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“A Walk in the Wash”
She’s always been shy, my Grace, but when we walk in the wash--it’s Sunday morning and a false spring warms--she remembers.
Memories echo from younger days back in Florida. Walks with a pack of friends in the mangrove swamp, runs on the beach, tracking land crabs. In her memory there were no pheasants or grouse, but once she was free of her garage prison next door and moved in with me, she exercised her instincts with what was close at hand. My brother’s Golden Retriever, Sherman, drove her to take refuge behind my back on the couch, but a crab inching its way across Highway A1A would drive her into the middle of traffic with me flailing on the other end of her leash and cars diving for the boulevard.
She smiles that setter grin with brown eyes giving me a sidelong glance, checking my proximity as she lopes through the dry desert
wash. I pick up a rock that looks like a robin’s egg, the color startling in contrast to the dun-colored ground--I know it will fade on my kitchen counter like seashells that are vibrant and
glisten in their home of damp sand but carry only a wisp of a memory when put on a shelf to become collection.
We used to play a game when her bones weren’t so stiff and creaky.
She would run ahead, far ahead--then turn looking. I would call her--Graaa-ceee. Ears alert, she searched for me. I always wondered if her hearing was going--it does sometimes in
purebred setters. So I would wave my arms high above my head to signal where I was; she would reward me with a look of pure joy--you are there, I am found--and then, as the background score
rose to a crescendo she would run, ears flying, legs pumping, straight for me and our loving reunion, her tail flag-waving, her eyes sparkling.
Knowing that one can never have too much in the way of theatrics in life, we might do this two or three times during a walk.
This morning she kept a steady pace so that she could last the couple of miles, only occasionally tempted by my younger dog to climb the wall
of the wash where dead, twisted athol limbs fall down the slope, the evidence of some long ago storm. When the terrain gets too chancy, she comes back to the flat ground, the possibility of
stumbling too humiliating when it happens to my elegant Grace.
We are transplants, Grace and I. We come from “back east,” not so long ago that we can remember the Landers Quake or the rumble of
trucks off to Desert Storm but long enough to have met a pack of coyotes on the morning of 9/11 who let us walk on by in our grief; long enough to remember paws yellow with pollen the year wildflowers
bloomed a second time in September; long enough to have the first snow day in their dog lives November of 2004; long enough to breathe in great gulps of gratitude for the openness of our desert; and long
enough to learn how to pray in the space and silence of a walk in the wash.
Sue Kelly – Twentynine Palms
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