Boone

The thing about a dog’s life is that it fits, in its entirety, within a short span of your own. Our other loved ones extend beyond that scope. Our parents exist before us and so, when they get old, if they get old, we make ourselves feel better when they pass with the justification that they lived long, full lives. Our children, we can only hope, live on long after we are gone and so when it is our time to say goodbye to them, we do so believing they will have long, full lives too. There is no such comfort really when we say goodbye to our dogs. And there is no relationship really that compares to that one.

Boone was the first love I ever committed to—the first relationship I went into knowing that, no matter what, I would be with him until the end, care for him until the end, and love him unconditionally. Even my marriage is not, if I’m being honest, guaranteed on these fronts.  And yet the man I am married to deserves so much of the credit for Boone’s existence in my life at all.

When I gave up my traveling job and moved home to Vermont, I rented an apartment in Montpelier and got a job teaching English nearby. Sam lived nearby too but we did not yet live together. In fact we had never lived in the same state prior to that time and adjusting to that new circumstance was challenging. Instead of seeing each other once every three months, and missing each other from a distance in between, we worked in the same place and saw each other every day. For two independent people, that was challenging. Especially since one of those independent people was struggling to figure out what the next phase of her life would be, and not being very independent in the process. 

Coming down off the adventure of two and half years of teaching and traveling, I had to re-calibrate my whole sense of self. I got a new job teaching, but it wasn’t the same. And I still had adventures, but they weren’t the same. Instead of starting every day with an extended family of travelers in a game of ultimate frisbee before breakfast, and then climbing, or kayaking, or backpacking or surfing every afternoon, I had a lot of quiet time in my apartment by myself. Sam and I spent most nights together, but on the occasion when we took a night off, I gave in to doubts about my decision to settle and doubts about my reason for doing so—being with him. My doubts, surely, were contagious and Sam, rightly, felt caged by my insecurities, my jealousies and my sudden dependence on him. 

At the end of that first year, I knew something had to change. I quit the teaching job that wasn’t as exciting as the one before it, and took a job that felt more aligned with the person I thought I had become—an adventurous traveler who needed to roam, if not as often, at least periodically. The unfortunate reality was that most of the time, it was a desk job, facilitating other people’s travel adventures. And as I drove to and from that desk job, and I sat all day at that desk, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to regain my sense of self and my capacity for joy. It was a puzzle, at first, when I took stock and realized I seemingly had all I wanted: I had a place of my own, with a kitchen I had been longing for, a partner I sometimes loved (and sometimes just couldn’t shake), I had access to adventures and travel. Still, I felt rootless and unhappy, until at some point I realized, prior to my traveling job, I had always had a dog. 

To have a dog is to have a sense of purpose—someone else whose needs must be tended to before our own: meals, walks, play and love. The momentum in my desire to have a dog built quickly. A puppy, I knew, would make me laugh, keep me company, and get me out in the woods. I knew I was a better person when I had a dog in my life, and so I set to work finding one. 

I knew that I wanted a yellow lab, like our old family dog Ben, who had become my dog for a time. The first lab puppies I went to see were all black and because I was over-eager, I brought one home. He was absurdly sweet and docile and he sat curled up next to me on the seat of my truck. I named him Merle and, as I drove toward Sam’s apartment, I glanced down at him over and over again. Each time I saw his sweet dark eyes looking up at me, I thought first how sweet he was and, second, that he didn’t have the yellow face I had been imagining. I convinced myself that was okay, for about two hours. But soon after I introduced him to Sam, who fell instantly in love with him, I was determined to take him back. When I announced that decision, the shock on Sam’s face was unnerving. He pleaded with me not to go through with it and I sensed, in that moment, that I might be risking more than the loss of a sweet dog by doing so. Nevertheless, Merle was not the dog I knew I was meant to have.

A short time later I found another litter—this time the labs were yellow. I drove to Georgia, Vermont to see the puppies. The parents of the litter were athletic looking field dogs. The father had been a bomb detection dog, working for the FBI if I recall correctly. They were "working dogs," I was told, but at the time I didn’t really know what that would mean.

I sat down on the wood floor and enjoyed having the puppies play around and with me. One puppy was more purposeful than playful. He climbed up on my lap and put his front paws on my chest. He leaned in close and looked me in the eye. Seemingly unimpressed, he hopped back down, turned his back to me and took a leak on the floor. Before he was done, he glanced at me over his shoulder, as if to say, “What are you going to do about it?” I knew then that was the dog for me. He was bold, confident and independent—irreverent even—and those were the qualities in myself I was trying to regain. 

I left my deposit and started making plans to bring him home. I said I would be back and I left there excited that I’d found my guy. I could barely wait to pick him, until it was time to pick him up. Inexplicably, when it was time to go get him, I panicked. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was happening, but I called the owner and said something had come up and I’d have to postpone for another couple of days. And in those days, I got excited again, until it was time, again, to pick him up. By the third time when I tried to postpone, the owner was onto me. “This pup needs to go,” he told me, and that time I said I would be there, for sure, the next day. 

This is where Sam comes back in to the story. He was increasingly confused, agitated even, by my indecision. I told him I needed his help—I needed him to come with me and convince me, if I tried to change my mind again, that it was the right thing to do. About two miles from the house, I did change my mind again and, in a panic, I told Sam to pull over. “What if it’s too much work?” I asked. It wasn’t so much a question as a plea, and Sam’s answer came without hesitation. “The work is the joy,” he told me, an imperative more than an answer, and it was enough.

At the end of the long driveway from the house overlooking the lake was a wide open field. We stopped the car and got out with Boone to let him run around a little and get used to us. He ran in wide circles like a dog possessed, tail tucked and eyes wild. He ran at us, nipped at us, and when he was caught, he wriggled away and ran some more. Eventually, we got back in the car and he settled in my lap, and Sam drove us back to Montpelier where Boone and I would live together and Sam would visit increasingly often, both of us happier, and better off together, by virtue of Boone’s presence in our lives.

In those early days, Boone and I went to the city’s woods trails together twice a day for hour-long walks, early in the morning and later in the evening after work. And when I went to my desk job during the day, Boone came with me and slept and chewed on toys under my desk. Eventually, I went back to that teaching job nearby, and Boone came with me there too. And on a campus full of kids, Boone was happy, and I was happy again too. He licked everyone in sight, fetched lacrosse balls, and ran to the far end of campus to submerge himself fully in the muddy drainage of the upper field. 

One winter afternoon, when the field was covered in snow, I watched some kids throwing a white lacrosse ball into the snow. One of the kids was laughing at him. “That dog is so dumb,” he said, “he thinks he’s going to find that ball!” He kept laughing until Boone did find the ball and then returned and dropped it at his feet. That kid hadn’t been the one throwing the ball, but he was the one to receive it, and at that point the whole crowd was laughing, but not at Boone. 

One spring afternoon, on that same field, I looked out from inside one of the buildings in time to see Boone collapse, mid-stride, as he ran back to another student with another lacrosse ball in his mouth. He had been out there for a while and after each thrower got bored and moved on, Boone would find another thrower. It wasn’t the only time he ran until he collapsed; we learned early on that we would have to end the game for Boone, because he would never end it on his own; he would keep going long past when it was safe for him to do so.

Some of his working tendency was put to good use. When I lead a seventeen day backpacking trip for a handful of girls, Boone came with us for the first 65 miles, from the Canadian border to the base of Mount Mansfield, on the bottom of the Smuggler’s Notch road. At that point, with vertical ladders ahead of us on the trail, I had to send him home with Sam. It was a hard goodbye as up to that point, Boone had been the leader who held our group together—even though that job was my responsibility. He was young—only two years old—but he showed me on that trip what being a working dog meant. He carried his own pack and all his own food, and spent each of the seven days hiking circles around us. As the only adult on the trip, and the slowest hiker by far, I always hiked last. The girls knew to stop at every intersection and wait for me to catch up, so we could be sure everyone was on the right path. When we were in motion, Boone would run ahead to the girls in front, and then run back to check on me, and he would keep moving in that circular way the whole day. At the end of each day, once we were close to our next shelter, I would usually leave ahead of the girls from the last break point, and arrive with Boone first. While I took off my boots and settled in to the camp, Boone paced back and forth at the top of the trail until the last of the girls arrived safely. Only then would he find my sleeping bag, lie down and fall quickly to sleep. He counted every head and wouldn’t rest until all were safe. It was early June when we did that trip, and it was still cold and damp in the mountains. Boone slept inside my sleeping bag with me each night. And each morning he was the first one up in the cold, licking the tops of the girls' heads to wake them. He was eager to put his pack on each day and get back to work.

All of Boone’s adventures with me were purposeful. When we took him to Green River Reservoir for his first canoe trip, he refused to get in the canoe and insisted he’d swim. The reservoir is big, 653 acres with 19 miles of shoreline, and Boone swam much of it alongside our canoe. We stayed close to shore so he could, if he wanted to, get out for a rest, but even on those “rests” he was running. Another trip back, sometime later with Mary and her dog, I left the canoe in their care and swam the big crossing from the island to the take out with Boone. He was a powerful swimmer and I struggled to keep up. Swimming from shore I could race him…I’d throw out a frisbee or a stick and we’d sprint side by side to get it. And on the return I could lightly take hold of his tail and he would tow me back in with ease. 

Boone’s retrieval instinct was mostly wasted on me. He would have been an incredible duck dog, but he was relegated to frisbees and lacrosse balls. Nevertheless, he gave all of his fetching a serious and relentless attention. He would launch himself off any cliff or dock in pursuit of something to bring back. And he would do the same to satisfy a command. Once I was hiking with him and he took off after a scent and found himself on a parallel trail that climbed up a steep hill. I saw him at the top of a cliff and called for him to come. I assumed he would backtrack and catch up, but instead, without hesitation, his eyes locked on me, he leapt from the cliff and landed at my feet. Fortunately it was a snowy soft landing. 

For a while, I brought him to agility courses, to give him the sense of purpose he seemed to crave, and in doing so give myself the sense of purpose I also seemed to need. I brought him everywhere with me. He loved being in the car and he rode stretched from the folded-down back seats across the console between the two front seats, either looking out the windshield with me, or resting his chin on my shoulder. In those first years, he gave me all that I needed.

When Sam bought our land and we started clearing it, Boone fell in love with the place as we did. He loved being part of the work, always throwing small logs at our feet as Sam felled trees and I cut branches. He was a menace really, always a bit too close to the action. If you got fed up and threw his stick in the burn pile, he would retrieve it, even if it was on fire. We did that only once. For Boone, Sam’s maxim was true: the work was the joy. 

Once the house was built, we started leaving him home more often. Moses was with us by then as well, and they seemed to like being settled here during the day. The landing by the window I wanted to build, as place I would read and have tea, quickly became Boone’s perch. He claimed the brown sheepskin as his own, and from there he watched the driveway for our return. The woods walks Boone and I took in his first year in Montpelier were nothing compared to our explorations on this hill. The logging roads and snowmobile trails go on and on and my hikes with Boone and Moses here have been our best. We’ve stumbled upon moose and bear many times, and there are more berries in the late summer than any of us can ever eat. 

When Sam and I were contemplating having a kid, one of the conditions for me was that after having one, I did not want to face pressure from Sam to have another. I remember having a conversation with him about it. We were on the last leg of walking the upper loop, with Boone and Moses ahead of us on the road. Sam and I both had dogs growing up and could recall preferring their company to that of all others. We could have only one child, we agreed, if we made sure she always had a dog in her life.

When Quinn came along, our dogs were no longer the center of attention, but we justified this shift by reasoning that they had each other, they had a good home, and that a dog’s life up on this hill, wandering freely in the midst of so much wild nature, is a good life. Boone ate peas and tomatoes and carrots in my garden, and he got lost for hours of happy grazing in the blackberry brambles that emerged after we cut down our trees. He took naps on the porch and in the grass, and in winter he rolled around in the snow. He’d run happily along as we skied, sledded, hiked, biked or ran. But over time, of course, he ran a bit slower, and his hips would take longer to recover from the running. Eventually, on our longer adventures, we had to leave him home and as we moved away from the house, we could see him in the window from the landing on his sheepskin, howling audibly for a long time, begging us to bring him too.

The heartbreak of that eased when he stopped howling behind the door, but other heartbreaks were coming. He grew more and more stiff and eventually we started noticing that when he went to lie down on his side, he’d get to a certain point and flop over (rather than roll gently down)--his head landing on the wood floor with a thud. His bark evolved to a yowl. He grew increasingly disoriented, whining to go out and then whining to come in. In the night he’d wander into a corner or under the dining room table and would yowl for a rescue. He started going to the bathroom in the house, and seemed unaware he was doing so. 

This past summer I started reckoning with the irreversible signs of his aging and decline. We started talking about whether we’d need to put him down, and we started talking to Quinn about what that would mean. By September, when we had a break from the daily grind of the beginning of the school year, we planned for the vet to come to the house and do that work. And I picked out a little flat spot on the far side of the garden where I imagined laying him to rest—the first spot to see the sun rise up over the eastern ridge. But as we got closer to the date, I grew increasingly confused. Maybe he wasn’t suffering, maybe he was just old? Maybe I was rushing him? The day before our appointment, I walked into the vet’s office and found Donna, the kind, trusted woman who has taken care of Boone along with our vet Roy, since Boone was a pup. “He’s confusing me,” I told her and she smiled as if it wasn’t first time she’d heard that plea. She brought me into the office and we talked it through. I told her all the reasons I was thinking it might be time, and all the reasons I was thinking it might not be time. She helped me process through it and I decided to wait a little longer. 

The next morning, sitting on the porch with my morning coffee, Boone walked over to me—an increasingly rare gesture—and put his chin on my lap and gave me a lick. I swear I saw his tail wag once. I was sure that morning that he and I had just had a very close call and I was relieved for this second chance. We had the most beautiful weather this fall; it was sunny and warm nearly every day for two months. And Boone got to wallow in all of it. In that time, Quinn made a point to spend long periods of time loving him, and her example reminded us to do the same each day. He got lots of love these past two months. 

But the signs, of course, were still there and they were more and more clear. He slept nearly all the time and when he wasn’t sleeping, he was pacing. Occasionally he wandered off. One day he wandered 3/4 of a mile down our hill to a far neighbor’s house. Thankfully she brought him in, gave him water and called us. We all assume he got going down hill and just kept going. It was hard for him to turn around—his left hind leg often held off the ground—and he got lost easily. I paid closer attention after that, never letting him go out of my sight. This week, when I saw him heading out the driveway, I watched to see him head up the hill toward the apple orchard—an old favorite place. I followed him but decided to keep a little distance, studying him as I had begun to do, looking for a sign. He ambled slowly along, stumbling now and then, seemingly unaware I was with him. Eventually he paused and looked around, a bit confused, or tired, or both, and I was glad to step up then and put my hand on his neck. He turned and followed me home.

In my clear thinking moments, I’ve known for some time now that it has been “the time.” And yet just as easily as I could call up the reasons for knowing that, I could also easily dismiss them with reasons to let him keep going. But the beautiful fall is over, and the cold weather has started to settle in, and as much as I have dreaded losing him, I’ve also dreaded watching him slip and fall on the ice, or see the cold settle in to his unpadded bones. 

Still wrestling with the decision, I went to websites looking for answers. Many of them recommend making a list of your dog’s favorite things to do, and noting the point in time when he can no longer do two or three of them. I made a list in my head, and then made that list with Sam and Quinn: frisbee, hiking, swimming, playing with us, chewing toys. Boone hasn’t been able to do any of those things for a while, some of them a painfully long while. I called the vet on Monday and stopped at the farm store on the way home to pick something up for Sam. I walked by the rawhide bones and picked one up for Boone. When I gave it to him, he perked up quite a bit—more life in him than I’d seen in a while. I sent Moses outside so Boone could enjoy a chew in peace. He was happy, but he couldn’t hold it the way he once could. I held it for him, but his soft gums easily bled. He gave up on it pretty quickly and went back to sleep.

On the way to school on Tuesday, Quinn said, “You know, Mom, I don’t like the spot you picked for Boone.” That was upsetting as I didn’t think I could make any more decisions—that one, I thought, was already done. “But why?” I asked her, “I thought you’d like it; you can see it from the window seat in your room, and he’ll be able to see the house.” “It’s not tucked in,” she told me, “It’s too out in the open. I think he needs to be tucked in and protected.” 

I thought about this after I dropped her off. I’m building a cabin next summer, a space I hoped Boone would someday be with me, though I knew it was too far off. I’m still trying to find the right landing place for that cabin and though we now have ample open space, many sweet spots with beautiful views, I have known from the very beginning of our time on this hill that I would someday have a cabin in the woods. It will be much more complicated to build it, but all along I have explained, to myself and others, I want it to be “tucked in.” 

Yesterday I asked Sam to dig a hole under the red maple tree off the corner of our back porch, tucked in by the sweep of the house, tucked in under the tree with the beautiful red leaves, a spot I will pass each time I walk to my future cabin, or walk to the door of my now fenced in garden. It’s right next to our new blueberry bushes (Boone loved berries), and it still has a beautiful view. From my bedroom and Quinn’s bedroom, and every other window on the south side of our house, we can all look out and see that resting place.

Dr. Hadden and Donna came to the house last night. All day I vacillated, as I have for months now, between knowing and doubting that it was the time. It was a warm day yesterday and I spent some of it stacking wood and some of it sitting with Boone as he slept. One moment I felt at peace, another moment I felt the panic rise up. At 2:30 in the afternoon when he seemed to want his dinner, I caught myself thinking, “it’s too early!”…and then, of course, I fed him. I cried all day. And while I dreaded the vet’s arrival, I also felt that I needed him to come because I needed his help. I have been circling around it for so long. Before they arrived, Boone had woken up and started walking his circles around the house. I sat on the low step stool and each time he passed my spot, he came to me and let me rub his head and his ears. I cried, and apologized, until he’d start walking again. 

I greeted them at the door and was crying still. Before they even had their jackets off, I told them how confused I was. They understood, and mercifully started talking. “Does he pace like this all the time?” Donna asked. I told her yes and she nodded in a knowing way, though I didn’t really know what it meant. Dr. Hadden said a bunch of kind, helpful things which are now all kind of a blur, but this one moment I recall is when things started to come clear. I had admitted that Boone pooped on the rug almost every day, that he stumbled a lot, and he could no longer see, hear or smell anything. "Yeah," Dr. Hadden said, "but he senses that you're here so he's just going to keep going." I didn't yet see where he was going. "Maybe these things are okay," I said, "maybe that's just him being old?” I had worried all day that it wasn’t his time and that maybe I was putting him down just because the work was harder. “Am I just giving up on him?” I had to ask. It was more of a plea than a question. “No!" he said, "You can cross that one right off your list. Guys like this just don’t know how to stop,” he told me “and we’ve gotta help them let go.”

There was more talking after that, more light-hearted joking to ease the sadness of it all, but that was the point that helped me know. Boone had never been able to stop, but I had forgotten that about him. In witnessing the whole of Boone’s life, my sense of him evolved over the years and I greeted him each day as the dog he appeared to be. I forgot about the dog he once was, and who he still was, inevitably, on the inside. A dog who thrived having a job to do, who lived every day with a sense of purpose, who was relentless in his determination to do whatever work he was doing--and willing to do it long past the time it was safe for him to do so. I failed to see that staying alive had become his work, and it was work he was probably not doing for himself. Just as I used to have to take the frisbee or the ball away from him, I had to make this decision for him too. It was easily the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make.

I knew I would be with Boone when he died, but I also knew I would not be able to bury him. I warned Sam in advance and he agreed to do it for me. Sam always agrees to help me when I need him to. In spite of having spent nearly as much time with Boone as I have, Sam has always let me think of Boone as my dog. But there’s no doubt he was Sam’s dog and Quinn’s dog too. I said goodbye to him when he was laying on the blanket in our warm house, while Sam took the brown sheepskin out and laid it under the maple tree. When he came back in, and gathered Boone up in his blanket, Quinn insisted she wanted to help too, so she ran for her boots and jacket, and she carried the lacrosse ball out to bury it with him. Her courage and stubborn determination impress me—and I realize now, remembering Boone more fully, that she has these qualities in common with the dog she helped bury last night. 

I made it as far as the porch, which is farther than I thought I would go in that moment. When I looked out into the darkness and saw Quinn laying across the grass, reaching down to pat him, and realized she was crying for the first time all night, I called her to me, picked her up and carried her inside to wait for Sam. I will always be grateful that he helped me bring Boone into my life, and that he helped me let go of him too.

This morning we woke to the first real snow of the winter. Evergreen branches are dusted white. After Sam and Quinn left the house, I went out and put the sod back in place over Boone’s spot. When the snow melts, on the other side of winter, I hope I will feel joy in my memories of him. Right now I just feel an aching sadness for the friend who helped me find myself when I was lost, and who has kept me company on every step of the journey since. 

Resolution

It has been seventeen months since I wrote my last “monthly” essay, and many months before that since the habit was in fact a monthly one. Every week I have missed it. My feelings evolved from an anxiousness at having missed a month’s end deadline, to a developing fear that I would fall out of the writing habit, to a sadness at the realization that I was having less and less time to write, rather than more and more.

In these months, so much has happened. Quinn turned five and then, in another moment, turned six. She “graduated” from daycare and “jumped up” from preschool. She skied more, played more soccer, and did more gymnastics. She traveled with us to Colorado with our school, then to Wyoming to see Eloise, and to Belize to hideout—just the three of us—by the beach. We spent a long weekend in Ogunquit for Father’s Day, rented an apartment in Boston for part of a summer week to explore, and returned to our beloved Green River Reservoir twice in that time. This year, as I  started a new job, Quinn started kindergarten. As I am learning how to be me in my new role, Quinn is learning how to read. Together we cast our vote for the first female major party candidate for President of the United States. We fully believed she would win.

There have been so many trials in 2016, so many hardships hitting so close to home. And though our family has made it through this year relatively unscathed, we’ve absorbed the stresses and losses of those around us. We stood, with our community, on the Harwood soccer field, holding candles to the October sky in silence, watching paper lanterns floating away. And as I stood there, trying to imagine the loss of the five mothers whose children died, I held my own child who held her candle in silence and watched the lanterns float away. I watched her count them out, watched her understand the passing we were there to witness, and in that moment knew too much was slipping away.

School has nearly consumed me for the past two years and, while I have always been motivated and engaged in my work, I recognize this year to be different. Our school has been in crisis and I’ve been part of a team that has been actively working to hold it together each day for the past twelve months. This holiday break was the first period of more than two consecutive days in all that time that I’ve managed to disconnect from it…managed to let the emails go unanswered and let the work sit. And now that I’ve made that break, I’m having a hard time imagining going back in. In fact, I’m feeling determined not to let myself go that far back in again.

Last week we took Quinn to see The Nutcracker at the Boston Ballet. We spent a night at the Copley Plaza Hotel, ate dinner at a busy restaurant, and hurriedly did our Christmas shopping on Newbury Street amidst the city’s holiday lights. The next morning we ordered breakfast in the room and watched cartoons before heading north to celebrate Christmas with my family. It was an exhilarating twenty-four hours. And The Nutcracker was magical. I spent half the time watching the ballet, and half the time watching Quinn’s face as she watched the ballet. I have been waiting years to take her; I finally did and I enjoyed it as much as I imagined I would. Just tonight, cleaning my room, I asked Quinn if she wanted to save the program. “No,” she said, “I don’t need to. I will always remember that day.” And I will too, I hope.

The other long-imagined experience that happened with Quinn this week was skiing through our woods together. Quinn started an after school cross country ski program this year. She had only gone twice until the other day when we decided to go out together here on our hill. Sam and I have been in this house for ten years now and for all these years we’ve been walking, running and skiing the loops around us. From the time I was first pregnant, seven years ago this month, anytime I’ve been out on my skis, I have imagined skiing through these woods with Quinn. Finally it happened and it too was magical. 

Getting to this point, where she’s old enough to enjoy so many things, and capable enough to go on adventures, means she is  growing up, quite a lot. At times six seems very old, and yet there are still glimpses of the little tiny kid in her. She still says “aminal” rather than animal. And “lightling” instead of lightning. She asks me to “pass forward” through the ads on tv, rather than fast forward; I love the irony here…I would like to pass on going forward some days too.

And yet one thing that I’m realizing is that the passing of time—at least for now—is a process of life getting better and better, rather than of losing something sweet and fleeting. It is all sweet and fleeting, I know—a paper lantern lifting into a dark sky—but each day I am with Quinn I am happier to be there than I was the day before, and exponentially so compared to the early days that felt, at the time, as if they were the most important days. And to see this pattern repeated is to see light ahead rather than darkness. Her daily magic is a promise for tomorrow rather than something lost today. On my good days I am capable of dwelling in that place of gratitude and hope. 

Today I asked a friend at work to lead a yoga session to start the new year—for anyone who wanted to join. Sam and Quinn and I went together. Quinn worked hard to respect the quiet of the class for the few other people who were there. At the end, when I laid down on my back for shivasana, Quinn slid over and laid her long body on top of mine and rested her head on my chest.  For a few moments, she rose and fell on my breath. That is the breath I am determined to return to in the months ahead.

Summer

When I am with Quinn, I want more than anything to exist with her completely, so the moment will somehow get absorbed into my cells and stay there forever. I want it all to be saved, in detail. I want desperately, to control my wandering thoughts, ignore my impulse to check email, and stop my mental tallying of what work is left to do. I want to stop thinking about other people’s needs when I am with her; I just want to be there with and for her. I want this and yet I often fail to achieve it. 

By the end of this school year, Quinn would often call to me impatiently, while I replied to just one more message. The tone in her voice made clear that she knew I was putting meaningless things before her, before I had realized that that was what I was doing. The school year felt out of control for me by the end. I hadn’t exercised in months, I hadn’t slept well, I hadn’t taken any breaks. In April, when we had two weeks off, I checked and responded to email every day. By the end of that vacation, I felt more exhausted than before. So exhausted, in fact, that even though I knew my Vitamin D level was probably low, I couldn’t muster the energy to swallow a pill. I’d open the medicine cabinet, look at the vitamin bottle, sigh hopelessly, and close the medicine cabinet. I gave up trying and kept thinking, I just have to make it to summer. And in the meantime, through the month of May, I often woke up at 5 am and snuck out of the house by 6 am so Sam and Quinn could sleep and I could get to work. Many mornings I was at my desk before 6:30 am, and I wouldn’t see her until 5:15 pm when I picked her up.

As the weeks ticked by, each seemingly more busy than the last, Quinn held up pretty well, but she was always craving more time with us. Our weekends usually involved taking turns: on Saturday I would go to work and Sam would “take Quinn,” and then on Sunday we’d swap. I usually preferred to work Saturday so that I would have Sunday to look forward to--it would motivate me to get as much done on Saturday as possible, so I could actually enjoy my time with her, rather than be stuck feeling like it was another duty I had to perform. Still, our time together on Sundays was often spent catching up from the week past or preparing for the one ahead--we’d do laundry, clean, grocery shop--and Quinn was generally pretty tolerant. 

On one Sunday in particular, I recall her working on chores with me from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon. Even Sam would have difficulty keeping his head in the game for that long, but Quinn, at four years old, worked without complaint for six hours. She emptied the dishwasher, raked leaves out of the gardens, folded laundry...and who knows what else. And even when she hit her limit, she was good humored about it. “Mom!” she urged, “we’ve been working for hours! Can we please do something fun now?” It was a reasonable request and fortunately she didn’t notice that the “fun” thing I offered was also, partially, one of our remaining chores: “How about a bath,” I asked her, “and after your bath we can cut your hair and paint your nails?” Quinn loves to “get fancy,” so to her this was a perfect idea. When the bath was done and I had snipped off two or three inches of her hair, I set her up on a low stool in my bedroom, and I sat at her feet with nail clippers and polish. To start, I rubbed some lotion onto her little freshly bathed feet and legs. “What is that!?!” she asked. “Just some lotion to keep your skin feeling smooth,” I told her. “OH!” she said, sounding a bit like someone’s grandmother, “that is a squirt of JOY!” 

I fell over laughing and then she did too. When we spend time together, and we’re not working, we crack each other up.

I thought of that moment again and again as spring wore on and it was one of the many sweet memories that finally helped me to set some boundaries for myself this summer. Quinn is only going to be four once. And I’ve been missing some of this time, putting her off, rushing her, listening to her with only a portion of my attention. I haven’t disciplined myself well enough in this regard and haven’t forced myself to block out the ridiculous internet distractions I’m susceptible to when I’m tired--even though I know how pointless they are. And yet in all my wasted internet time, I haven’t even written stories for my blog. I’ve become increasingly protective of her privacy as she’s gotten older, especially this year as I watched a lot of mean things happen between kids on the internet, and I don’t want to contribute any material that might some day be used to embarrass her. Still, I want to keep writing and saving her stories; this is a problem I’m working to solve for myself.

When Quinn was a language-less baby, lying on a blanket, often seemingly in another world than the one I was inhabiting, these issues weren’t issues. But now that she is my action-packed, observant, thoughtful little buddy, everything is different. By the time I had to start making summer daycare plans for Quinn this spring, it was clear to me that I didn’t want to make summer daycare plans; I wanted to take her out of school completely and have her to myself. For the past three summers, because we’ve had to pay to hold her spot, it’s been easy for me to justify continuing to drop her off, keeping her in her routine at school, and using that time for other things. But all I could think of this year was that I wanted Quinn to have the kind of summer vacation that I used to have as a kid. 

Memories of summers with my family are vivid. I remember dividing the back of my dad’s Volkswagen Rabbit in half with the big blue suitcase so my sister and I could each make a fort with pillows and blankets and books for the long drive from Rochester to Lake Winnepesauke. I remember the taste of the birch beer soda my grandfather would have stocked for us in the garage when we arrived, and the maple candy, playing cards and stationery my grandmother would tuck into the cubbies of our shared desk in the back bedroom. I remember always being in a bathing suit, and my mom and grandmother always being in their bathing suits, and I remember that the days and weeks and months of summer felt very long.

It’s a hard fact of life to know that time speeds up and then never slows down again. But it is also true that when you can exist fully in a moment, that moment is like a long hard squeeze on the brakes--the earth spins a bit more slowly for that instant...just long enough for you to look around and breathe it in and acknowledge the full volume of joy, or satisfaction, or gratitude, or maybe just rightness that you feel. So right now I’m working to break some bad habits of time and mind that have started to take root in the chaos of a busy year, and I’m bearing down hard on the brakes for this short bit of summer we have.

On Father’s Day weekend, as I watched Sam carrying our exhausted daughter down the bottom portion of the trail from Taft Lodge on Mount Mansfield, after a grueling six hour roundtrip hike, I felt that slow motion swell of love and gratitude. It was supposed to have been an overnight. I got Quinn pumped to sleep in the cabin on the top of Vermont’s highest peak, to ensure she would make it up the trail. She had her brand new purple sleeping bag packed up, and her purple pocket knife with her name on it, and she was ready. And when we got to the top and decided with our friends that, because of the weather moving in, we were going to hike back down while it was still dry, Quinn handled the news pretty well. She cried at first, disappointed, and that made me cry a bit too, but I told her how proud I was of her, and how impressed I was that she made it all the way up to the top, and then she took a deep thoughtful breath and said, “Thanks for saying that, Mom. Okay. I’m ready to go down now.”  By the end, her eyes were closing as she walked, and Sam carried her, along with her Frozen backpack that had her pink blanket and some GORP in it, and his own gigantic backpack, with his sleeping gear, all of our food, and a bottle of wine he carried up as a surprise. And as I watched them go down the trail in front of me, my heart swelled and time slowed down and I felt it all absorb into my cells.

There have been many moments like that already this summer. Like when she sat on the front of my paddleboard for the first time and leaned against my legs as I paddled her around Blueberry Lake. And when she sat on my lap in the Poconos with dozens of Jackson cousins and second cousins all around, with her cheek nestled against my cheek, as we watched the family’s Fourth of July fireworks. And again later that night when we snuck back to our bed in the Secret Hideout above grandma’s shed to sleep in the woods. 

Or when I looked over at her, at the sandy beach on Saranac Lake, and realized she trusted her pink shark life jacket for the first time and was swimming, on her own, with arms and legs in motion. I felt it watching her hold Char’s hand as they walked around the Adirondack Wild Center talking about flowers and turtles and owls and things. And again, a few days later, when she asked me for one more hug before she worked up the courage to let my hairdresser wash her hair for the first time. And then, a couple of hours after that, when she sat on Church Street eating her strawberry ice cream watching “Tony Briefcase” do his juggling show. And when she started a back and forth banter with the street performer, to the delight of strangers all around, until he begged, “Would someone please get this kid her own show!?!” 

I felt focused and happy the day Quinn and I gathered buckets of lupine seeds and spread them all around our yard in hopes they might take hold for next year. And the day Quinn agreed to help us stack wood and she came out wearing her pink princess “work” gloves, and she actually worked hard for hours...filling the tractor bucket with wood, her dad’s earplugs in her ears for protection from the loud noise, driving the tractor on his lap, scrambling to get each log that was her size and add it to the pile. That night at dinner, when I told her what a “bad ass” she was turning into, she asked me what that meant. I told her a bad ass is someone who is tough and does it all--hikes big mountains, swims in cold lakes and rivers, stacks wood, is strong and brave. “Well, what about a “good ass” then? I want to be a good ass!” When we all spend time together, and we’re not worrying about work, we crack each other up.

Four years ago, Sam and I took Quinn camping for the first time, at Green River Reservoir. She was ten months old and had just started crawling. I had imagined it would be a heavenly and memorable time, but it was mostly a hot, buggy, screaming-baby disaster. It’s taken us four years to reattempt it. This time it was all I hoped for the first time, and more. In our 24 hour stay this week, we canoed, swam, picnicked, read books, whittled sticks, roasted marshmallows, listened to loons, watched for fish, checked out beaver dams, and looked out at the world silently for long periods of time.

Right before bed the other night, looking out at the calm lake, I couldn’t resist the pull to go out in the boat one more time. Quinn felt the pull too and wanted to come with me. We slid the canoe back into the water and paddled out through the lily pads to open water. We glided past the campsite where Sam and I stayed five years ago, when I was at the very end of my pregnancy, just weeks away from her birth. I showed her the spot where I swam buoyed by her, and where I paddled by myself at sunset wondering about her. This time, Quinn and I paddled out over glassy water together, admiring the purple in the evening sky. She looked back at me periodically to remind herself how to hold the paddle, and to smile at me. I felt certain that we were sharing the same feelings in that moment. I told her I had waited a very long time to be doing what we were doing right then--maybe even my whole life--to be canoeing with my own wonderful daughter. “Thanks for saying that to me, Mom,” she said. And that’s all we said for a long while after. It was all we had to say.

As much as I often feel like I understand her, Quinn still surprises me all the time. When we paddled back to camp the next morning, after exploring out on the lake, and swimming and reading the end of Charlotte’s Web on an island, she said “Mom? Can I have a little private talk with you over by the tent?” I’ve learned to trust her when she says she wants to talk to me privately, as they are always meaningful talks, so I followed her to the tent. “Do you want to know why my eyes had tears back in the boat? It’s because Charlotte died,” she said, as she tried, but failed, to hold her fresh tears back. I picked her up and she wrapped her arms around me and buried her face at the curve of my neck. “Thank you for buying that book for me, Mom. I really loved it.” I was amazed to see her already capable of recognizing the potential for beauty even in sadness.  “You’re a girl with a really big heart, aren’t you,” I asked. And she nodded as she tried to pull herself together. 

I don’t know when my earliest memories started to take hold. They blur together now in categories rather than in a specific timeline. There are memories of summer, and of my mom, of early adventures and important firsts and favorite books. I had a lot of time as a kid, and freedom, and the focused attention of my mom and dad when I wanted it. These factors, I’m sure, combined to make all that was good possible. I realize now what tremendous gifts they were. I really hope I don’t screw up the formula.