
I showed it to everybody who would pay attention at the campground. It's my job. And I still have the sample. Maybe tomorrow I'll post a photo.

Summer Night

Tonight, after our staff meeting, I came home to our empty RV. Well, not empty of course...the dogs were inside wiggling with delight at my homecoming. John is gone: a business trip in Orlando followed by a family visit to his mom, dad, and Grandma Libby near Tampa.

Except for the dogs, I am home alone. We are having blissfully coolish temperatures. Sometimes, in Texas, it's still too hot at midnight to go for a walk. But tonight the dogs pour out of the coach and I let them have a rare leashless romp through the campground in the dark. They move like a pack of coyotes through the campsites, scavenging a hot dog bun and a stray marshmallow that missed its mark.

I let them run down by the lake, striking by moonlight, where the herons still wade in shallow water. I never knew they hunted this late.

We are celebrating one year as full-timers this week. That's what we call RVers who have given up their permanent moorings of house and home and driveway and mailbox for the looser tethers of a diesel powered house on wheels. We five, the dogs and John and I, have lived in less than 500 square feet for over 365 days. It's something to celebrate, I guess, if only for the fact that nobody has killed anyone else over a patch of carpet to lie on or 5 minutes of privacy in a bathroom that feels crowded even when you are alone in it. We even managed to grow tomatoes here, an accomplishment that eluded us when we had a real house and a real yard.

So here we are running through wet grass, panting from the exertion, scofflaws (of the leash law at least) until we whistle ourselves back home.

Finding M&Ms...and more Ms

Sorry about the annoying alliteration in this true tale. And it's long—sorry about that, too.

Maggie, a 9-year-old Dalmatian, escaped from a recreation area about 90 miles from home. It happened when Melissa, her owner, asked a friend to hold onto Maggie's collar while Melissa participated in a quick canoe race on the lake. Obviously, the friend didn't do a very good job of hanging onto the dog because Maggie escaped, trying to find her mom. The friend chased Maggie and then followed her in a car but lost her in alleyways on Saturday afternoon. Melissa, with the help of family and friends, had scoured the area for 24 hours with no luck. Melissa's stepmom had hired a pet detective to find a missing dog once, and she found my website http://www.lostpetspecialist.com/.

When Melissa called me for help, I recommended large fluorescent posters and a neighborhood notification system called FindToto.com. Melissa did everything I told her to. Still no Maggie.

By the time I was able to get there, Maggie had been missing for 3 days. I met up with Melissa at the point where her Dalmatian was last seen. I gave Murphy, my search dog, the scent of the missing dog from a piece of her bedding. Murphy, an Australian shepherd, is a pretty good cat detection dog, but he has always been a little wobbly on tracking and trailing lost dogs.

I mean, face it—tracking is hard. Imagine an Easter egg hunt where you are blindfolded and have to find the eggs with your nose by following the footprints of the person who hid them three days ago. Plus, Murphy is also a bit of a goof-off. One whiff of a squirrel or rabbit can distracts him to no end. You could say that my confidence was "low-ish" as Murphy raced along through the neighborhood, nose on the ground, dragging me behind him.

So, I was as surprised as anybody when the owner, who was following along, said, "Omigod...there are bloody paw prints on the sidewalk!" The prints were dry, about the right size for a Dalmation, and enough to break your heart. If these were Maggie's prints, she had run until her pads wore through.

Murphy was trailing along the adjacent shrubbery—we have no practice with tracking bloody paw prints—so he was unaware that we humans were receiving visual confirmation of the trail. I admit I was tempted to follow the visual trail rather than Murphy's nose. Every time he made a turn away from the bloody prints, I thought, "NO! NO! The prints go that way!" But then we'd cross the grass or dirt and there would be the prints again, on the next solid surface. "Okay," I said to myself, "trust your dog."

This went on for about two hours. The Texas sun was scorching and it was really getting too hot for Murphy to work much longer. We had already gotten yelled at for trespassing by an old farmer guy, so we had to go the long way around his property. Even when we were beyond his property in a heavily wooded gully, he was still yelling at me over the fence. "Little Lady!" he said. "You are gonna get ate up by chiggers down there and probably snakebit. You need to get out of there!"

Now, I hate it when people call me Little Lady, but the idea of snakes really did scare me. But I looked up at Murphy and he was pulling hard into his harness, staring straight ahead into what I was sure was a pit of vipers, probably copperheads. I decided to follow him deeper into the gully. "Well, you may have to call the paramedics then," I yelled over my shoulder to the old farmer guy. And we kept going.

No more than 20 paces farther, Murphy stopped stock still, head up. In the tall brush beyond him, expecting to see a deer, I saw one black dot on a white background, then two…Maggie. I called out to the owner, who ran to her dog. Maggie was smart enough and tired enough to let herself be caught. A very dehydrated and foot-sore Dalmatian was delivered to her friends at the nearby fire station where Melissa's dad works. It was beautiful—shiny red firetrucks, firemen in uniform, lifesavers themselves, fawning over Murphy and the Dalmatian he'd rescued. Of course, I didn't have my camera with me—dumb, I know—I missed a great photo opportunity.

During the rescue though, I hadn't missed the opportunity to yell back at the old farmer guy, "We found her! We found her down here!" Of course I had a little twang of the triumphant-I-told-you-so in my voice. And he was nice enough to admit, "Little Lady, that's the most amazing thing I've ever seen."

Blog Slacker

Ugh, I'm so embarassed that it's been 3 weeks since my last post. This blogger...someone should flog her. I have two good reasons for my being such a slacker. (Actually, there are lots of reasons, but they aren't very good, such as "needed to lay on the floor and stair at the ceiling for 2 hours.")

#1--I went to the eye doctor a couple of weeks ago. While there, I got a routine glaucoma screening and a surprise. Apparently my optic nerve on the left side is about 4 times the normal size. This fact gets me labeled as a "glaucoma suspect" and wins me another round of testing, which I also flunk.

This has dragged out over a couple of weeks and will probably drag out a couple more, so they can put me through the torturous "field of vision" test (also known as the anxiety attack generator) again, so I can flunk again.

Anyway, the reason this has negatively effected my blog-writing is that the time I would normally spend obsessing over my blog has to be spent obsessing about my huge, bulging optic nerve.

#2--Don't worry...this excuse is not so depressing: We've had the prettiest weather I've ever experienced in North Texas. Ever. I mentioned this to my dental hygienist and she said, "Don't you remember all those beautiful spring days from when you lived here before?" Of course, by then she had her hands in my mouth again, so all I could say was "uh-huh."

What I do remember about my first summer in Texas, back in 1998, was the 50 days in a row where the temperature was over 100 degrees. I remember trying to figure out where to hide when the tornado sirens blared their wizard-of-Oz warning. I remember getting hit in the neck by a golf-ball sized hailstone when the clouds were still 5 miles away.

So, when these San Diego-like days popped up, well, I really turned into a slacker. I even took up kayaking on Grapevine Lake. Some of you may remember a story I wrote last year about a fellow camper who drove me a little bit crazy, trying to get me to join her in some activities, one of which was kayaking.

Well, Joni came back to the campground, on her way from Florida to Colorado. When I saw her big green Monoco motor-home come lumbering into the park, I was filled with kayak dread. But even a stalwart boat-hater like me couldn't say no to the still-as-glass water, herons hunting at its edge, turtles ducking underwater as I passed in my big yellow kayak. Even if I might have glaucoma, especially if I have glaucoma, I had to get out on that water.

I Miss My Phone

When my husband John and I decided to live in our RV, we knew we'd be giving up a lot, making changes of heroic proportions.

I was talking with my therapist, Jon Benigas, normally a pretty unflappable guy, while we were trying to extricate ourselves from the construct of home-as-we-knew it. What to keep with us in the motor home? What to put in a storage unit? What to throw in a heap on the front porch for the Craigslist vultures who were circling my neighborhood waiting for my next posting of free stuff? And what about the eight linear feet of winter coats, jackets, vests that we absolutely had to have to get through a Midwest winter? And don't even get me started on gloves, mufflers, mittens, hats, and scarves. Or Christmas china.

I swear, my therapist was about to have a nervous breakdown right along with me, just thinking about his own coat closet. But by the end of the session, he would reel us both back in. I remember him saying, "Bonnie, I don't think you're fully appreciating the enormity of what you are doing. What you are doing is huge."

And another time, "Most people only dream of making a change of this magnitude. You're actually doing it. Remember that."

"Right," I'd say. "It is huge." And thus, propped up by his empathy and that mysterious-whatever-it-is that makes good therapy good, I'd trundle off for a few more days of frantic sorting, choosing, packing, and giving away the one million or so items that had taken over our lives.

One of the things I gave away was a really nice set of three cordless phones. I loved those phones--one in the basement, one on the main floor, one upstairs--but I wouldn't be needing them anymore. No land line...no land line phones...and no land line bills. In the motor home, it'd be cellphones only.

Of all the stuff I shed in those months last year, I believe I miss my phone the most. My real phone--the one where I could hear the breath and words of my caller and not the gale force winds that surround her or the roar of a passing diesel truck.

Of course, I love my cellphone. How did I ever live without it? But it lacks something, something I can't quite put my finger on, something that has to do with timing mostly. Maybe it's the the ability to interject without interrupting that you have on a land line. That you can say something funny and hear your caller chuckling at the same time on a land line. But try to be funny on the cellphone and the conversations usually devolves into "What?" "What??" "Go ahead." "No, you go ahead." "Oh never mind; what were you saying?" Like that.

When we moved into our RV, we had originally planned to stay in the St. Louis area, where I would've continued my long lazy journey toward mental health with my beloved therapist. But then my husband was transferred to Dallas, and our already-topsy-turvy life became both topsier and turvier.

I think my therapist was almost as panicked as I was. Perhaps we had chosen too leisurely a pace toward congruence--I don't know. But I noticed that he tried to pack a lot into those last few sessions, tried hard to tie up as many of my loose strings as he could. He offered to continue my sessions via email or phone.

"Email??" I screeched. "Are you out of your frigging mind? It's taken us five years of talking to get to this point! I'll die of old age before we get anything solved via email." He knows perfectly well that I am a very slow writer.

"Well, what about by phone then?"

"I don't know," I sulked. "Maybe. I'll think about it. I'll have to see if I have any leftover money in my flexible spending account." My insurance company had already told me it would cover only face-to-face sessions.

Well, whatever was left in my flexible spending account got eaten up by my knee surgery. And I tried getting both a new cellphone and a new wireless company, hoping to improve my conversations enough to conduct the serious business of therapy. Neither was especially helpful.

One thing I have not tried is getting a new therapist. The idea of breaking in a new one gives me the hives.

Why Was I Resisting This?

From Steven Pressfield's The War of Art:

Most of us have two lives. The life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance....Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

And Bubba, I know what Resistance is. It has kicked my butt a thousand ways: procrastination, perfectionism, distraction, vanity, self-loathing, addiction. Sometimes Resistance resorts to controlling me with heart-stopping terror, but most of the time it gets off cheap, with nothing more than slight fluttering fears. But not today; today, I win.

How do I know I've won? Because in about 5 minutes, come hell or high water, I'm going to click the button that says "Publish Post." I will. I swear I will.

But first, I have to tip my hat to Resistance by fiddling around with the font size and format, by proofreading 12 times, by wigging out about who will read this and what they will think, by dinking around with every comma and semicolon, by patting myself on the back one more time for being a good speller, and then asking the spell-checker to confirm this fact, just in case. Plus, I'm getting a little hungry for lunch and there is a nice piece of pot roast calling my name from the fridge. Okay, maybe it'll be more like 20 minutes, tops, before I click "Publish."

No, no. It will be now, here, this minute. I win.

Changing Blog Address

Oh...silly me...I just realized that I started this blog for my lost pet recovery business, which, I see now, is entirely too narrow. I need a big wide river in which to wash, to wade, to cast a line for bright sparkling fish. Thus, the name/address change.

One of the great things about workamping is that you have time to fiddledefart with your gadgets!

Straight But Not Narrow

I've always said that I have a hard time making friends. I'm prickly, standoffish, and have a hard time keeping a pleasant look on my face. I've known this all my life.
Yet, I suddenly noticed the other day, that I have 5 new friends who say they love me every time we speak. One is the husband of my friend, Vicki. Maybe I shouldn't say that Bill is a new friend--I've known him for 5 years now--but I just noticed the I-love-you thing. He also calls me BonBon, a true sign of friendship.
Another is Chris, a woman who lives across the street from the campground where we're parked. Chris is a little gnome of a woman who befriended me when I trespassed (just a little) on her property because my dog could not resist the delicious scent of mice that inhabit her land. Chris and her husband, "The Buzzard," just celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary. First we waved. Then we chatted. Then we exchanged phone numbers, and now we love each other.
Friends #3 and #4 are Nan and Leota, an older gay couple whom I fell in love with immediately. My husband and I spotted them right away when they pulled into the campground in their motor home.
"Do you think they're nuns?" John said.
"I doubt it," I said. "One of them is drinking a beer. At 10 a.m."
"Nuns drink," John said.
I gripped him by the shoulder and said, "Honey, they aren't nuns."
"Oh."
It's almost impossible to find fellow Democrats in any campground. But especially here in the Bush-land of Texas, it's almost solid Republicans. I thought I spotted an Obama t-shirt on one of them, probably Nan, and since I think of myself as straight-but-not-narrow, I found the first excuse to mosey through their campsite. Now we love each other.
My newest friend is Seth, the grandson of another fellow camper. I would've guessed he's no more than 25, but I hear he's in his forties. It's too bad that the term "simple-minded" is out of vogue--it describes Seth perfectly. I don't know what the right term is, but you get the idea.
My husband is comfortable with people like Seth and greeted him warmly. I sort of ducked around the corner. But Seth sidled up to me anyway, put his big arm around my shoulder.
"Seth loves blondes," his grandpa joked. And apparently he doesn't care how brassy the blonde or that its wearer is nearly 50.
Later that day, he wrote me a note:

Hi Bonnie,
I am glad you're here.
I love you.
You are special.
You are my friend,
from Seth

Maybe I should stop saying that I don't make friends easily. Maybe it's just one of those lies I've been telling myself all my life.

I Hate Writing

Oh...I just had the greatest conversation with my neice, Jenny, on the topic of filling our creative void, finding our creative voice.
I told her (in confidence of course) that I am a really good writer, but that I hate writing.
Jenny said, "I never knew that."
"No, it's true," I said. "It hurts me to write. It hurts my shoulders and my hands. It hurts my neck...Once, my husband called me at home while I was working on my master's thesis. He called me at 9 a.m. to ask me how it was going. I told him I was stuck on this one idea--I don't remember now what it was--and that I had been pounding away on this one sentence for, like, an hour."
I told Jenny that he called me two hours later to check on me and I had only written two sentences since then and I was really no closer to finishing my thought than I had been when he called before.
"I get all sweaty," I told Jenny. "I bite the inside of my lip until it's raw. I'm really good at it, I told her, but it hurts."
It's not like painting, I told her, where I enjoy the process (sort of), where there is a logical progression from thinking and looking to sketching and drawing, then (heavens open) and color is applied, light is brought to paper and heaven is brought to earth.
"Writing's not like that," I told her. "It's excruciating."
But I am a good speller, a very good word picker, and an excellent orderer of words . I can do it, it's just very painful.
Jenny said, "I never knew that. That must be terrible."
It is. Trust me, it is.