Sleepy and having trouble starting the day?

Me, too.

Maybe these pictures of three-month-old Vizsla pup, Gabe, dropping in on Gryfe for a visit yesterday will perk us all up.

At first, Gryfe and Gabe seemed a bit overwhelmed by each other, but that didn’t last long.

All the decent pictures I was able to take were while they were standing still, unsure.

Minutes later, they were mauling each other in frenzied dog happiness. All those pictures were a complete blurr.

Gabe is wondering what the heck I’m doing with that lickable block of plastic.

Gryfe is asking if he can get a puppy.

Under the influence of visiting, sweet, soft, cinnamon Gabe, I was asking myself the same thing. Just for a second.

My favorite thing? The thing I would grab in the middle of the night if the house were burning down?

I set myself a few ground rules:

• it couldn’t be a person or a pet (of COURSE I would save those first from a burning house)
• it had to be something I could carry in my own hands (that leaves out the house, the barn, the giant maple tree in the yard, the view out my bedroom window, the ocean)
• it had to be a tangible thing (strike sunlight, the sound of the bamboo wind chime on a lazy Saturday, music, smiles, laughing with friends, the taste of a tomato pulled straight off the vine on a warm August day, the view from a summit, and the moment just before bed time, when there’s nothing left to do but lie down and rest)

Well, that eliminated a lot of options straight away.

I looked around the room. The camera was an obvious choice. Too obvious. Besides, as much as I love my camera (well, both of my cameras), I could buy a new one with the insurance money.

For a day, I seriously considered the one-handed gate latch on the main gate by the goat barn. Really, I love that thing. It’s made my life so much easier, when my hands have been full of hay or water buckets and I need to slip in and out of the gate quickly without letting curious goats escape.

I nearly settled on that, then remembered that it, too, could be easily replaced.

Next, naturally, I came to things that could never be precisely replaced because they were one-of-a-kind, either because they were acquired under such specific, unrepeatable circumstances, or given to me by people who were no longer around to give.

The last birthday gift my mother gave me: a beautiful whale-bone carving she bought on a trip-of-a-lifetime to Alaska.
The mah jong set my grandmother used for years and that I played with as a child.
Yellowed photographs of great grandparents, grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, taken before the digital age and stored in shoe boxes and other flammable containers.
The cream and egg white whipper from M’s family; irreplaceable, unique, and perfectly suited to the job.
Little scraps of paper, notes, and poems that H has left me over the years.
A little plastic triangular-shaped ring that was the first thing that H held in her little baby hand.
Books. Books. Books. Inscribed, worn out, written in, dog-eared, reread, stained, carried everywhere.
The hunk of rock brought back from the Dolomites, the seashells, the river rocks, the nests, the colorful leaves, the branches-turned-walking sticks from a hundred hikes.

Uh oh. That’s getting to be a long list.

Listen, Rebecca, you have just bare minutes to grab something before the smoke and flames overwhelm you. What will you take?

I cheated a bit. Not one thing, but two.

A leather-bound, letter-press-printed, signed book of poetry, by my favorite poet, containing some of my favorite poems, including this one. A gift from M, when I was in grad school, and we could not afford such luxuries. But for poetry and love, you make some exceptions.

And, easily, because it’s on my hand already, the gold band on my left ring finger — made by a jeweler in Portsmouth, NH, who understood exactly how simple a ring I wanted; put on my finger in a round room in Bergen, Norway, by my sweetheart; worn nearly every day since, for going on twenty years; bearing the scars, scratches, and nicks that make up a life, including the time it had to be cut off my swelling finger after I broke my arm 10 days after H was born.

All else can be replaced.

January 16, 1912, at a latitude somewhere beyond 89° 42′:

Bowers’ sharp eyes detected what he thought was a cairn; he was uneasy about it, but argued that it must be a sastrugus. Half an hour later he detected a black speck ahead. Soon we knew that this could not be a natural snow feature. We marched on, found that it was a black flag tied to a sledge bearer; near by the remains of a camp; sledge tracks and ski tracks going and coming and the clear trace of dogs’ paws—many dogs. This told us the whole story. The Norwegians have forestalled us and are first at the Pole. It is a terrible disappointment, and I am very sorry for my loyal companions. Many thoughts come and much discussion have we had. To-morrow we must march on to the Pole and then hasten home with all the speed we can compass. All the day dreams must go; it will be a wearisome return. We are descending in altitude—certainly also the Norwegians found an easy way up.

And the next day:

Wednesday, January 17.—Camp 69. T. -22° at start. Night -21°. The Pole. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected. We have had a horrible day—add to our disappointment a head wind 4 to 5, with a temperature -22°, and companions labouring on with cold feet and hands.

We started at 7.30, none of us having slept much after the shock of our discovery. We followed the Norwegian sledge tracks for some way; as far as we make out there are only two men. In about three miles we passed two small cairns. Then the weather overcast, and the tracks being increasingly drifted up and obviously going too far to the west, we decided to make straight for the Pole according to our calculations. At 12.30 Evans had such cold hands we camped for lunch—an excellent ‘week-end one.’ We had marched 7.4 miles. Lat. sight gave 89° 53′ 37”. We started out and did 6 1/2 miles due south. To-night little Bowers is laying himself out to get sights in terrible difficult circumstances; the wind is blowing hard, T. -21°, and there is that curious damp, cold feeling in the air which chills one to the bone in no time. We have been descending again, I think, but there looks to be a rise ahead; otherwise there is very little that is different from the awful monotony of past days. Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority. Well, it is something to have got here, and the wind may be our friend to-morrow. We have had a fat Polar hoosh in spite of our chagrin, and feel comfortable inside—added a small stick of chocolate and the queer taste of a cigarette brought by Wilson. Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can do it.

Sometimes it just doesn’t matter how much you want something, how much work you put into it, what you’ve given up, or what you’ve suffered. The universe doesn’t owe you a thing. A blank, white, untouched field of snow doesn’t always mean that the promise offered will be fulfilled. Sometimes it means an awful soul-wearing trudge and the discovery that someone else has beat you to the punch.

Still, you march on. You do the thing you set out to do. You’ve come this far, after all. And when you’ve reached the bottom of the world, you have no other choice than to head back the way you came.

One little step to help me march through the year.

I’ve joined the LensProToGo 52 Week Photo Project where we’re given a photo assignment each week. This week’s assignment (due today) is to take a self portrait of yourself without you in it.

Hmmm.

My first thought was, “What?! I have no idea what to take a picture of!”

My second thought was a picture of my disaster of an office. But that would just be too shocking as my first entry.

My third thought was a picture of scattered somethings (seeds? toys? thoughts?) on the floor, and I still sort of like that idea.

Then I saw my bedside stack of to-be-read books and figured if anything represents me, that would pretty much sum it up: a love of words, a pile too big to handle easily, and a selection too eclectic to describe in one sentence.

When I downloaded my photos from my camera, this photo was rotated by 90º, and I liked it. M and I discovered that if we flipped it over 180º, even though it’s still on its side, it didn’t look anywhere as interesting. Something about the words on the spines being oriented the “wrong way” (for those of us in North America, anyway, used to reading book spines from top to bottom) made it look as if the books were floating.

Well… I’m a beginner and this sort of serendipty made me smile. I’ll take that.

The Project participants are posting their pictures to the Project Flickr page by the Sunday of each week; go check it out; there are some really amazing photos there. I’ll try to post mine here each week, too.

Left. Right. Left. Right. Left. Right. Left.

I read other people’s blog posts about their resolutions to recommit to their exercise programs, focus on their work, be more true to themselves, eat only organic foods, buy only from local bookstores, finish their novels, learn new languages, be better.

I read and I feel inspired, and then I feel depressed. And tired.

Some days in early January, the most I can resolve to do is get out of bed each cold, dark morning and start the water boiling for tea. I want to be better, more productive, more creative, kinder. Instead I feel a bit lost. Angry, if I admit it. My words leave me.

January’s fresh calendar advertises clear, open days to fill in as we wish, but life has shown me that January can also be a kick in the teeth, a black “X”, a curtain drawn across the window of a life.

Resolving to do anything makes my shoulders hunch up around my ears. What is the point of trying to do anything at all?

Well maybe the point is not having a point. Put the lists aside. Be open. Stop struggling. Listen to music. Read if you want to. Write a single decent line—or word. Stare into the middle distance and remember something hilarious someone you love once said. Bake a loaf of bread. Walk your goofy dog. Take a photograph. See what the day will give you.

Do the work that needs to be done, and then let yourself off the hook.

The clock won’t stop ticking. Time won’t stop sliding past. Another January comes and goes and people you loved who aren’t here won’t come back simply because you resolve to improve yourself. But if you cut yourself some slack and stop trying so hard, maybe you can come back to yourself, the way you were when (as Loudon Wainwright put it), “nothing bad has happened yet”. When you believed in fresh starts and resolutions.

I can try.

This time of year, we make our own light to stave in the hull of darkness.

We celebrate every holiday, light everything on fire, cook with oil.

The other night, I accidentally lit the lamb chops on fire. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Our bedroom is unheated. We have four layers of blankets on the bed. But the windows in that room face due east, and every extra drop of sunlight lands on me first.