2016 By The Numbers
1 mini ramp. What happened was, it rained a lot, and I started missing my old mini ramp this spring. I didn’t tell anyone, though. Within a week, the universe, along with Colin, Johnny, Niki and Deva, had delivered a lovely used ramp to my residence. Some things just work like that.
2 border crossings. I've taken to making a list of places I wanted to go. A "to-go" list. For years, the little surf/hippy town of Tofino, B.C. and the medieval ocean-faring country of Portugal have been on that list. Now they're not. Because I went there, to both places, THIS YEAR! On the making-shit-happen scale, 2016 was a level 10, I'd say.
5 months living with Mark. My steady boo moved in on August 1. After what amounts to years of living alone, the struggle to not become curmudgeonly was real. But turns out, having someone at the house when you get home is quite lovely, because then that someone is around to open stuck jars of jam, and there’s someone to drink wine with as the light falls, and when that someone happens to be someone you love, well isn't that just a little bit of life magic?
6 nights sleeping out under the stars. I thought it was more. Surely it was 15 or 20? It's one of those mysteries of memory, how all those nights sleeping in my old bed, the shades closed just so, one just like the next, they all blend together, and so 1 or 2—or 6—nights passed bathing in starlight, an owl crying over there, the tallest of the trees rustling and creaking, or if in the desert, a coyote howling in the nearby dark ... Nights like these are so full of sensory experience that they just take up more room in your mind.
2 broken hearts. Twice in 3 months, I held the head of the dog I love while the life passed right out of him. Lefty? I think about him all the time. I dream of him often. And now, with a little perspective, I can look back and be proud that I didn't cling, that I was afraid but didn't let the fear rule me, and that I was able to walk with him into the best death possible.
For Durango, our lil pup, barely 5 months old, Mark and I are still struggling and struck dumb, with no understanding and no peace. Durango departed us one week ago today. Christmas, Twin Falls, Idaho. 10 p.m. We left him in the car. He was alive. We came back, he was dead. I shook him, pressed his little ribs cage and blew into his little lungs, we panicked, we yelled, we called every vet in town, we didn't know what to do, our hands froze, we cursed the cold, we drove too fast up the dark highway to an emergency vet hospital, we got pulled over in their parking lot, the cop saw Durango and said "Go!", we rushed him in, they stuck a tube down his throat, they stuck a needle in his heart, but it was all ... too late. We had to leave him there, on the table. Just leave him and walk out. Get back in the car. Drive home to Portland, 12 hours through a cataclysmic snowstorm, staring out the windows, pits in our stomach, suffocated by the stillness in the car, feeling like everything was the same but impossibly, irreconcilably different.
My dear friend Genna said to me recently, "Sometimes there's no lesson to learn, no 'takeaway.'" I shall choose to believe that. Or maybe the lesson is just how we get to know our own capacity for love when faced with its sudden absence? Anyway, for now I'm staying in, living a sparrow-brown existence, avoiding my phone with it's many megabytes of puppy photos, and pretending everything is alright—because eventually, it will be.