Cleo phone home

“Oh crap,” I say, turning abruptly to face Morgan. “I just made eye contact with Cleo.”

I glance sideways at Cleo where she has been ensconced in her box in the kitchen all morning staring intensely at the ceiling. She is now staring intensely at me.

Her green eyes are quite mesmerizing and I try not to look directly at her again, to let her know I see her. But it’s too late. I watch from the corner of my eye as her round shape rises up from the box on pointed little feet and then moves forward like a balloon sailing across the floor on a current of air.

She never once takes her eyes from me and in my blurry side view I see her mouth open, letting escape a tiny squeak of a half-meow. And then I can’t help it because part of me feels for this little misunderstood cat who from the beginning never quite fit in, and I also think of the time we gave her away for a day. So I look at her and she breaks into a trot, finishes her meow and then lets loose another, more powerful one, and then another. She is circling me now in a well practiced, determined tiptoe, throwing herself against my legs with each turn, staring up at me with those green eyes.

Morgan and I have discussed Cleo at length, working up theories to explain her escalating neuroses, like why she has taken to living in this box filled with scraps of used Christmas wrapping paper, why she stares at the ceiling constantly, and why she has these bouts of desperate neediness, clinging to me like a person drowning. She can’t just sit on my lap she has to claw at my shirt, ram her nose into my face all the while meowing this intense “I have something earth-shattering to tell you,” meow.

We watch her one-day as we sit at the kitchen table drinking tea. She marches around us spouting her crazy ravings and then beelines to my chair, reaches up and pulls on my shirtsleeve, meows pointedly and stares into my eyes before walking away and settling into her box to once again fix her bulging eyes on the ceiling.

“Maybe she’s trying to contact the Mothership,” I say, and then thinking about the dolphins in Douglas Adams’ The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, add, “Maybe she knows the end of the world is coming and she’s trying to warn us.”

A few days later I walk into the living room with Cleo trailing me at an anxious trot. Morgan looks up from his magazine, “I know what it is,” he says with the tone of someone who really does have it all figured out. “The Mothership has told her to stay near you so they know where to find her.” As if I am some kind of beacon for aliens.

Maybe.

I think of this while I stand in the kitchen and Cleo throws herself against my legs. All it takes is a moment of intense attention and she will be fine for a few hours so I reach down and wrap my arms around her balloon-shaped body, lift her a couple of inches off the ground and hug her fiercely. Her purr is quiet and refined and she loses herself in the moment, eyes closed partway, paws kneading at the air, and then I let her go. She wanders back to her box, tramps in amongst the flattened papers that don’t really crinkle anymore, opens her eyes wide to scan the ceiling, settles in, and waits.

Superstar

I smile to myself, try not to look too proud, try not to gush because I’m sure they say things like this to all their patients.

“She was awesome,” the vet tech says as she leads Bear back to the waiting room. It is empty except for me and when Bear glances up from her frantic sniffing she does that skippy thing labs do, ears flapping, tail wagging, as if she hasn’t seen me in weeks although it has been only minutes since they took her in the back to draw some blood.

“And you have a bandage!” I say, taking in the thin white strip of tape wrapped around her left front leg.

“Yep, she was so good,” the girl says with a genuine smile as she hands the leash back to me.

The tests, I am told, will take only 15 minutes so we decide to wait. I take Bear outside for a quick wander and a sniff. The wind howls and snaps at us as we step from the tiny building. Flattened brown grass is brightened in patches by cool sunlight filtering through a layer of thin clouds that turn the sky palest blue. If it wasn’t for the wind it would be a perfect spring day but the wind has an almost wintry bite to it as it whips across open fields and swirls back again from the mountains.

I try to pull my down vest a little tighter against the blast of cold with one hand as I hold Bear’s leash with the other and follow her beneath a line of towering cedar trees before attempting to usher her to a more sheltered spot behind a tin garage.

Our vets’ office is a little white bungalow on a farm nestled near the foot of a low mountain range. It is part of the moutainous area that begins with an escarpment, skirting the edge of Lake Superior, and marks the south-western limits of Thunder Bay. The mountains around here kind of march north across the landscape as if they've broken away from the escarpment, and curve, like the lip of a bowl, around farm country.

Bear and I have sat outside on the grass in the past and looked down across the valley draped in all its golds and greens and browns, but today it is too cold, for me anyway, and I escort Bear back inside.

There is another girl behind the counter who smiles widely at Bear and then directs an enthusiastic “Hello,” towards her as well.

As I’m paying, the first girl appears again and the two of them start discussing how cute Bear is, how well behaved, how sweet.

“You have to see her when you give her a treat, her whole face lights up,” says the girl who helped with the blood test. The second girl takes a treat from the jar. Bear is instantly on to them.

“Look at her ears perk right up,” says the girl with the treat. “And her forehead is all wrinkled.” I love these people.

“She is a pretty special dog,” is all I’ll let myself say knowing full well everyone thinks their dog is the best dog in the world. Well, mostly. I have no illusions when it comes to Murdoch. The last time I brought him to the vet he growled at everyone and sort of bit the vet.

Sometimes I feel like I should wear a sign when I’m with Murdoch like those bumper stickers some people have that say ‘my other car is a Lamborghini’. I feel like my sign should say ‘my other dog is an angel’ or ‘my other dog is NOT a jerk’.

So I smile wider as the vet techs fawn over Bear and we wait for the all-clear from the vet, which comes with some more compliments and treats, and we leave the vets without having to apologize for anything.

Bear is not perfect, but today she is and on the way home I gush over her in the car.

The night the sky fell

It’s dark outside. The windows act like mirrors reflecting your life at you, all golden and glowy and warm. You’re standing in the kitchen talking to your husband, throwing a ball for your dog. You toss it in the air straight to her and she clamps her jaws around it. The ball is too big for her mouth but she insists on jamming it in there anyway. She heads off on a foot stomping, tail wagging, one dog parade around the kitchen table.

You laugh at something your husband says and then glance at your dog. She is jerking her head at a strange angle towards her backend, toenails skittering almost rhythmically on the floor, over and over again, the ball is still clamped in her mouth and she seems to be having trouble breathing around it. It is like she’s stuck in a loop, a broken record. “Are you okay?” you say as you realize she’s not and you are by her side wrapping your arms around her chest and easing her to the floor before her knees buckle.

Your husband is there too, cradling her head, the ball has bounced away somewhere, and one of you says it out loud, matter-of-fact and disbelieving at the same time, “She’s having a seizure.”

And then your dog is convulsing on the floor and there’s a puddle spreading under her of drool and pee and you’re vaguely aware that you are kneeling in it but you don’t care because your hands are on your dog’s body, her short black fur sticking up in tufts between your fingers, and you’re talking to her, trying to calm her down, trying to call her back and you feel like ten minutes have already gone past and shouldn’t she have stopped by now? She’s making the most horrible choking, gagging sounds like she can’t breathe and her tongue is hanging limply out the side of her mouth and then you’re sure she is dying right there in front of you on the kitchen floor and you think, “it wasn’t supposed to happen this way.” You’re not ready.

You have time to panic now because suddenly time doesn’t exist, and your husband and you look at each other and you hear yourself ask “What do we do?” and you don’t know what you mean by that because there’s nothing you can do but wait and watch but you’re also thinking of after. What if this is it? What do we do now? Because she’s 11 and ever since she turned ten you’ve wondered how much time you have left, but you’ve never really thought about it, never dwelled on it, just let the idea float around somewhere out there, not ready to face a time when she’s not with you.

And then it’s over. Just like that. And there’s panic in her eyes and she wants to get up.

You tell her it’s okay but she’s agitated, won’t lie still. You can’t make her stay and now she’s pacing wildly and you’re following her in loops around the kitchen, watching. Is she walking the same? Is she holding her head differently? Does she seem focused? Does she know where she is? Shouldn’t she be exhausted, want to sleep?

When she finally lies down on the blanket you folded neatly on the floor for her, she pants heavily and you sit with her on the edge of the blanket, avoiding the wet spot that got doused in water when she kicked over the water dish you put in front of her. Your husband sits on a chair because you don’t want to both crowd in, make her nervous, and you watch, and you talk about why.

But sometimes there is no good reason.

Two days later you are still watching her like a hawk and she looks at you like “What?” and you hug her again for the millionth time that day and she rolls her eyes and sighs that deep “I don’t get humans” sigh and you smile at her and hand her another treat and try to forget and not forget at the same time.

Naptime

The sun skims across the tops of our trees and paints bright golden squares on our living room floor that slant from left to right and then right to left as the sun arcs through its path in the sky. Its warmth floods the house, swirls in to every corner.

By the window, I settle into my bean bag chair, the one I’ve had for about 15 years whose black vinyl skin has been pierced and slashed by little sharp claws and stitched up many times to stop floods of tiny white Styrofoam balls that pour from open wounds.

The cool smell of receding snow drifts in through a window open just a crack along with the lazy drip of melt water from the roof and the chortle of songbirds amidst the utter silence of the forest.

There are a million things I should be doing, but the beanbag chair feels softer in the sun and I sink in a little deeper as Bear stretches out on the couch, her eyes closed but for a sliver, her nose whistling softly. Chestnut sprawls beside her, a deep sigh escaping through his nose as he melts further into the couch, if that’s even possible.

Only Cleo is not relaxed, her pretty green eyes, shimmering like a couple of jewels, bulge from her face as she stares at the ceiling, mesmerized by every tiny reflection, even the flit of light reflected off the surface of my tea as it swishes about in my mug. She has not taken her eyes off the ceiling for weeks, not since the sun started showing up stronger and more regularly in clear skies.

Spring arrived early, after winter barely got going. Already there are flies and moths and other buzzing creatures that should still be in some kind of stasis somewhere. Great patches of leaf-strewn ground are emerging in the woods where just yesterday were fields of white.

In the lengthening evenings Murdoch and I explore the changing forest, try to remember the well-defined paths we made that are now melting into their surroundings. The remaining snow, the consistency of a slushie, gives way easily underfoot. It crunches and slops as we weave through the woods and watch the sun sink behind the bare-branched trees, a burning ball of gold in a peach coloured sky.

But in the early afternoon, the air smells like sunshine and our house inhales every last drop of it. The trees stand completely still as if they are sleeping and my eyes refuse to stay open. My list of a million things floats to the back of my mind, I watch it go until it is muffled by the warmth and the sun and I think “just a few minutes”, as Bear’s breathing deepens and Cleo finally closes her eyes.

Making a comeback

The sun’s heat is so strong in these late days of winter that if I close my eyes and stand in the middle of the road beside the open meadow near our walking trail or on the trail itself where the new growth trees are just starting to crowd in, it feels like early summer. And then the smell of winter drifts up on cold drafts of air skimming across the snow, fresh and clean.

In the woods silence is filled with the sighs of trees, chittering squirrels, the sweep of raven wings and of dogs sniffing every hint of new smell and the melting snow crunching and compacting beneath their paws. I watch them for a moment, lost in their own worlds, smelling the bases of trees, burying their faces in the snow up to their ears, tromping over the well-trod path.

Murdoch runs ahead and I follow Bear, watch her happy gait, her brace-clad knees pumping smoothly through the spring in her step. It is so great to have Bear back.

Since late October Bear has resumed her daily walks following almost a year of bed rest after injuring both cruciate ligaments. It was a year of faraway stares, deep, heartbreaking sighs, forlorn grumbles and insolent eye-rolls as she slid into a lethargy that I felt very deeply.

I missed walking with her, my constant companion. Bear and I have been inseparable for the last nine years. We have done everything together: camping, canoeing and swimming, traveling, walking and walking and walking.

It just didn’t feel right to leave her behind. But everyday I had to turn my back on those sad eyes as Murdoch leapt out the door on the end of his leash. I’d call back over my shoulder, “Good girl Bear! I won’t be long.” We both knew that wasn’t true.

Eventually she stopped asking to go. She shrunk into herself and curled in a ball on her bed. I felt terribly guilty and it seemed the bed rest wasn’t doing anything; she still limped when she walked and stood with her hips askew to keep weight off one leg or the other. But then we found those knee braces and, slowly, things started to change.

In the woods she fills the spaces with her presence as if she never left. Giddiness rolls off her as she skips along the path, ears flapping happily, back legs hopping along in her red braces that make her look like a castaway on a desert island, or in this case a winter forest.

I walk behind her, watch the sun shimmer off her black fur, wait for her to find a stick and spit it at my feet. When she turns to look at me, a great big grin is spread across her face as she whips her tail from side to side, and in her brown eyes there’s a spark of puppy mischief.

This is more like it.