Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray)

1. Morning walks. Our first morning back was gorgeous, just like it always is here, and we made that joke we do, said the thing we do on walks when we are traveling but in this case we were talking about a place only a mile from our house, “if we lived here, we’d walk here all the time.” Because there are so many fires in Colorado right now, many of the sunrises right now look more like sunset, with a bright red hazy cast.

Eric was so happy to see the turtles digging nests to lay eggs

We had lots of good walks in Oregon, on the beach most days but also one hike on the Cumming’s Creek Trail that was my favorite walk of the trip. The way the light filters through the old growth there is a particular kind of magic. I was watching Ringo that morning, thinking to myself how happy he was when Eric said, “he looks so happy.”

As an older dog who doesn’t care about being offlead, running around and playing, and who only wants to smell stuff and get treats, it turns out that walking on the beach isn’t as much fun. He still did that thing where every time he stops and digs in the sand, he expects a treat, which can lead to him only taking five steps between each dig, which is hilarious to me.

One thing I’m particularly grateful for from the trip is that we had FOUR skunk sightings but not one spray, and as those sightings happened on a trail in Utah during our drive and what a nightmare it would have been to try and clean Ringo on the road and that smell never would have come out of our car and how could we stay in a hotel or rental house smelling like that, so I’m so grateful we avoided it. We renamed that particular trail, “Skunk Loop.”

Another bit of luck was our second morning of a three day drive, Ringo started to limp on the morning walk, the thing I’d worked directly with him and his care team for two months before we left to prevent happening. Turns out he was “just kidding” because that was the only time the whole trip it happened. I made lots of concessions for his advanced age, putting down anti-slip mats and adjusting all the beds so he could get up on them without wrecking himself.

2. A safe, easy, successful trip. Ringo did really well and so did we with three days in the car and two nights in hotels, there and back, six days of total travel. We had to make adjustments to the accommodations for him at our hotels — in one, I pushed the mattresses back to expose enough of the box spring foundations to create a step Ringo could use to get up on the bed and at another smaller motel we were put on the second floor one night and the stairs are those metal kind with little holes surrounded by teeth and Eric had to carry Ringo up and down, which was not ideal but we made it work. My favorite parts of the drive are going by the Wasatch Mountains and then all the various national forests in Oregon, the backroads in the Willamette Valley, and the whole section between Corvallis and the central coast.

Regrowth after the devastating Santiam Canyon fire of 2020

3. Visiting family. I am very aware how little time we all have together, so each moment spent with them is precious. While I was over in the valley to visit my mom, I booked two nights in a small hotel in Independence. When I arrived, they apologized that the room I’d booked hadn’t been cleaned, so they upgraded me to another room, which turned out to be the Osprey Suite, which was amazing and had a balcony with a view of the Willamette River. I was very grateful for the extra luxury and quiet during what was a difficult part of the trip.

4. Our last big trip with Ringo was a good one. He could have more years with us, but this is the last time we’ll make him take a big trip, so the last time he’ll be at the beach in his current form. I’m sad about that but also so happy that he was comfortable and at ease while he was there and we got to spend that time with him.

5. Kitchen counter love notes. I post these every week, but you may not have heard the story behind them. It started with Eric leaving me the occasional love note on the kitchen counter to find when I got back from walking Ringo, after he’d left for work or the gym. They were nothing special then, nothing fancy, but then he found out I always kept them and started to take it seriously, making them into tiny little pieces of art. At first, it was only the days I walked Ringo and Eric was gone when we came back, but then it became every day, and not always one the counter. In fact, now he puts them in the cabinet next to my green tea, or if I’m traveling he sneaks them into my Kindle or my suitcase or sends me a picture of one first thing in the morning. On this trip, he packed his art supplies and made me one every morning, even though we were on vacation, including a few he drew into the sand.

6. Home sweet home: My tiny family, small house, little life. It was a good trip AND I’m so happy to be home, be back here with them. When I picked up our mail, the tshirt quilt I’d had made from shirts of my dad’s, so many of them Colorado shirts I’d sent him over the years, had finally arrived. We also have new patio furniture gifted to us by our neighbors who moved while we were gone and couldn’t take it with them. There was also a sweet “welcome home” from my dear friend Chloe’ who’d been watering my plants while I was away. My peonies are long gone, but I had a few pictures from right before we left I hadn’t yet shared here.

Tshirt quilt I had made out of my dad’s tshirts

Bonus joy: getting back in the pool and sauna and using the hydromassage chair, yoga at Red Sage, cherry season, molasses cookies, pay day, our own bed (!), a dozen white roses because Eric knew I was sad my peonies were gone, all our favorite trails and the mosquitoes not too bad yet, a/c, a warm shower, texting with my brother, how good Mom’s house looks now and the HUGE difference that is making in the listing price and all the hard work Chris did to get it there, getting out all the summer recipes for yummy seasonal food, writing with my Friday morning writing group after four weeks away, blogging, being back in my own house with all my own things, grocery shopping, doing laundry, unpacking the first night even though I didn’t really want to but Eric was working on it because he was tired of sitting all day and wanted to move and next day me was so happy that day before me had already taken care of all that, naps in my own bed, letting myself go slow and take it easy, therapy, adding things to my schedule that are just for me, reading in bed at night while Ringo and Eric sleep.

Rabbit, rabbit. A long-time folk tradition claims saying this first thing on the first day of a new month will give you good luck for the rest of the month. The trick is these must be the first words you speak, but apparently the same superstition allows that if you forget, you can say “tibbar, tibbar,” (rabbit spelled backwards), at the end of the first day as the last words you speak, and it will turn things around, earn you the same chance at luck.

When we were in Oregon, staying in the same beach cabin we had with Ringo two other summers before, we expected to see the same small dark brown rabbit that often ate lunch in the backyard, nibbling on the strawberry clover and beach daisy that grow there. However, almost two weeks in we still hadn’t seen any sign of the rabbit. One afternoon, walking up the road by the house where the edges are thick with salal, evergreen huckleberry, rhododendron, salmon berry, thimbleberry, fuchsia, escallonia, red clover and blackberry briars, we finally saw two tiny dark bunnies. They had moved up the road to a place more wild. The relocation may have been related to the cat we’d seen one afternoon running across the lawn or the coyote we saw right next to our yard one of the last mornings we were there, or even the bald eagles being harassed by a loud murder of crows that we saw at the corner of the yard on our very last morning, one eagle holding a dead rabbit.

Back in Colorado where the rabbits are bigger and the color of dry dirt and where their main predator, the red fox, has struggled to recover its previous numbers for almost the past ten years, the rabbit population is strong. No need to search or wait to see any as they are now almost as common as the squirrels. This morning, as Eric and I made our way back from our walk with Ringo he said, “oh, two rabbits, fighting!” I didn’t ask him what made him think they were fighting, but it was only then, after many words already spoken aloud, that I remembered it was the first day of July.

At this, the start of our second day back, I find myself still in that liminal space of traveling between. Eric said he woke up last night unsure of where he was, at first thinking he was still at the beach. Returning from time away always feels like this, the reentry and the landing slow and awkward, even uncomfortable. I feel confused and clumsy for days. This happens in particular when I come back from time spent in Oregon, in the Willamette Valley or on the central Oregon Coast. That landscape, that place is still home to me, even after 30+ years gone. I carry it with me when I’m not there, the roots running deep, and coming back fully to this other version of “home” is complicated.

Eric and I agreed that this trip was one of the best we’d had in a long time, but for me, it was also one of the hardest, for lots of reasons. My mom is continuing to decline, and that’s hard to see. I visited her for the first time in her new care home and while it is good, her last place was excellent. We are in the final stages of listing her house for sale. I went over to see it for one last time before that happens, to walk through it with my brother who has done so much of the work to get it ready. My parents lived there together for the last 18 years of my dad’s life and it was where he died and where we cared for Mom the last 1.5 years she was able to live there surrounded by all the stuff of their life together that earlier this year we worked so hard to recycle and rehome, so there’s a mix of sweet memories and some of the worst moments of my life that are all still there even though the house is now technically empty.

This was our first trip back together since Eric’s mom passed, since his parents’ house was cleaned up, cleared out and sold, and the first visit we made to his dad’s new home which isn’t a place big enough for us to stay overnight with him. When he spent a few days at the beach while we were there, he told Eric one night that being there with us was the happiest he’d been since she died. My aunt and godmother, who has lived at the beach for almost the past 30 years embodying the life I won’t ever live but can imagine so clearly, who we always visit when we are there, is selling her house and moving back to the valley to be closer to her healthcare providers and because the upkeep on her property became too much. And finally, seeing Ringo there this time was a stark contrast to him two years ago, and it became clear how he’s changed and aged, and I realized that this would be his last big trip with us, his last time at the beach, even if he keeps going for more years after.

The trip was fraught with loss and grief and anxiety, so much gone, so much shifting and in flux, so much forever altered and so much still in the process of changing. We made the first long road trip to Oregon from Colorado to stay at the beach with our dogs and visit family when our first dog was only 4.5 months old, the same year we bought this house that has been our home for 25 years now. All the versions of our past selves and all those moments, from the past 25 years and even further back, are all there together.

One day when I was there this time, four of my aunts were there visiting my mom and while I wouldn’t call any of them old, they are all widowed, just like my mom. “Now” turns into “the good old days” way too fast, and life may be long but it’s too short, goes by too fast. I try really hard to be in it, with it as it is happening, but it also can feel too big, too much. And this has been my life for the past six years, this ongoing series of complications, change and loss. Discomfort, suffering, and grief as a living, growing thing, constantly churning and gnashing its sharp teeth, holding me so tight and going so fast it can be hard to breathe.

And of course, love continues to pour honey all over it: the mornings lingering in bed cuddling with Eric and Ringo, how happy Ringo was hiking the Cumming’s Creek Trail that one morning, all the delicious food and good company, sitting watching the waves, those few sunsets, walking on the beach, how Ringo would lean on me in the car and fall asleep against my leg, how he has one stomp that means give me a treat and another that means pet me, the butterflies and birds and bees, the flowers, donuts and marionberries, sitting out on the deck in the sun, making each other laugh.

Tibbar, tibbar. Always the chance to start over, as many times as necessary, to begin again, to keep going, to let go and come back. An opportunity to try again, to turn your luck around, to come back to the very first day, to this very moment and find yourself home again. I’m so lucky, rabbit or no rabbit.