Music Monday: One Big Wolfhound Love

Ciaragh is still on my mind - last night I went to shut the basement door after Bryn and Willow came inside and I swear, I could feel her out there on the patio, lying on the cool tiles and looking up at me like, "five more minutes, please?" I don't regret the decision we made, but I do so miss her - our Ciaragh had one big love for all of her humans and pack mates. So this is for her...and for me. Lest I forget...

One Big Love

by Patty Griffin

Let's take a ride to the seaside

We can go out swimming in the high tide

Just wear your shorts and your long hair

Don't forget the lawn chair

Everybody's gone to the movies

Everybody's gone and its groovy

They went to the one about the big war

I didn't, I'd seen it before

I guess I'm taking my chances

Giving up the ring throwing in the gloves

I guess I'm taking my chances

Trading in my things

A couple wings on a little white dove

And one big love, one big love

Everybody do like a Monkey

If you want to go on and be funky

No need to talk like a hero

Talk a walk count down to zero

No sense defending your honor

Just go on and kiss him if you wanna

Everything before is gone or is going somewhere

I guess I'm taking my chances

Giving up the ring throwing in the gloves

I guess I'm taking my chances

Trading in my things for a couple wings on a

Little white dove

And one big love one big love

I don't know where we are

And I don't care

And now we're out of gas

And riding on air

And one big love, one big love

Stages of Love

I'm going to talk about grief today, and not just because we just lost that gorgeous face there yesterday afternoon to a very aggressive lymphoma. 

It's been a wild ride, these past few years. We lost my father in 2018, my mother in 2019, the world from 2020 to 2022, and now I've lost my youngest wolfhound, my Ciaragh. So much loss. So much hurt. How do we keep going?

Grief is funny. Not funny ha-ha or funny hmmm, but funny insidious and cantankerous and never, ever satisfied. I've heard all the little adages about grief being love you have that you can't give anymore because the object has passed...love that builds up to where it spills out your eyes and down your cheeks... And while those are valid, they don't strike home as much as grief being the flip side of gratitude or maybe even just a level of gratitude.

If I wasn't grateful that I was Hoyt and Martha's daughter, I wouldn't have noticed that they passed out of my mortal life. They wouldn't still be a part of near daily conversation. I wouldn't have thought of them when I saw a cardinal in a tree looking at me as we arrived back home without our Ciaragh.

If I wasn't grateful for the friends I have, the life I had before, the interactions and bus rides to campus and all the thousands of little things that made my life my own prior to 2020, I wouldn't have grieved the loss of the same for going on three years now. I'm an introvert and the pandemic lockdowns and social distancing should have been my time to shine -- and it was, to some extent -- but it was also painfully lonely in other ways. 

If I wasn't grateful that my dear friend Heather rang us to see if we could foster a 14-month-old Irish Wolfhound who needed re-homing through no fault of her own, I wouldn't be missing the wide-eyed, fuzzy head in that photo.

I've said a few times over the past 24 hours that this is just part of having a dog in your life, and it is even more so when the dog is a giant breed with a short life span. But it's more than that. It's learning to open your heart again and again, even though it is only cobbled together from past hurts. As another friend said, it is learning to "hold them with open hands" because you know what is coming.

It is tempting to close off to everything -- friends, experiences, love, laughter -- but that isn't the right choice. If you don't love, you don't grieve. It's the love and the gratitude that makes the pain worth it.

If you are in that dark place with all the grief, I am with you. When you can, turn some of the pain to gratitude. It will help, I promise.

Notes from Exile: That Author Life, Tho

Looks like I've worked at Waterstone's before, eh?

I recently took part in an online vendor showcase for Beach Bound Hounds, an event that I used to attend every year when I had greyhounds. As a result, I now find myself swimming in extra book stock, so I'm trying to find ways to make it pretty.

The yellow tote in that photo (and the one beneath it) is filled with BOOK SIGNING BITS AND BOBS and copies of The Nature Walker Trilogy and the Tales of the Forest War. I've stacked the rest of the stock waiting to be autographed and mailed out on top, and I think it creates an interesting visual representation of my career (hee hee!) as a writer. 

The closest book to the camera is Proud Racer: An American Greyhound in Yorkshire, written in 2011 about my two years in Keighley but told through the perspective of my greyhound, Daisy. I JUST got that delivered TODAY because indie publishing cares not for deadlines nor my own sudden realization that I had no copies of it on hand. That's my beautiful Daisy's eye, there on the cover- which if you will indulge me a bit of self-promotion, is one of the best covers I have ever designed. Or maybe that's just me. Anyway... To me now, that book reads like it is telling someone else's story. 

Just behind it are copies of Bryn's book, Clobberpaws, and Ciaragh's book, Clobberpaws, Too! and there are only a few of them (that I found, y'all, what are the odds?). The Irish Wolfhound Association of the Mid South blew me away last week ordering all the stock I thought I had and enabling me to make a donation of over $200 to the Heather Burns Memorial Fund for Veteran Hounds. I blogged about my friend Heather's death last week, and IWAMS set up this fund to help adopters and foster homes take in the hounds most dear to her heart, the seniors and those with medical issues. I'm just glad I could do something to help - though it doesn't come close to repaying all the help that Heather and IWAMS have given us since we brought our big girls into our family. Wolfhound STRONG.

Along the back, there are copies of Rift, Scorch (Tales of the Forest War), and Guardian (the last in the Nature Walker Trilogy) and I am looking at them like the Waterstone's Bookseller I was when I lived in the UK. I used to love days when I could just hang out in the stacks and look at all the books on the shelves. Now, that isn't a shelf, but it motivates me to do more/write more/be better so that one day that will be the shelf in a bookstore where the Nancy E. Dunne books are.

I'm still home, I'm still working remotely, and the pandemic rages on as people take unnecessary chances and chose not to wear masks. But this week I am happy and overwhelmed with the little writer life that I've created, and that makes a difference.

PS-no word back yet on the pages request I got as a result of #PitMad back at the beginning of September, but if nothing comes of it that won't end me. I feel that, for the first time in a long time, I'm doing what I'm meant to be doing, and that is enough for now.