Remembering Nellie
Snow fell during the night, and there’s a clay pot on the dining table with narcissus bulbs beginning to wake as they drink their first water from moist soil. There are capers and tinned tomatoes in the pantry, wine and a whole chicken keeping in the fridge for our Chicken Cacciatore dinner after our last son plays his last basketball game on our high school court tomorrow night. There’s a nearly-finished scarf in my knitting bag, ready for today’s travel to the away game. Spring break plans are being settled. Life goes on.
I wish I could have told you last week, loves, but writing lots of words seemed too much when every day we were just trying to pull ourselves together and get by…we lost our sweet Nellie Belle a week ago Monday to advanced abdominal cancer. We didn’t know life could feel so quiet and empty. We find ourselves hearing her on the porch, wanting to come in; hearing her doggy-dream whines in the middle of the night; reaching for our boots to go for our afternoon hikes, then knowing there’s no way we can hike without her.
There’s a small wooden box on our bookcase shelf, crafted in the local cabinet maker’s shop. On the lid is her worn, engraved leather dog tag. Critter, her favorite toy, is with her inside. Sometime in spring, our family will take our last hike with her to her favorite place in the mountains - a grassy knoll where groundhogs live beneath ancient boulders tumbled down over centuries from the rocky mountain face above. We’ll tuck her in there, where she and the groundhogs can endlessly play in a dimension we can no longer see.