Good dog goes bad

I met a friend for a hike through the woods with the dogs a few weeks ago. Everything was fine until we got home and Cookie came over and laid her head on my lap. Oddly. Lolling about. I chalked it up to her undying love for me. Then I got up. And she didn’t.

She tried but she stumbled; then she fell and sprawled out on the kitchen floor. Panic. I tried to coax her but her eyes would look and roll away. I picked her up. She fell down.

I was in an all-out panic. I called the emergency vet. (It was a Sunday, of course.) They flushed her system with charcoal, ran tests and hydrated her. Everything came back normal and Cookie seemed to be coming out of it. No one could figure out what had just happened. We were relieved but bewildered.

I went in Monday morning to pick her up. But they didn’t just hand her back to me. Instead, I was taken back to a bare room with a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

I was made to wait. I could hear Cookie’s tail drumming the cage bars. And still, I waited. What was the deal? I started to sweat. I took off a layer, my coat and purse on the floor. More time, more thumping.

Finally, the doc appeared. I practically jumped on her in gratitude and worry. “What made her so sick?” I wanted to know. I was not ready to give up the hunt.

Unfortunately, neither was she.

The vet pulled up her chair. Quite close to me, face to face: “Are you sure there’s nothing Cookie got into?”

“Nothing.”

“Positive?”

“Yes.”

“Certain?”

“Yes...?” I was starting to doubt myself. Long pause. Things were getting heated and I hadn’t even seen the bill yet.

“THINK, Kandy!” We were on a first-name basis by then.

“OK, OK...” I was buying time, up against the wall. “Wait, I know! We painted. Did she lick the wall?” I was triumphant, bingo.

“No.” She was unmoved.

I was down to my T-shirt by then, wringing with sweat. What was happening?
Finally,  I remembered that we’d passed a party spot out in the woods, a bonfire. When I told the vet it must have been the leftover cans of PBR and bottles of Boone’s Farm, she relaxed.

“But it wasn’t beer,” she declared with satisfaction. “It was pot.”

I almost couldn’t speak and when I did, I never felt so goody-two-shoes, girl-next-door-innocent in my life. “Did you say pot?”

“Pot, a pot brownie or a pot cookie probably,” she said. “I knew it was pot by the way she came stumbling in.”

We shared a good, expensive laugh then.

So it appears that the vet had been waiting for me to confess. I imagined her whole staff on the far side of the door, waiting to hear what kind of story I was going to feed them. But I had no story. The real story was that my dog was now more experienced than me.

PART 2
The friend I was walking the dogs with that day isn’t just any friend. She’s a friend married to a narcotics cop.

I called her. Indignant.


“Was this a STING OPERATION?”

Five minutes later she sent me a picture of her dog in uniform.

PART 3
This was a fine opener for the “Say No To Drugs” talk with my boys.

When I was done explaining what Cookie had accidentally gotten into and the horrors of drugs, I asked the boys if they had any questions.

My 11-year-old: “What if someone offers me drugs?”

Me: “Say no thanks and walk (run) away.”

My 9-year-old: “But... what if someone offers me brownies?”

Blog Hop: My Writing Process

My friend Cari Noga tagged me in the Blog Hop. This was a fun way to think about what I am really doing with my time and writing! Read on… and see the three women I tagged at the end to hop over and read next Monday!

What am I working on? I am working on stitching together essays into a novel. For the last three years, I’ve written about my mother and losing her. I’ve written about my parenting and how that changed when I no longer had a mother. I’ve written about biking and how it's been my salvation. I’ve written about making new friends when your old life is gone. After three years of writing in increments, taking apart moments of sadness and happiness, I see a pattern now. I can see where I came through the loss of my mother via those friends and my children and that bike. I’m now working on putting those pieces together in a novel, part fact, part fiction.

I’ve posted many of my essays on my blog at www.kandacechapple.com. One of my favorite excerpts, I just reworked as an editorial this month. This particular essay is about four-wheeling, boozing and trampolining. And missing my mom. I also work year-round on my own publication, Grand Traverse Woman, a bimonthly regional women’s magazine I pub with my twin sister. I am the editor and also write a regular motherhood column that is sometimes funny and sometimes incriminating.

How does my work differ from others in the genre?  I feel my work is both serious (working through the loss of my mother) and funny (my mother would not approve of some of these confessions). It’s a combination of writing as deep as I can go, then taking a break by finding something small and real and funny to write about. I like that my writing feels like a conversation between best friends – one minute we’re crying together, the next laughing.

Why do I write what I do? I like to laugh and I like to remember. I wrote for many years while my mother was alive and well. None of that writing means anything now, it is empty. I see now how loss has changed me. I wrote about this writing shift in a recent issue of Writer’s Digest. It’s true. The words I write now carry so much more, a perspective that only grief and overcoming can bring.

How does your writing process work? I like to write in short stretches and short pieces. Often ideas come to me while I am out biking. I sometimes stop in the middle of the trail and get out my phone and make note of the idea. It’s just a few words but I’ll suddenly realize I’ve been thinking about it half the ride. If I don’t write it down, I’ll forget about it even I’ve thought about it for the whole ride. Then, I get home and try to write it out in 30-60 minutes. Sometimes I have to let the idea sit a day or two and then it comes to me, the start. Once I have a start, the rest comes hot on its heels.

I try to devote part of my day to something related to my personal writing (outside of my magazine duties) – stitching essays together, pitching an essay to a publication, writing something new. My favorite part is the writing something new. Taking that nugget of an idea I thought of on the bike and turning it into an essay. Those are always the truest things I write. The things that keep coming to me even when my eyes should be on the trail, the ruts, the turns. They are often the hardest to write - the most emotional and the most rewarding.

OK, next Monday, May 12, hop on over to the following blogs to check out their writing processes:

Heather Johnson Durocher - Michigan Runner Girl is a site written and produced by Heather Johnson Durocher, a journalist of nearly 20 years. – She offers race recaps, running advice and great articles on women and running. She says, “I love Michigan. I'm passionate about running - and all things outdoors in our beautiful state. There's so much to see and do, and I welcome you to come along for the run. And ride. And paddle. It's all about being in a state of motion.” -  Visit http://michiganrunnergirl.com/

Margaret Fedder – Margaret lives in Traverse City, Michigan. She is a mom, a wife, a former teacher, a freelance editor, and an aspiring writer. She says,”when I write, it comes from a place inside of me that just wants to speak truly - about relationships, family, motherhood, spirituality, creativity, memory. But I also like to write about the things I love - like Michigan, the seasons, books, and paper crafts.” Visit http://www.mjfedder.blogspot.com/.

Chris Convissor – Chris is a creative writer, artist and adventurer. She fixes things that act up in and outside of your house to pay the bills and is presently making the transition from full time fix-it person and part-time writer to full-time writer and part time fix-it person. Visit her newly launched blog at Jhidzia.wordpress.com.

A Mother's Day Tribute (on a four-wheeler)

I wrote this in 2008, a year after our mother passed away. It seems a fitting tribute to publish it this year for Mother’s Day, looking back on that first summer without her, when our kids were so little and we were figuring out this motherhood thing all by ourselves. We know she’d laugh.
~

We broke out the cherry wine somewhere between the juice boxes and bologna sandwiches. We hated wine.

“Let’s open this wine and try to learn to like it,” Kerry said, unearthing a corkscrew from the back of her junk drawer.

I cut a sandwich in half for my 3-year-old son and sent a shocked yet pleased look over his head to Kerry. It was a perfect summer afternoon. Yet we both sat there pretending not to miss our mother.

It was an excellent distraction to our pretending.

We were 33 years old and neither adept at opening a bottle of wine. I promptly snapped the cork off half in the bottleneck, half out. Kerry poked the remainder of the cork into the bottle and watched it float before pouring two glassfuls into plastic wine glasses. Kerry’s was neon pink, mine grassy green.

“Cheers!” The plastic thudded in an unsatisfying way.

Our children, cousins, dirty from running in the sprinkler, tan from a summer of no shirts and no school, ran in the yard.

Neither of us could tolerate more than a few swallows of the sour cherry wine. We spit it, with much fanfare, into the burning bush at the edge of the deck. This is when the giggles started.

“Just boozing on a Thursday afternoon,” I whispered. We had, until that very afternoon, lived a prim and proper life. We’d grown up in a little town, lived less than five miles from the home we’d grown up in, had a good job and good kids. Never had we dreamed of getting drunk on a Thursday afternoon. It was a stupid yet very grown-up thing to do. And with no one about to stop us, we pressed on.

“I like where this idea is going, but we can’t do it on wine,” Kerry said, dumping hers in the bushes. “I could run down to the gas station.”

This, too, made us laugh. A beer run on a pretty summer day while the kids played in the yard?

“And leave me with four wild kids?” I liked the idea of getting drunk, but already it was too much work.

“Wait,” Kerry said. “Dad’s not home.” The words were an open invitation to the Smirnoff coolers he loved. And kept in inventory.

Dad, in fact, was 2,000 miles away on vacation in Montana.

“Field trip!” we belted out to the children, who came running. Kerry’s house was a mere half-mile from Dad’s. By cutting through the woods, we could be there in 5 minutes.

In 15 minutes, not only had we hijacked Dad’s fridge, we had also hijacked his four-wheeler.

In 25 minutes, we had figured out how to fit four children and two adults on a slowly creeping ATV with a six-pack balancing on the gun rack.

“Wait till Dad realizes his booze is gone!” we squealed. We were young and daring, stealing a four-wheeler we could borrow any day of the week, clocking 8 mph through the field, wide open.

We rode together, one hugging the other around the waist like we used to when we were 10. Back when things had been simpler, our mom in the kitchen making dinner, dad in the pole barn wrenching on something.

In 45 minutes, we’d traveled as far as we dared with the four-wheeler. Only to arrive, as if by fate, at the trampoline.

“Drinking and driving do not mix, but how about drinking and jumping?”
Everyone liked this idea, or at least we did.

In 50 minutes, tricks and small competitions were unfolding high in the air above the trampoline.

In an hour, the kids were unhappy and we were very, very happy.

“You’re ruining our fun!” the children bellowed. There was a general consensus that moms were too big for trampolines. TWO moms was downright dangerous.
“Then get off!” we yelled. We wondered about the neighbors watching from a distance. The twins had commandeered the trampoline.

The two older children started to cry because they wanted the trampoline back. The two younger children started to cry because they wanted their mothers back.
We poured another Smirnoff over ice in our plastic wine glasses and marveled at how we’d never thought to pour a drink over our sorrows before now.

It was the closest we’d come to having fun since losing our mother, an hour or two of going off the rails and letting go of the grief. It seemed even better that the good times were unfolding on her trampoline, with drinks from her fridge, and under the shade trees she used to share with her girls all summer long.