A Walk in the Dog Park

Last night, as I was walking in the dog park missing my dog, there was a sun spot filtered through the leaves that looked like it shouldn’t have been there. I love those. When you can’t see where the light is coming from, but there it is, laying softly dappled on a spot of grass or a tree trunk. The ways of leaves are too complicated for me to discern. Life comes and it goes and here is all this greenness covering the boughs—but am I ready for spring?

Summer is almost here. Yesterday evening was a humid close to a day teetering on the brink of 90 degrees. Somehow, as the world was quieting down for the night, the sky seemed far away from me. Humidity does that sometimes—creates distance. So maybe it was the thick air tampering with my depth perception, or maybe it was just the fact that I didn’t go to greet the trees like I normally do, but either way the forest stood apart from me, making me feel smaller somehow.

There was a female cardinal nuzzling the grass close to me though. She looked at me for a moment, intently, as if to say “Here I am.” Her frame was little, and I knew she must be much smaller than the males. How strange and beautiful it is that females are smaller in the animal world too… it made me think of me and Ethan and how much smaller I am. And I stopped to wonder if there was a male cardinal out there who was delighting in her.

Our dog had a small frame, so small that it failed her when the cancer came. She had spent all of her short life delighting, loving. I stood there in the fast approaching evening and hoped that, wherever she was, she didn’t feel the distance we feel from her.

But maybe delighting closes the distance. Maybe there’s something about gratitude that quietly shepherds in nearness. In the clear air of a new day, thankful thoughts have taken hold of my hand and joined them to the heart of memories—not the grief, which comes after and just obscures like humidity—but the very real and very true love of a moment that lives, although it is past. All those times she met me at the door after my walks, wanting to smell the leaves on my fingers and all those times she came to sit by me just to be close—the love of those moments is the heart of those memories. I will not believe distance is final when a little female cardinal is telling me otherwise, when there is yet love.

Past times are not dead times any more than passed lives are dead lives.

There is a land of the living and I know that Love keeps it alive, even in a darkened, grieving mind.