Change of Pace

 I had been looking forward to the morning run in the way that I anticipate most of my planned exertions: with the brief but serious imagining that I could pull the covers over my shoulders and roll over in bed and relax into the warm cocoon of extra sleep.

Instead, I will unwind the blankets I'd worried into a twist overnight and gingerly dust off the rust in my joints as I get my bearings. I will walk the floor to gather my gear, irritating the still snoozing with my creaks and groans as I hop into my Hokas.

Truly, I find it amazing that I so seldom heed my recurring initial sluggishness. 

Especially now when I look at my wrist and see the time ticking away. I'm going to be late ... 

Surely my rally must be a result of the folks who will be expecting me ... the friends I have made pounding the pavement. Or not since I also likely forgot to add my name to the roster negating expectations. 

If I hustle I will make it.

That's when I noticed the dog, floppily making its way to the edge of the lawn, and the white mini-van slowly herding the freedom-drunk puppy to safety. 

It occurred to me that the woman exiting the vehicle was a Good Samaritan as she dropped to the ground and cautiously tried coaxing the canine toward her empty, outstretched hand. 

Her trepidation told me she was not the dog's official person. 

She was dressed all in white, with pretty shoes and styled hair. She told me she was on her way to work.  

"I don't know what I'm going to do," she said, looking at her watch. 

"I know," I replied. "You'll go to work and I'll take the dog... she has to live around here somewhere."

I asked the lady to do me one favor and drive the dog back to my house, where I could get a better-fitting harness and a leash.

As we were making arrangements, I knew I would be running around the neighborhood this morning but not along my usual course.

Together we would traipse up and down the main street – SHE (I had checked) would bumble around at my side, sniffing at this and that, as if we were always a pair. 

I was the thing out of place: As she ambled close beside me, I held her harness in an outstretched arm … as if it were toxic. I couldn't be sure an owner would know their dog if it were wearing different clothes. I peered into slow-moving cars, and dead-staring drivers, hoping to discern if they might be looking for the beast at the end of my leash. 

We visited the post office to give the postmaster a good look.

He didn't recognize her, either, but most people leave their furry friends outside … just like the sign recommends.

When I was about to give up, someone yelled out of a car “Is that Katie?”

“I sure hope so,” I hollered back. 

“But Katie didn't seem to respond at all to her name.”

He told me where Katie lived in case it was her after all.

It wasn't far. As we got there, another neighbor agreed that the dog lived in that house, but said her name was “Daisy,” which did get a reaction from my tethered friend. 

Briefly.

No one was home, unfortunately, but two Next Door posts and three messages on Facebook confirmed it was the place, and “Katie” might wish to be known as “The Escape Artist Formerly Known as Daisy,” after all.

And as it turned out, a morning of dog-walking and light detective work was exactly the change of pace I needed. 

Waxing prophetic

 A mysterious puddle had formed on the floor in the bathroom in the general vicinity of the toilet.

I know what you're thinking. I thought it too. Boys live in my house. And boys, we squintingly surmise through the thick lens of stereotypical thinking, are inattentive and sloppy with it comes to nature's call.

Of course, neither of my boys are youngsters: One graduated from middle school nearly three years ago and the other has graduated to middle age. 

Still, I did what any mother (with a strong constitution and a weak gag reflex) would do. I dipped my finger into the water to test its temperature and try to assess any odiferous qualities.

The liquid seemed to be icy cold and filter clear.

Which seemed, somehow, worse.

I did not relish relaying the news.

This appeared to be a plumbing issue.

Well, that's how it seemed to me, at least, having spent the better part of seven minutes studying at the Google School of Home Mystery Leaks.

My husband, however, would not be so quick to diagnose the problem.

He saw no evidence the dank little reflecting pool had come from the commode, so he ignored my initial assessment that perhaps the wax seal, after fourteen years of silent service had gotten dry, or broken, or cracked, and was channeling a stream of au de toilette toward the lowest spot in the powder room.

In its place he swapped a multi-pronged theory that included the potential that someone had improperly closed the shower curtain ... or that the cat had spilled the water bowl or the dog had been drinking from the toilet because the cat's water was gone.

Or that operator error or a remote-control switcheroo between the bidet's “jets” and “jet dry” features caused an unsanctioned waterfall to go spectacularly unnoticed.

Now I know he's creative, but a part of me couldn't believe he was able to spin this fabulist tale out of the dehumidified air.

But he persisted. Disconnecting the seat sprayer, turning off the water, and planting a mote of toilet tissue around the bathroom perimeter, making sure to cover the shower, the cat water, and the base of the thunder mug, hoping to pinpoint the source of the leak wherever it may emanate.

“Now we wait.”

“You know … the internet said that often wax seals don't leak in a reliable way. It may take a while.”

“I really don't think it's coming from the toilet.”

Denial is not a river in Egypt. But it might be at least a little related to a nebulous body of water in your upstairs loo.

I managed to keep my face just as straight as he circled the drain in search of a solution that didn't involve tools larger than a basin wrench or a project that would take him all weekend and eventually require the skills of a certified plumber.

My husband, not unlike the two bags of clothing donations in the trunk of my car, must drive this thought around in his head for weeks before he admits it might be time to replace the beeswax gasket.

Tooth and Nail

 "What?"

"What?"

"WHAT!?"

“WHAT DID YOU SAY???!?!”

I looked up from my phone to see my husband's face all red in the cheeks and stern. His arms, locked at the elbows and rigid, were attached to the steering wheel by vice-grip claws. Nails digging in. 

"I asked you six times to tell me why you said 'Oh no' before you just trailed off."

He was driving, and I was reading a message on my phone and trying to do two simultaneous tasks: find the answer to a question posed by one of our kids and then respond. 

I hadn't heard him say 'What' once, let alone over and over again. 

"It's nothing, just the girl asking if I could send her a nail clipper. She forgot to pack it when she went back to school."

"Well, you could have just said so. I thought something was wrong."

My silence, he explained, was as grating as nails on a blackboard.

I guessed he was just Hangry.

It creeps up on him around four o'clock on the weekdays. "Hangry" we call it. It is that confluence of irritation that when mixed with hunger can make a person short-tempered.

I fished a bag of nuts out of my bag and dumped a small pile into his palm. "This will make you feel better.

It worked. For the next 27 minutes, as I tossed nuts and seeds in his direction, and he'd munched enough to level out his blood sugar. He even apologized after we arrived at the track meet and he'd found a parking space.

Still, I wondered if he had enough stamina to hike the four bazillion miles from the parking lot to the vulcanized rings of hell that seems to be built in the center of the sun.

Now HE was dawdling. 

"This way," I said to my husband, churning the air with my hands as if the current it created would drag him in my direction.

He ignored me. Or so I thought.

I saw his brow arch up and his nose twist in the way it does when a person smells something bad. 

I was immediately annoyed.

There was an opening along the fence near the high school track's finish line and soon the boy would be coming in "hot."

I wanted to see the race ending up close, but the man was dawdling.

I raised my hands and shook my head.

He raised his hands and hung his.

Soon he was bent over and combing the grass with his fingers.

And for the forty-fifth time that day, what had seemed so unclear became transparent. He wasn't purposefully ignoring me after all. He had lost something.

"My tooth!" He yelled back with the same exasperation at me for giving him the nuts that could dislodge his dental work … and more than a little relief. "Found it!"

He extended his arm and in his open hand was the proof: A molar-shaped cap.

“Oh my, let me see it.”

“No way! You'll probably send it to the girl with her nail clipper, and I'll never see it again. Besides the starter gun has already gone off. The race will be over soon. And you know what that means ….

No, what?

What?"

"WHAT!?"

"WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?"

A year of goodbyes

 I opened the top drawer of my father's dresser and peered inside. 

A four-leafed clover key ring, set in glass and edged in silver, sat in the jewelry tray along with a half-dozen safety pins, a St. Christopher's medal, some coins and a tiny ceramic pair of Dutch shoes.

Memories came flooding back.

The room hadn't changed much since I was a kid. Its furniture was arranged for storage more than purpose, and sedimentary layers of dust had accumulated since age and infirmity encroached. 

It had taken me more than a year following his death to shake off the dust of dread and finally clear out his things. 

I had said goodbye but I hadn't been ready to let go, just as he hadn't been able to part with the things my mother had owned. 

All of it here still. 

There were official documents, yellow-edged, folded and fastened with age-dried rubber bands; flax-colored notebooks he used to bring home from work, some of them filled with numerical figures of some unnamed accounting while others were empty; and so many mementos, including a personalized wrist cuff with my name on it bought at the county fair while I waited anxiously for the craftsman to line up the letters that would rend my name into a length of leather with a snap at each end. 

It still fit, if only barely. I put it on and continued to extract items from the collection, separating each into bins or bags depending on their final resting places. 

At the very back of the drawer, wrapped in brown paper, lived the small hand puppet I had fallen in love with in a Boston toy store. He must have saved it -- a white rabbit with wood block for a head and polyester fur for a body -- from a bag of my toys headed for Goodwill after my final departure. 

I may be taller now, but feeling my calves harden into a cramp as I pressed up into my toes to get a better view brought me back several decades into my childhood.

Back then I would furtively drag my mother's camel-saddle hassock over to the high-boy bureau as quietly as I could, trying to keep its paired ornamental bells from announcing my treacherous snoopery.

I have authorization now. 

Still, my heart raced at the sight that startled me most way back then. And there they were: four rifle cartridges tucked inside the snug elastic loops of a leather holder. 

I knew he had the hunting rifle somewhere in the house, but I'd never seen it. My initial search of the closet I'd been warned away from as a child had nothing but old clothes, cobwebs, and perhaps the ghosts of Christmas presents past. 

I had just about decided my father had disposed of it himself as he was putting his affairs in order. Something I had hoped he'd do so I could stop thinking about the unthinkable.

My son found it.

Unloaded and zipped into a soft case my father has stowed under his

Bed. Discovered after we'd disassembled the bed frame and hauled off the old mattress. It was heavier than I imagined and imposing for an old gun. 

I still don't know if he'd ever fired it; the stories he'd told about its acquisition circled around being vetted by a hunting party he'd been invited to join but never zeroed in on a target. In my mind - the childhood one that refused to speak to him for two weeks after a mouse died in a trap he had set - I had concluded his interest in deer hunting was more social than practical.

For a moment I wished I had asked him. But then I decided it was probably best to keep my doubts. 

My husband secured the gun and stored it temporarily under lock and key. It would not live with us for long.