Friday, August 26, 2016

A Walk In The Woods


A conversation around 6 am, Friday, August 26:

She dropped her pills.

No, she didn’t. I don’t see anything.

On the floor, right there.

There is nothing on the floor.

Why are you being like this?

 
Jerry’s morning was probably peaceful until I stomped into it. Why was I up after just 4 hours of sleep anyway?

I had stuffed a few pills into a lump of burger meat and fed it to Hershey, who knows by now that I am stuffing pills…

Around 11 am I see a small white pill on the kitchen floor, right where it must have fallen at 6 am. Oh.

She is sore today. She was stretched out on her bed that is now next to where I sleep and can reach her during the night. She wagged as I stepped over her, but stayed on the floor. She is slowing down quickly.

In the woods on our trail an hour later: She loves the cool forest floor and its early autumn leaves. Today I stand on the rise and wait while she sashays along, approaching a grove of Hemlock that opens on a ridge near a vernal pool. One of her favorite places to swim, the pool is filled now with ferns — a hollow that swells with rainwater and runoff from the rocky cliff above. In late autumn and early to mid spring, her tail wags in its shallows, tossing sprays of water left and right.

Hershey likes to sit in the Witch hazel’s thin shade, small branches overhead casting stripes on her face, waiting for the pool to fill.
 
It's just a cancer dance now as I watch and wait and stuff her burger meat.
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

2 comments:

  1. Your posts are just beautiful, Kendra. So eloquent at such a difficult time.

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  2. Many, many thanks. Hershey is a great dog. She is such a good and loving girly. The cancer is a terrible kind of inflammatory mammary cancer that strikes and swells in just days. We have cut it out twice, but that's not slowing it down. It did give us a little extra time to swim and hike and be outside in the sunshine.

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