Read Online Cherished by Barbara Abercrombie - Free Book Online
Authors: Barbara Abercrombie
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months, already caused enough trouble that he got kicked out of someoneâs house. This appealed to me.
Seamus had been gone exactly twenty-one days when my friend Cindy and I drove ninety miles east of Los Angeles to get Thomas. He had not been house-trained and had no idea what a leash meant. He appeared to be perilously close to his wolfish, rat-hunting origins, with little interest in humans. On the way home, we stopped at Jamba Juice, and we sat outside on a little strip of mall grass, sipping our pomegranate smoothies and staring at the strange, puzzled dog, who looked around at everything but us.
Thomas turned out to be a hard one, not biddable at all, which did not release me from my do-over deal with the universe. I enrolled him in the first class available on the schedule at the West Los Angeles Obedience Training Club, and kept him there until he stopped slipping his lead to run off with the soccer players who shared the park. I trained him to take tunnels, jumps, and teeters. I took him to an Earth dog trial, where rodent-hunting terrier breeds prove their gameness by burrowing underground in search of a rat. At one of those trials, a woman with some expertise in the terrier world grabbed him away from me. âThis dog needs to be stripped!â she yelled, and proceeded to school me in the art of stripping a cairn terrier.
One week at the end of August, I left Thomas at the puppy camp, where heâd fallen hard for a spindly Italian greyhound. Ipacked a truck full of gear, tents, and wigs and drove athousand miles north to the Burning Man festival near Reno, Nevada. It was time to give up and start over, to find another place to live and another way to live it. I cried, danced, slept far too little, and walked until my legs ached. Late one night, I wandered out to the Temple, the place at Burning Man where people remember their loved and dead. With a Sharpie, I wrote verses in big block letters to my two little dogs. âIâm sorry,â I wrote, âfor not seeing you.â
And with that, I began a new year. Drawing on the failed experiment of all the years that had come before, I wrote up a list of intentions â a design for a new life â and threw it into a bonfire. My wish, above all: a life full of love. I would put my foot down and settle for nothing less.
Two months later, I walked up a mountain under a full November moon with Thomas at my heels, surrounded by friends, one of whom had brought his neighbor, Billy. By the time the night was over, Billy and I had split off from the group and talked for eight hours straight. Two years later, to the day, we got married with less fuss and forethought than it takes to plan a vacation.
We do carry our sticks: our struggle over our shared desire to write something true and profound; our ideas about how to change the world; our sometimes divergent opinions about the care of the baby pit bull we adopted after Mollyâs death. (Never much of an animal person before, my husband has become a relentless spoiler of dogs.) I was inclined to think that meeting him was magic, but it was not: if I didnât find him before, it was because of the simple fact that none of us can recognize what we havenât already seen. In his death, Spud had shown me how to live.
7.
CALICO
Melissa Cistaro
C alico saved me. Not only from the fire but also from the constant longing I had for my mother. It was Calico that I counted on to be home every day after school as I walked down our long gravel driveway. Past the blackberry bushes, past the pink tea roses. She was always there. For eighteen years Calico was the mother cat in our big yellow house. Twenty-three kittens. Seventy-eight (at the very least) field mice, birds, and blue-bellies that she captured out in the pasture. An occasional alligator lizard and close to a dozen tailless voles. Every day, she watched us diligently with her big gold and black eyes.
The fire was an accident. It was close
Seamus had been gone exactly twenty-one days when my friend Cindy and I drove ninety miles east of Los Angeles to get Thomas. He had not been house-trained and had no idea what a leash meant. He appeared to be perilously close to his wolfish, rat-hunting origins, with little interest in humans. On the way home, we stopped at Jamba Juice, and we sat outside on a little strip of mall grass, sipping our pomegranate smoothies and staring at the strange, puzzled dog, who looked around at everything but us.
Thomas turned out to be a hard one, not biddable at all, which did not release me from my do-over deal with the universe. I enrolled him in the first class available on the schedule at the West Los Angeles Obedience Training Club, and kept him there until he stopped slipping his lead to run off with the soccer players who shared the park. I trained him to take tunnels, jumps, and teeters. I took him to an Earth dog trial, where rodent-hunting terrier breeds prove their gameness by burrowing underground in search of a rat. At one of those trials, a woman with some expertise in the terrier world grabbed him away from me. âThis dog needs to be stripped!â she yelled, and proceeded to school me in the art of stripping a cairn terrier.
One week at the end of August, I left Thomas at the puppy camp, where heâd fallen hard for a spindly Italian greyhound. Ipacked a truck full of gear, tents, and wigs and drove athousand miles north to the Burning Man festival near Reno, Nevada. It was time to give up and start over, to find another place to live and another way to live it. I cried, danced, slept far too little, and walked until my legs ached. Late one night, I wandered out to the Temple, the place at Burning Man where people remember their loved and dead. With a Sharpie, I wrote verses in big block letters to my two little dogs. âIâm sorry,â I wrote, âfor not seeing you.â
And with that, I began a new year. Drawing on the failed experiment of all the years that had come before, I wrote up a list of intentions â a design for a new life â and threw it into a bonfire. My wish, above all: a life full of love. I would put my foot down and settle for nothing less.
Two months later, I walked up a mountain under a full November moon with Thomas at my heels, surrounded by friends, one of whom had brought his neighbor, Billy. By the time the night was over, Billy and I had split off from the group and talked for eight hours straight. Two years later, to the day, we got married with less fuss and forethought than it takes to plan a vacation.
We do carry our sticks: our struggle over our shared desire to write something true and profound; our ideas about how to change the world; our sometimes divergent opinions about the care of the baby pit bull we adopted after Mollyâs death. (Never much of an animal person before, my husband has become a relentless spoiler of dogs.) I was inclined to think that meeting him was magic, but it was not: if I didnât find him before, it was because of the simple fact that none of us can recognize what we havenât already seen. In his death, Spud had shown me how to live.
7.
CALICO
Melissa Cistaro
C alico saved me. Not only from the fire but also from the constant longing I had for my mother. It was Calico that I counted on to be home every day after school as I walked down our long gravel driveway. Past the blackberry bushes, past the pink tea roses. She was always there. For eighteen years Calico was the mother cat in our big yellow house. Twenty-three kittens. Seventy-eight (at the very least) field mice, birds, and blue-bellies that she captured out in the pasture. An occasional alligator lizard and close to a dozen tailless voles. Every day, she watched us diligently with her big gold and black eyes.
The fire was an accident. It was close
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