Thank you!

Dear Readers,

Thank you, thank you for being here and for letting me write to you. I am sitting in my house listening to the record Will The Circle Be Unbroken. Maybelle Carter is singing “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes.” I am so grateful for the longing that makes such beautiful music, for the people who sing it, and for the people all over the earth with tenderness in their hearts. And I am grateful for you.

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you are enjoying the people you’re with, even if you’re fighting with them—which I did with my husband this morning. First thing! As soon as he came into the kitchen! He said, Good morning. How are you? and I said, Pissed! Why am I the only one up cleaning?! Oh well. Being mad at each other is also love if you ask me. Now we like each other again.

Meanwhile, this month marks the end of my first year writing for Substack, and in honor of it, I’m republishing an edited version of my first post. Thank you so much for being on this journey with me. I’m so glad to have found you.

A Dog Named Butch

A few weeks ago my father, who has Alzheimer’s, called. He said that he had been thinking—he was living by himself and I was living by myself, (my husband Tommy was in Ohio, taking care of his parents) and maybe I could come stay with him for a few days so neither of us would be lonely.

I said that sounded great as long as I could bring my cat. Dad said, “I like cats,” which is true. When Mom was alive we called him St. Francis. It wasn’t unusual to see him talking on the phone with a cat on his shoulders and a dog at his feet. Often, during the middle of the day or a meal, he would get up suddenly, go to the kitchen door, open it and stick out his arm towards the roof. Three seconds later a cat would walk down his arm, across his shoulders, and jump to the floor. Dad would sit back down as if nothing unusual had happened because nothing unusual had happened. He could always hear a cat before anyone else, and the cats liked to enter the house that way.

(St. Francis in the stove room with Fritzi, ca. 1981)

Anyway, this was the first time I’d spent a night at the house since Mom died, and I was a little worried about how that would go, but it was a great weekend. We sat by the fire and told stories. We stacked wood and listened to old episodes of Prairie Home Companion.

The second day, I found some old photos in an album and one of them was of a Siberian husky we’d had named Butch.

Here’s how we got Butch: One morning my sisters and I looked out the window and there was a wolf trotting up the driveway. We were so excited, we ran out of the house and threw our arms around him and begged our mother to let us keep him. My mother said he wasn’t a wolf, he was a husky, and no we couldn't keep him. We already had chickens and rabbits, 7 cats, and a very anxious hamster. She found his owner who said the wolf’s name was Butch and took him back. Three days later the wolf/dog was back in our driveway. We threw our arms around him again and begged our mother to let us keep him, but she took him back to the owner. A week later he was in our driveway AGAIN. The owner, who bred and sold huskies, said Butch’s markings weren’t quite right so he was probably going to be put down. If we wanted him, we could have him. Yay! We said. Of course we wanted him! He was a snow dog!

And he was a snow dog. All winter he followed my father outside, up the hill to get wood from the barn for the woodstove. I still have such a clear picture of this--my father in his black galoshes, a green coat, blue scarf, red hat, followed by a black and white dog, going up the hill to load the sled Dad had made with scrapwood and an old pair of skis.

Up the hill, down the hill, up the hill, down the hill.

White snow, purposeful man, joyous dog.

We had three pine trees that were at least 100 feet tall and Butch would make depressions in the snowdrifts underneath them where he’d curl up to sleep. Sometimes you almost couldn’t see him, he blended in so perfectly with his environment. His body heat would melt the snow around him, which, when he got up, would turn to a thin layer of ice, making snow nests all over the yard.

Once we dressed him in a green turtleneck and a beret and painted his toenails red. Then we tucked him into bed like a baby and took a picture of him.

Years later when I was driving my mother to dialysis Mom said that she put that picture in a family album. Once my grandmother, (who also had Alzheimer’s) was looking through that album and when she came to that picture of the husky tucked in bed she said, “Barbara, is that your father?”

Mom and I could not stop laughing.

But here is my favorite story about Butch: We had a record album I liked to play called Songs of the Humpback Whale. Whenever I played it, Butch would go into the living room, lift his black and white head and howl along with the whales in long, mournful cries. Once, when I was in Hawaii I took hula lessons from a woman named Lorraine Joshua Daniels, who at one point put her hand on my heart and said, “No, no, no! Dance from here! From your bosom. Where your soul lives!” (So that’s where it is, I thought. I knew it!) You could tell that’s where the dog was singing from, and sometimes my sisters and father and I would howl along too, and my mother would laugh and the whole house became a symphony of beings making sounds from their bosoms, where their souls lived.

Now that I know more about the power of sound I wonder, were we healing each other and our world with those sounds? To me that’s so much of what magic is, listening and talking and calling to each other from our souls the way the water does to the wind and trees on up to the stars.

“The thing that stays with me now,” I said to Dad, “is how smart that dog was.” He must have known he was going to be put down. He ran away to our house three times. He knew he had another purpose in this life than having poor markings and going to the SPCA.

My father said that was an interesting perspective. Then he put another log in the stove and fell asleep in his chair. I went into Mom’s closet to see if I could find more old photos, but when I saw her empty shoes placed neatly on the floor my heart stopped and I shut the door