What Lies Beneath

The crew that is re-siding our house arrived early Monday morning and quickly began tearing off the old, yellow stuff. I've been more than eager for this. We bought the house five years ago, and have been nailing back pieces in various places around the house that have sprung. I'm sure the neighbors were pumping their fists at the sight of the Burnett Siding truck that pulled into our circle drive. The workers assured us this would be a two-week job, tops, assuming there were no complications. No complications. In my naive moments, of which there have been many over the past 45 years, I believed that complications were the exception instead of the rule. I was jolted out of my joyful existence every time life got disorderly.

I should not have been surprised when the doorbell rang and the crew leader said the words: "We've got a big problem." I stepped outside with him and looked at the front of our house. The siding was off, revealing wood that had rotted away to whatever construction material was underneath - something pink and aluminum with labels stamped across it. Buckets of water, as he put it, had poured forth from beneath the cheap siding, trapped for who knows how long. Something or other had not been sealed, and for years the rain that would beat the front of our house was becoming a part of it and eating away at the wood beneath. It was hideous, resembling something that would be featured on a home and garden network episode of nightmare remodels. All this time, I thought everything about our house was intact, except for a few pieces of stray siding here and there. I thought what could be seen represented everything that lay beneath. But like life, it was much more complicated than that. What was underneath was waiting to be revealed, seen, gaped at, puzzled over. We asked ourselves how our seemingly well-constructed house could be so complex under its surface.

The crew patched, and then put up the new, crisp, white siding that has transformed our house into something even better than before. I was proud of myself for taking this complication in stride. I didn't panic or stomp around or grumble about the unfairness of life. It was just rotten wood, after all.

Sounds Above Me

I'm really missing the creak in the floor upstairs. It has been silenced since Erin left for college three weeks ago, and I find myself listening for it late at night when she should be in bed. She was always scrambling around in the deep hours finishing things that she had put off. Sometimes I would wake to the creak at 1 a.m. on a school night, and know that it would do no good to climb the stairs and remind her that she was bound to be tired and useless the next day. Erin was old enough to know this. The late night and early morning creak reminded me that my parenting approach must shift a bit. Some lessons are best learned by natural consequence, not by tired reminders that fall on deaf ears. So if she spent enough nights creaking around at all hours, she would probably spend one landed face up on her bed, eyes covered and window blinds closed tight as she endured another migraine headache. There was no reason to say "I told you so." There was nothing to do except realize that the creak in the floor meant that sometimes it's best to learn our own lessons the hard way.

When I talk to her on the phone, I ask if she's sleeping well. "Pretty much," she will say. Or, "I'm going to get more sleep tonight." Like so many things about sending your kid off to college, this sleep issue is now truly out of my hands. I can't hear her if she's up padding around long past the hour when she should have been sleeping. I'm not there to remind her that sleep is essential to good health. She knows all this, so I've emptied my hands for a while of knowing whether knowledge is translating into action. It is true: you do the best you know how as a parent, then you send them off and hope something stuck.

Tonight it will be quiet in our bedroom - no sounds above our head in the empty second story. But somewhere around 1 a.m., if I wake up with that instinctual parental jolt, I'm certain that I'll long to hear the creak in the floor upstairs again.

Grace is Alive and Well

She bounded into the kitchen tonight – 15 pounds of lab puppy, tail swinging, ears flopping – and I felt like applauding. Almost two weeks ago she was fighting for her life in an oxygen tank. A bacterial infection had gone viral, and then into pneumonia, accompanied by coughing, runny nose, and loss of appetite. Serious stuff for a puppy that only a few days earlier had been lying in a cage at Animal Welfare. I passed by that cage several times and noted that her brown eyes followed me, but she never moved. She remained on her side until I stopped and sat down, then her head lifted a little. I poked two fingers through the metal cage and said, “Here, girl.” She slowly rolled on to her tummy, cocked her head at my wiggling fingers and scrambled up and over to lick. And that was that.

We paid Animal Welfare the requisite $75 to hand her over, complete with spay operation, shots, and a goodie bag containing food samples and coupons. For two days, we reveled in our good fortune to have adopted a full-bred black lab puppy with a good disposition and enough intelligence to do most of her business outside. She didn’t fuss when we put her in the crate, slept through the night, and allowed us to carry her around when we felt like it. What we didn’t know was that her intestines were harboring hookworm and she was incubating a deadly illness.

After four days in the oxygen tank at the Emergency Animal Clinic, we took her back to our vet, where she spent another night under observation. When we told our friends the sad story of Grace and her illness, most of them looked at us with a mixture of confusion and astonishment. It was clear that they weren’t sure whether to console us for the puppy’s illness or our climbing credit card bill.

“You’ve only had the puppy for a week?” One friend asked. “You must be some kind of soft-hearted dog lover.” Which pretty much describes four out of five people in our family. And the most soft-hearted dog lover of us all just might be the nine year old. Grace is her puppy, and has been from the beginning. When I sat down in front of her cage that day at Animal Welfare, I was scouting out dogs for Alison.

“That’s the one,” Alison said with finality after we took her out of the cage to get a closer look. I’ve tried to envision at what point we would have told our daughter that we had spent quite enough money to save her puppy. Would she have understood if we returned the dog to Animal Welfare, explaining that we could no longer afford to turn over our credit card to the doctors at Veterinary Associates? We chose Grace, and signed a piece of paper promising to take responsibility for the welfare of this puppy that had been residing in Cage #141. It didn’t seem possible that we could tell Alison that the puppy wasn’t what we had bargained for. In the scheme of things, it seemed more important for our daughter to know that from the moment we carried her out of the cage, Grace was ours.

When she ambled into the kitchen tonight, my dad, who was visiting, looked down at her with a grin and said, “Well look here, it’s the survivor.” Yes, that describes our Grace. And maybe, it describes us also.

It's Good to Be Back