This city is filled with the ghost of you.

Read more …

Mom told me last night, but I don’t think it really hit me until now.  I’m lying in bed trying to sleep and I suddenly remember the last time I was home, over spring break, sitting on the couch watching tv, and sweet old Bailey hopped up in the couch, despite her small stature and arthritis, to sit next to me.  I just pet her and held onto her for the hour.  And thinking about it now made me cry, really cry, because I’m not going to see her, pet her, feed her, love on her, anymore.

I remember when we got her.  I was eight, and we drove up to West Virginia to pick a puppy from my aunt’s litter.  Bailey was feisty, and the size of a burrito.  I held her in a shoebox in my lap the whole drive home, and I cried because she was crying and I felt bad for taking her from her mother.  When my dad came home from sea, the first thing she did was piddle on his dress shoes as he stood in the foyer and gave my mom one raised eyebrow because he was thinking German Shepard, not Miniature Schnauzer.  He was her favorite, and he loved her as much as any big dog.

I remember how we used to call her Radar Ears because of the way they would stand up, disproporionately huge in comparison to her sister and mother.  She got pancreantitis more than any dog I ever knew of, but she always pulled through.  She used to dance for treats.  She was stinky.  She shook uncontrollably when I gave her baths, and then snuggled into the towels when I tried drying her.   She was silver, but had a brown beard. She traveled with us from Georgia to California to Connecticut to Alabama, and now she’s buried in our new yard that she never got to destroy with poop bombs.  She was a damn champion and I will always love her and remember her as a crucial part of my childhood, teenagerdom, and early adulthood.

It’s a culture clash in my kitchen