For Love and Spring and Dogs

It is a perfect spring day. My back yard is full of birds, and the pear trees have exploded into blossom. The dogwoods are soon to follow. The sugar maple in the corner is hung with what my nephew calls twirly-birds, or the helicopter like seed pods that will take flight later. What's better, none of the bugs have hatched out yet. Living in a valley with two rivers can mean dealing with mosquitoes. I am hopeful that the long, hard winter killed some of them off.

I took my dogs down to the Tinton River yesterday afternoon. I was finishing the laundry and dug out the old Frisbee that the youngest one likes to chase. She has a bit of retriever in her, and there's nothing finer than seeing her sprint full out down the river bank, ears tucked back, eyes set on catching the disc before it sets down. When she grows tired of the chase, she'll walk over to the water and plunge her snout down into the cool water, shake loose the surplus, and plop down into the mud. Later this afternoon, I'll have to bathe her in the back yard with the hose.

The older dog doesn't care much for the games her canine sister plays. Mostly, the eldest will wander around, stopping occasionally to sniff out a hole in the bank. There's a snaking grove of birch trees down where we walk, and she has a favorite that grows out over the river, its root ball jutting out like a shelf above the water. She'll perch there and watch the other dog chase Frisbees. Strange how one favors sport and one favors rest.

These are good days for dogs. I know I was rife with cabin fever this winter, but the dogs needed spring, too. The younger dog lives in the house with me, and this past week, she's whimpered every morning to be let out as soon as the sun rises.

So I let her out, and then I'll drive down to my office in town and do some work, and then I'll drive back home for a bite of lunch. The younger dog will come inside and eat with me, and then I'll put her in the car and bring her back to my office for the afternoon. I have a small balcony at the end of the hall, where a pair of French doors opens onto the street, and I'll leave them open in weather like this and the dog will curl up in the sun for a nap.

Then, when it's time to quit, we'll go for a walk. Sometimes I'll take her down to FDR Pub, and we'll sit outside on the deck while I have a drink and watch the river. A man, a dog, and a beer never fail to make conversation.

Watching the dogs play by the river, and watching all of the town dressed up today for Easter, their white dresses and seersucker suits radiant in the spring-glow, I am convinced that life might never be as good as it is today. This is a feeling I've been having more and more often, a slow reminder to pay close attention to everything around me. I am reminded of Hawthorne, in The Blithedale Romance:

"Priscilla had now grown to be a very pretty girl, and still
kept budding and blossoming, and daily putting on some new charm, which you no
sooner became sensible of than you thought it worth all that she had previously.
possessed. So unformed, vague, and without substance, as she had come to us, it
seemed as if we could see Nature shaping out a woman before our very eyes, and
yet had only a more reverential sense of the mystery of a woman's soul and
frame. Yesterday, her cheek was pale, to-day, it had a bloom. Priscilla's smile,
like a baby's first one, was a wondrous novelty. Her imperfections and
shortcomings affected me with a kind of playful pathos, which was as absolutely
bewitching a sensation as ever I experienced. After she had been a month or two
at Blithedale, her animal spirits waxed high, and kept her pretty constantly in a state of bubble and ferment, impelling her to far more bodily activity than she had yet strength to endure. She was very fond of playing with the other girls out of doors. There is hardly another sight in the world so pretty as that of a company of young
girls, almost women grown, at play, and so giving themselves up to their airy
impulse that their tiptoes barely touch the ground.

Girls are incomparably wilder and more effervescent than boys,
more untamable and regardless of rule and limit, with an ever-shifting variety, breaking continually into new modes of fun, yet with a harmonious propriety through all. Their steps, their voices, appear free as the wind, but keep consonance with a
strain of music inaudible to us. Young men and boys, on the other hand, play,
according to recognized law, old, traditionary games, permitting no caprioles of fancy, but with scope enough for the outbreak of savage instincts. For, young or old, in
play or in earnest, man is prone to be a brute.

Especially is it delightful to see a vigorous young girl run a race, with her head thrown back, her limbs moving more friskily than they need, and an air between that of a bird and a young colt. But Priscilla's peculiar charm, in a foot-race, was the weakness and irregularity with which she ran. Growing up without exercise, except to her poor little fingers, she had never yet acquired the perfect use of her legs. Setting buoyantly forth, therefore, as if no rival less swift than Atalanta could compete with her, she ran falteringly, and often tumbled on the grass. Such an incident--though it seems too slight to think of--was a thing to laugh at, but which brought the water
into one's eyes, and lingered in the memory after far greater joys and sorrows
were wept out of it, as antiquated trash. Priscilla's life, as I beheld it, was
full of trifles that affected me in just this way."

And so it is that my own life in this little town is full of trifles that affect me in this way. I have sat now and written this much, mostly to avoid some work I've left to do for an upcoming story in the Spectator, one that will be difficult to get right for the dear readers of Confluence. I've decided to publish an article on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the car accident that claimed the life of Marilyn Coolidge Salarino.