"NO! Not Cellulite!"
EZ visited the Vet on Monday. She hadn't been her perky self, not exactly drab, but increasingly blunted since our last trip. From her station in the back of the car she'd issue occasional yelps but, since she was only sitting watching out the window, nothing could be causing an outburst. Although I do recall seeing our adolescent new mayor jaywalking last Thursday.
I've seen her open her jaws narrowly and tilt her head sideways, then return to normal. I watched her nibble a twig last Friday morning. She "yipped," and expelled it, and came over to sit beside me for a pet. I called up the Vet.
"Is she eating?"
"Yes. But she's in pain. Maybe a broken tooth."
"We can squeeze you in at 11:30 Monday morning."
I've weaned EZ from her collar over the past year or two. It all started on a trip to The Woods when it occurred to me that she might like no restriction, be completely nude while there. So it became a tradition of ours, when arriving, to remove the collar. (This custom also had root in my not wanting to launder it during summer months when she rolls in stinky scat and the odors lodge in its nylon fibers.) I forgot it at the cabin once when she forgot to remind me to re-dress her for civilization. Once or twice I just wasn't in the mood to put it back around her neck when we got home. Then it seemed humane to let her go natural always.
Monday morning I took the collar down from its hook by the door. She saw it and hurried over and sat proudly, like she was receiving a medal, while I snapped it in place. Scrounged through the garage for a leash (leash law at the Vet) and came up with a musty red one. She sniffed it without comment and jumped in the car, which always gives her a good shot of endorphin and clears up bad moods.
I left her in the car while I went inside the clinic and announced her. She barked viciously and rocked the Honda sideways when other dog patients walked past her view. When her name was called I went out, snapped on the leash, and guided her inside. The doctor welcomed us both, asked questions and wrote details on a ledger. Then got down on knees to inspect her eyes and ears and the inside of her mouth. EZ grinned and gave him a lick.
"Her right eye is protuberant. Come around here and look over from behind. See?"
"Yeah ... yeah, it is!"
He turned on his headlight and waited for her to start panting, to allow her a head-start on his opening her mouth. She opened, he pushed. EZ yipped.
"Her jaws should open twice as wide." He gave her a moment to swallow and re-compose herself, then took a careful look inside.
"Teeth are all fine, though there's a swelling behind her right-side molars. Come around here and look in."
I crouched down and looked in.
"See way back there? Compare that side to her other. It's enlarged, puffy. Oh. There's even a spot of blood on her tooth. See?"
"No."
"Right behind her back tooth on that labial ledge (or some other Latin term). See it? It's a small seep. See?"
"No."
"It's beside the gum line. See?"
"Yes." (I didn't.)
Ray shut off his light. "She's got cellulitis."
EZ snapped at his hand.
"No! Not cellulite."
EZ brightened.
"It's a subcutaneous infection. A mild case. Some dogs have a severe chronic condition, one eye bulging, unable to eat. I'd like to start her on strong antibiotics for three weeks, but just a week at first to see how she responds. She should show improvement within three days."
Friday,
May 24--
7:30 p.m.-
The trees are only beginning to show green, two weeks later than usual, and the two maples transplanted last year are sprouting vigorous new leaves. I dumped armloads of raked leaves onto the fire then remembered, although the aroma of burning leaves is pleasant, the fire gets overwhelmed and the pit fills up with ash.
9:05-
The boom doesn't lower on me when I'm here. Out in life away from here it can happen at any moment, from any front. House burning down, car accident, interpersonal conflict, or the rent being upped by a hundred dollars per month. It's a constant subconscious chafe, one I don't recognize having held over me, until here a while and the tension dissipates.
Saturday--
9:25 a.m.-
"Ten fifty-three."
"Couldn't be. It's on sale for six-something."
The teen-aged boy with a cigarette behind his ear blanched, then picked up a sale flyer and flipped through each page without success. He turned to a persnickety woman on his right, "He says this is on sale."
"Six ninety-nine," she snapped. But she'd paused too long before saying so. I'd seen the sale tag directly below the shelf and was sure there was a 7 somewhere in there after the 6. But, since I get into trouble by stating contrary opinions too quickly, I accepted my change and receipt without digression. Then went back to see what I'd seen.
$6.77.
Back to the checkout counter. A man was ahead of me writing a check for an ATV battery and complaining, "They don't sell these things by the pound, now do they."
A man behind the counter, late-forties with a comb-over hair, explained that it was a gel battery, "so when you tip the machine over it won't leak out. It's a safety feature and no other battery will fit in its place. That's just the way it is."
The Minneapolis check was accepted and out he went.
As I approached the checkout, another man "blammed" through the door and butted ahead, thrusting an uncapped small plastic jar of brown wood filler putty at Cigarette kid, demanding money back.
"It's harder'n shit. Leh'me see YOU patch a hole with it!" He told the boy egregious details of an unfulfilled woodworking cavity, and that he'd paid $1.99 for it, "just cup'la days ago," He showed no receipt.
The boy opened the cash register and pulled out a dollar and began counting out coin.
"There was tax on that too, you know."
The boy was new and didn't know what tax on $1.99 should be.
"Two-thirteen," the man suggested.
My turn. Sour-faced woman had come back and was shuffling sale cards under the counter.
I put the sale tag on the counter. "My grass seed is $6.77. Can I get my change please?" The boy shuddered, spoke not a word, but turned to the woman for guidance. She looked at me, at the sale tag, at me. Then shook her head slowly in plain-faced disaffection. She opened the till and counted out twenty-three cents, gave it to the boy, who, avoiding eye contact, splashed it onto a beggar's hand.
I'd gone into this store against conviction because the hardware store I favor had only one-pound boxes of grass seed prices at $4.59. The seed inside must've been premium grade, and the price paid would advance high-end credibility with a man's neighbors. "Yep, it's mostly Chewings Fescue and the foreshadowing of blue is due to 13% bluegrass."
I did buy a gallon of "Ultra Pure" lamp oil (liquid paraffin) for the lamps, far superior to kerosene and much better than traditional lamp oil. I also picked up a replacement gutter downspout to replace the one I broke in the fall. And noticed quite distinctly the difference in employee morale and the dispositions of owners. Good-natured humor is the best indicator. I will always patronize a store where cheerfulness is present and employee laughter is heard. And I don't mean the pseudo smiles and passionless silk-screening on the backs of smocks: "WHAT DO YOU WANT?" riding the backs of associates in corporately owned national chains.
Then over to the grocery to pick out breakfast for my coffee. Had to stand in line while two lumberjacks perused the pastry case, then reached in with bare hands and poked at the donuts and longjohns. "Smell better'n my longjohns."
They each picked out three, leaving me two, a yeast donut and a sugar-coated fried thing.
They were delicious driving back to the cabin with my downspout stuck out the passenger window, the tail end of it blowing 60 mph air into EZ's space in back and whipping up swirls of dog hair which floated forward onto my food.
1:32 p.m.-
Marsh marigolds are in bloom, vivid yellow clusters surrounded by succulent green leaves down in sunny low swampy spots. They blossom early before the trees leaf out.
I cut up downed wood along the trail surrounding the cabin. Much of it is light-weight and offers little resistance to the chainsaw. One ten-foot long branch is disorderly though, and fails to follow my rules. It dips away during high-rev cutting, so I lift my knee straight up into the whirring blade.
Everything hinges suddenly on "OOPS." So this is how chainsaw accidents happen. And, "Oh, I wasn't being irresponsible." But I did lapse attention for just a moment.
My knee hurts, and there is a gash in the jeans where no gash was before. I put down the saw and shut off the motor. I'm not dead yet, or at least don't think so. A time to reflect: Is this how major sudden death arrives, so casually, so importune, so irreversible? Does a man, unexpectedly put upon by death, look down at his leg and understand that his end has just come about, so he sits down to watch it run out? Without having brushed his teeth?
"Oh, for Christ's sake just take a look at the damn knee. Stop dithering."
I feel pain, of course, but not unconsciousness riding the wind or buzzing my ears. I am lucid and relatively still fit to sign a will if someone would just give forth with one. But the clock on my heart is ticking and I may fall over soon and the last testament document may fail signing if somebody doesn't hurry up with a siren and take me away to charitable doctors that can make me better or at least inject drugs to stop me from caring.
I contemplate the spot on my leg for signs of pulsating movement, which would indicate blood pumping, quickly draining my years.
"Goddamnit. Pull up your pants leg and have a look, you big baby!"
I feel cool wetness on skin where I once had a tan. But the denim is not darkening as I'd expected, what with a chainsaw blade recently whizzing. I try to roll up the cuff, but quit mid-calf when it winds up too tight. Nothing to do but unshackle the belt and drop the jeans down.
A fresh flesh wound is all that is there. Showing red blood, but none of it's spurting or even trickling. Two Woodticks are heading up-thigh, though, away from my crime, and aiming directly for more private surroundings.
"Huh."
Throw off the two parasitic bugs and pull the jeans back into place.
7:59-
The sun is ten feet above Red's Shed and leaving us quickly. The fire pit is smoking as it should after a ten-minute drizzle. EZ's asleep on her mat, still breathing through sore jaws, despite having had six days worth of antibiotics, and I've lit a fire inside to discourage the cool from coming inside. The broken downspout was broken two winters ago and replaced last summer, so now, thanks to my forgetfulness, we have a spare. Two hours ago we went for water. It's Memorial Day weekend and the Store was busy. So I filled jugs at the outside spigot and went inside. A group was finishing dinner and paying and praising Meg for the good food. Meg in the kitchen was beaming and being sweet, then asking if they wanted fresh homemade pie.
"No thanks."
Herb was mumbling greetings and handing over menus to a new couple just arrived. I went to the candy counter. Herb walked to the cash register and rang out a bill.
"Did you tell that new table about the Lasagna? asked Meg."
Herb, "No."
I fondle a Kit-Kat and inspect a Dove bar for fat.
"What comes with it?"
Meg doesn't hear.
Herb limps to the fridge and puts away ketchup. A bell starts clanging back by the fryer. Herb looks at Meg who's saying words to herself and tossing chunks of fried chicken into a to-go foam pod. The bell stops.
"Did you hear the bell?" Herb goes back to bussing the round table by the jukebox.
I examine Sweetarts. And a box of Dots.
The door swings open and a mud-spattered man hollers, "who owns that brown pickup?" Nobody answers.
"Somebody move that thing. It's in my damn way." He retreats, slamming the door and jingling the sleigh bells. I pick up a package of Necco candy disks and a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup and move to the cash register.
Herb carries a load of dirty dishes to the sink, "what comes with it?"
Meg, patting down a hamburger patty, "Coleslaw and tea."
Herb tallies my sweets and says, "dollar twenty-five." Candy prices have been raised since last time I was here.
Exiting, I see a Ford Excursion backing a trailer with eight ATV's toward the gas pump. All of it is gross. Big recreation with big horsepower to tear up tender grass, all pulled by a bigger vehicle which consumes too much gas. Man's inhumanity to nature.
Herb's Christmas tree is still between the door and the gaspump, removed from the sled, directly on the blacktop. Maybe to fine-tune it or change the oil.
9:35-
Firecrackers and whistly big booms have been sounding in the southwest on and off all day. They are escalating in frequency now that the sun has sunk and darkness is illuminating their explosions. New landowners must be celebrating the long weekend. In April I heard an ATV endlessly chugging from that direction where it's always been quiet. I'll have to drive around that way tomorrow and see the seat of the commotion.
I raked this morning and into the afternoon. Dragged leaves on a tarp to the outskirts of the clearing. Threw grass seed on the empty ground where I'd scraped down to dirt. Every spring I promise to rake in the fall and avoid the tedious work of removing the leaves from their earthy grip. They become glued to the ground during winter, like they've been pasted by children with too much school paste. Some of the leaves do not release until I reach down and pull them up by hand, opening the ground from their screen.
9:54-
EZ and I have had our pills. Hers, served on the bed and shrouded in peanut butter and mine disguised with beer. When I first started administering her medication, opening her mouth and ramming it down her throat wouldn't do. She couldn't open far enough. The Vet suggested Peanut butter, so I put her pill in a dish and spooned peanut butter over it. She liked the peanut butter and licked it all up but left the pill lonely and wet. So I put the pill on my finger and slobbed both with peanut butter and said, "here you go." She never blinked at as her tongue drew the chunk in, but just licked and licked 'till my fingers were clean.
Lately she watches me unscrew the peanut butter lid (I'm giving her the shitty trans-fatty acid stuff I quit eating a year ago, but couldn't throw out, owing to Minnesota thrift.) I lower the butter knife into the bottom of the jar. She suspects what's up and rises to sit by the door. I lovingly dab at the pill on my finger and seal in the bitter, then wipe down the knife and set it in the sink. She is trembling. I crouch. She's polite and doesn't advance, but keeps drooling on the tile, widening a puddle.
"Here you go."
She ejects off her blanket and leaves it a disheveled tangle. She sniffs my fingers, just to be sure, then sticks out her tongue and licks me clean.
11:20-
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or anything else I'd rather be doing. The cliched saying, "Find a place that makes you happy and go there," fits. But it's more than geography. It's about doing in life what makes sense and has meaning. Stop doing what is meaningless. That which, by living in a makin'-it-happen society, we fall into and go along with vacant agendas though our soul is blighted and whimpering because it's not designed for what we keep pushing it to do. I did that most of my life, trying to conform to a lifestyle of fattening a portfolio with career and social status advancement and acquiring possessions and scheming to increase last year's fifty-thousand income by ten percent more. That way of life was not chosen, but assumed by default as the way quite naturally everybody lives. Nobody should do that, but everybody is. The world moves and breathes in an unworkable milieu. It's sadness to keep trying to make it work.
Stepping outside into full moonshine spreading the yard, I wonder if big-city police are especially active tonight. I have heard from people at work, (one's husband is a volunteer firefighter and even has a handheld scanner) that it's true what they say about full-mooned nights. Crazy people go crazy, shooting up neighbors and walking downtown naked and wiping bloody boogers on door-shop handles. But I am not scared because we don't have police lurking outside and the neighbors (they drove past this morning doin' four mph and two white-hairs waved) are surely in bed. And inside the cabin the temperature has risen out of control to near eighty and EZ, on the bed, and although naked doesn't have boogers and is logy from peanut butter and heat.
11:25-
"Who needs an orchestra when you have an organ?" Michael Barone just asked. Then a fanfare-ish blast of full-bodied pipes, "Tah-Dah!"
Sunday--
8:55 a.m.-
Chuck comes today. I've been wanting to enclose the base of the cabin in hardware cloth to keep animals from lodging underneath. There has been no sign of the bobcat since last fall and I feel bad about that. I suspect its pelt is on somebody's head as a hat, or has been woven into a coat and is being worn by a decorous woman somewhere out in civilization. I didn't know it was a mistake at the time and I'd forgotten that not everybody shares the same goodwill toward wild things in quite the same way.
Last summer I mentioned to Herb that a bobcat was likely living under the cabin. I described sounds to him and witnessed the evidence. I thought he was being politely distracted or mostly disinterested when he said, "It'll be gone soon."
So, our Woods cat is gone.
I brought a 100-foot roll of quarter-inch hardware cloth and we will dig a trench around the cabin and submerge it, similar to how I did Red's Shed last summer. This is the perfect time of year to dig. The ground is full of water and loose, and accepts rearrangement more easily than in late summer. In fact, two rocks on the way to Red's Shed, which for years have been tripping me with delinquent ease, usually after dark, were dug up this afternoon and rolled out of the way for relocating to the firepit, which needs new rocks to replace the old ones. They've split into small rocks and need to be gone. (What makes a rock a rock and not a stone? A geologist will say an answer, such as a chunk of plagioclase feldspar larger than an egg is a rock. Smaller than that it's a stone. But what about a goose egg? Or a snapping turtle egg? Are those stones?
"No. A chicken egg," says the Professional.
"Oh. I see."
"But," I ask, "Is that a Rhode Island Red or a Bituminous Bantam?"
"Oh, you silly boy. Bantams are roosters half of the time and not subject to measure as are Rock Island Reds.")
Digging along the front of the cabin I smell dead animal. When Chuck raised the cabin fifteen years ago, he took up the sidewalk blocks that served as the floor and leaned them against the outside perimeter as a temporary barrier against animals, intending someday to make it more secure. The ground settled, blocks shifted, sank, and leaned, gapping luringly. A couple of sidewalk blocks at the east end tipped over and opened the crawl space becomingly; a perfect entrance for last year's bobcat. In April I was provoked one late evening, by subterranean shufflings, to go outside and shine my light into the darkness beneath, certain of seeing a creature lodging under my work table. Too many obstructions.
When the new floor was put in, white bead-board insulation (Styrofoam-ish) was installed between each floor joist. Whether from animal influence or natural deterioration it has broken into small chunks and covers the crawl space like a layer of snow.
I lift the sidewalk blocks out of loose soil. Styrofoam cascades out. So do whiffs of dead rot, and I am reluctant to stick a hand out of sight under the cabin to push insulation pieces back. Going to the cooler for a drink the odor assails me doubly and I am forced to stand back with a long stick to flip up the cooler lid and dig out a Dew.
I got the trench dug to sink hardware cloth into, but found no dead fetid animal, even through shining a flashlight and pushing away drifts of Styrofoam chunks. Gladly, no bad smells have been dealt up inside the cabin, so my concern about having to put up with it are eased. But curiosity about what it is under there must wait. I filled dirt back against the fence.
Chuck showed up around 2:00, with Susie too, who set into yapping at EZ's butt and commandeering the show. We agreed it was nap time, Chuck in the sleeper, I in the cabin. But, without foliage on the trees the sun has warmed the air to eighty. EZ accompanies Chuck to the sleeper and lays in the grass outside his open window. Susie, who did not authorize naps at this time, escorts herself out of the sleeper and goes on parade in the yard. I read, then sneeze violently for a few minutes, and count legions of Japanese beetles, warmed into activity, striding up and down glass and pine walls. So I get up and sit by the fire and read. Susie goes to the sleeper and reasserts herself loudly at EZ's butt (Chuck has observed that that is her location of choice lately for bawling out other dogs, since his brother's basset hound recently got annoyed with her behavior and captured her whole head in its mouth).
EZ rises and moves to the front of the sleeper. Susie approves.
Half an hour.
Susie's had enough quiet and launches a wake-up salvo at EZ's rear end. EZ gets up and slinks away. Susie stops barking. I hear shuffling and bumping inside Red's Shed. The door opens. Chuck slides his legs out and sits on the stoop. EZ discerns his emergence and hurries over, skooching up close between his knees for a pet. Susie screams belligerence and prances, barking like a fiend. Chuck yells "Susie! Sit!" EZ scoots closer right near his crotch.
"Go back," He pushes her away. Susie barks more wildly.
"C'mere! Sit!" EZ comes right back and sits, chin on his knee. Chuck grabs Susie up by the scruff and holds her up at eye level, "NO BARK!" He sets her down, pointing sternly at her face, "SIT!"
She doesn't. EZ is bewildered, she is sitting. Susie frisks, four feet away, tail flipping, barking, skipping, sidestepping. EZ watches somberly, head lowering between Chuck's legs, doing her best to be good.
"No bark." Chuck continues pointing severely, Susie continues. Revolting.
"Sit! SIT!"
Susie sits, tail wagging. Chuck pauses to be sure it's for sure. EZ lifts her head and blinks into his eyes. His brow is furrowed, full concentration on bad dog.
"You sit there and consider your indiscretions."
3:45-
We set in to work on the west side of the cabin, removing sidewalk blocks and stacking them against a tree. Chuck pulls out one, third from the end, and I see the tip of a fluffy brown-gray tail.
"Oh, look at this."
It's creepy, a visible unmoving animal tail but the rest of it's not yet known. Surely dead, or it would be reacting some way other than just laying there. I reach down and pull away another sidewalk block. revealing the lower half of the animal, although we can't yet tell if it's a fox or coyote, or why it should be dead. Chuck hauls out the last block.
Fox. Tightly wedged between where the sidewalk block had been and the corner cabin support, snout tight against the timber and a corner block. Beautiful pelt, early signs of decomposition. But why did it die? Was it trapped? That doesn't make sense. Maybe old age, but that's an unsatisfying answer since most deaths in the wild happen for good reason, like gunshots, and rarely of mere mortality. We shut dogs indoors and away from the temptation to roll against it and transfer its scent onto themselves. Then dig a hole for it thirty feet away. Chuck puts on gloves and cautiously (it's an unconscious reaction I share too, tentatively expecting maybe the animal is really only sleeping or deeply meditating and may twitch wide-awake with a kick and a snap) pulls the carcass slowly by the tail halfway to the grave site, stopping, releasing it for a better unobstructed view. He lifts a fox hind leg, "not too stiff."
He lifts it higher. A swarmy mass of maggots, cream-colored and writhing, comes into view, working the crotch. He turns it over.
"Whoa," we both murmur. Wormy bugs crawling out of the fox mouth, up its cheek and in through empty eye sockets. I discover no philosophical musings to share about this matter, at this moment, and neither does Chuck who gets back to the tail and skids the carrion stink straight into its hole. We cover it over, the hole is not long enough to accommodate the tail, so I suggest maybe leave it sticking above ground to memorialize the spot.
It's a fanciful idea and a bad one too and doesn't get done.
Let the dogs out and get back to digging. A few minutes later while taking a break Chuck notices Susie on her back squirming in the grass.
"Is she rolling on the spot I laid the fox before putting it in the hole?"
I called her to me, picked her up in one hand and buried my nostrils inside her back fur, breathed deeply, then reflexively propelled her out of my hand.
"Yes."
Monday--
11:40 a.m.-
For a reason I am
unable to discuss Chuck removed from his cooler a half cantaloupe and set
it atop the old woodstove fifty feet away in the woods. It sits there in the
sun for an hour while we get to work along the
north side of the cabin, continuing the fencing-in of the underneath. During
a lull to cool off and get refreshed he brings out the .22 rifle, sits on
stump and blasts the melon into brainy bits of exploded smithereens.