~:: Bedlam ::~

Here is the story of our luck.  It’s not a simple tale.  And maybe it’s just this year.  But maybe it’s not.  So I was – doing something.  I think I was cleaning the kitchen.  I probably wasn’t, but the possibility that I was gives a certain cachet of responsibility to my character.

When I heard the dogs.

This is not a picture of dogs. This is a second story that I am cleverly and awkwardly weaving through these other stories.  And this one starts like this: a week ago, this evening sun –

The dogs bark.  We swore that this time around, we would not have dogs that barked.  Unfortunately, I was driven to acquire cutie-woodie-widdoe puppies when the two old men got very, very old – anticipating heartache.  And I say unfortunately because the two old men lived long enough to pass their obnoxious flaws along to the young bucks.  Who now bark.  So when they started this barking,  I had my hands (as we suppose) in that hot, soapy kitchen water.

cut a tiny tunnel through all these leaves – 

Guy had gone to see what the problem was.  Someone at the door evidently.  This is not a great concern.  The dogs always go mad when people knock at the door.  The problem was that the dogs were on the same side of the door as the knocking person was.  And Tucker thinks everybody loves it when he nips them, inviting them to come play.

I was only really alarmed when I knew G was out there with them, but heard Tucker go into Maniac Mode (which isn’t pretty) anyway. That had me flying out the front door, dripping  bubbles as I ran.  Not unpredictably, the first thing I yelled when I got to the front step was, “What’s going ON?”  But there was nothing, evidently, going on – at least, I couldn’t SEE anything going on.  Guy, on his way out of the yard, was casually closing the front gate behind him, the one that gives out on the driveway.  The dogs were not foaming at the mouth, just running up and down the landscaping in a very businesslike manner.

Through which a tiny arrow of its light leaked, like honey from a cracked jar – 

Okay – wait.  I have to back up.  All this last while, we’ve been having the house sealed with linseed oil.  We’d built that studio addition some years ago, wood siding left naked and defenseless against the elements all those years, and then the New Room on the other side of the house, same deal – naked, quickly aging wood shingles.   Ah, there are so many opportunities for us to practice our laissez-faire philosophy of property ownership.

The painter loves the dogs, and didn’t mind keeping an eye on Tucker, who fancies himself at least a minor Houdini in a constellation of gifted dogs.  So the situation  was Kismet.  But the painter had finished for the day, having stacked all the tools and things neatly on the far side of the driveway – ladders and paint cans and – all kinds of stuff.  Mostly tucked back near the house or under the over-arching lilacs and box elder trees.

making lamps out of leaves – like this –

So you have me standing on the porch, dripping, and G going through the gate.  And me yelling.  And now G answers, “It’s just Richard,” who is our across the street neighbor, and has been for about thirty years, thereby having every right to come into the yard and knock on the door.

The thing is, the dogs hate him passionately because he owns – or his wife owns – a number of sassy Shitzus.  What’s more, both Richard and Jeri ride Harley-Davidson motorcycles.  This, the dogs cannot forgive.

and this – 

So it was evidently simply the presence of Richard in the yard, even though he had left his motorcycle at home across the street,  that had set Tucker off.  There has to be more to this part of the story, but the only people around I could ask were men, which means I still don’t know know happened, exactly.

and this.

The gist of it is this: Richard came over to tell us the house was on fire.  Well, not the house, exactly, but a medium sized bucket of – are you ready?  OILY RAGS.  As the painter had used the rags cleaning up the oily sealer, he’d tossed them into this metal bucket.  You should be able to do that, right?  Metal buckets don’t burn.

And the metal bucket had been put responsibly out on the cement drive.  It was even carefully placed so that it would be in the shade.  Not against the house, but who ever knows?  What Richard had seen was the billowing smoke erupting from this two foot high, now very hot bucket.  G carried it around the yard for a while, trailing smoke behind him.  He ran the hose on it (oil?  water?) but the smoke kept snaking up.  I don’t know what he finally did, but no fire ever came of it.

This was especially scary as we have a friend whose house DID burn because of a can full of oily rags placed too close to an aging freezer.  That was not a fun thing.

Thus, it seems that poor Richard, so maligned by the dogs, was actually responsible for the saving of our business, our home, our memories and maybe our lives.

As part of M-theory, science posits that for every event, there is a splitting off of realities. The me who is writing this is deeply grateful that Richard just happened to be outside working (probably on his motorcycle) and had seen the smoke and done something about it.  The me’s in all those other realities wouldn’t be writing so cheerfully.

So, of course, I made Cammon go out and stand in it.

But this is only part of the story.  The rest of the story started a little later, when G finally told me about the microwave.

Unbeknownst to me, G had discovered days before that he couldn’t turn off the hood light.  This is an over-oven unit we’ve had for some twelve years, handsome and black and fairly dependable.  But the light underneath it – the touch switch had evidently died.

With Scooter, the sober-faced.

That morning, all of the switches died.  The entire control panel.  The digital clock was faintly glowing (are those things radio active?).  But open the microwave door, and the light wouldn’t go on in there.  Nothing.  Nothing worked.  A few moments later, I smelled fried electronics.  We felt all the walls – but they were cool.  So we turned off the breaker and went off to ride the horses up the mountain.

That’s another story, the riding part.  And don’t worry.  I’m not going to tell it now.

When we came home, we turned the breaker back on.  And after a few minutes, the face of the clock was hot to the touch.  I will not remind you of the refrigerator and the dishwasher and the truck’s fuel pump earlier this year.  Some things are just too troubling for a re-tell.  So now, we are stuck with cold left-over scrambled eggs and no decent way of warming them.  Which is definitely a first world problem.

The true story is that the house didn’t burn down.  Twice.  Twice in one day.

Who just needs a little prompting, sometimes.

So this is actually a story of amazed gratitude.  And the fact that no one died going up the mountain, not even Zion, makes it even more so.  How many little miracles happen in a normal day, I wonder?  Heck – all four of our children lived to be adults.  So there must be MILLIONS of miracles we live through all the time, simply accepting them as normal life.  And that’s the end.  The end of this story.

This story is now over.  I am just posting this odd shot because I liked it.

I will tack on here an amazing creative moment: when I was trying to find clothes for the wedding, I brought home a very on-sale small gray T-shirt to wear under the white eyelet shirt. But the gray shirt was too long and had to be chopped off, yielding a nice, long, stretchy rectangular remnant of nylon blend fabric.  Which happened to be the perfect size and fabric to make a cell phone pocket on the back of G’s new, neon don’t-run-over-me vest—purchased for biking in the chilly, increasingly dark mornings.

He’d found that cast off  piece of fabric, offering it to me with both hands  – his eyes lit with cautious hope.

And this one because the dogs were so funny.

Because he knows I am scared of my sewing machine.  And besides, I wasn’t sure I could figure out how to make that pocket tight enough to actually keep him from losing the cell phone, which is the probability of his life.

HOWEVER, last week, because I had to make a pin cushion, I woke up the machine and got reacquainted (I only broke one needle), and I was able to very cleverly and cleanly make that pocke.  G has graduated from hopeful husband to man-with-an-elastic-gray-pocket.

And this one, because they went off to hunt for something.  Not lizards, because we don’t have any.  But something.  They didn’t find anything.  But they didn’t have to.  They were together, and that is the best finding of all.

And that is a tale of personal triumph.