Indiana Bones

I’ve come to love the smell of steak slowly roasting in an iron skillet with olive oil crackling at 6:30 AM each morning. I think I’ll remember it for all time, which is a strange thought for a vegetarian. Indiana demands food as soon as she awakes and the only thing that she seems to like at the moment is steak. This smell is the first indicator that I get another day with my girl. When she’s finished, she is on her way outside. I plan to join her just as soon as I slow drip my coffee and throw on my wool coat over my pajamas. 

I expect to find her at the bottom of the ramp that we built to our river cottage as soon as we learned that she had hip dysplasia. She likes to lay there because she can see all the windows and hear the conversations between me and Bo in the morning. But I didn’t find her there. So I went to check the overgrown bush that she loves to hide in. Not there either. No problem; onto her next favorite. I walk up to the lodge where she lays in the grass next to the stone wall right under the rickety Camp Laney sign. It’s no head scratcher why she loves this spot, where she can watch everyone come and go from the heartbeat of camp. Empty.

Now panic is starting to set in because I had this fleeting ‘what if’ thought… what if she went away to die alone. It turns out the only thing worse than Indiana dying is thinking about her doing it alone, which sent me into a panic. My coffee started sloshing around in my mug, spilling out over the edges as I picked up the pace to the next stop. I thought I’d find her in the woods behind river cottage. I think that’s where she’d go. My mind sees her even before I do. I’m not wearing my glasses and in the woods I can make out the tricolors of her coat. I stumble faster, fearful of what I might find. I find a large tree stump. When the warm tingle of relief fills my body, I turn and look toward the river. There she is. She’s lying in the dirt by the banks.

I laid down on my back beside her with our sides touching listening to the sounds of the morning: roosters sounding the alarm in the distance, leaves falling into the river, a light sprinkle of rain off and on. 

I start thinking that the river bank is a peculiar spot to find her. I didn’t have this on my list of her favorites because she hates to swim. I might have had something to do with that. Then I let the memories wash over me. 

I can almost see the first time that I threw her in Little River right off the dock. She was all of four months old. How could I have known that Berners can’t swim? If you want a good belly laugh, google Berners trying to swim. You’ll find videos of similar scenes. She flailed her front legs, failed to kick her back legs, and sunk like a sack of potatoes all in dramatic fashion. A camp lifeguard watched the whole scene and offered to teach her the right way. He tried to calm her fear by carrying her in slowly, a feeble attempt to change her mind. Didn’t work. From that point forward, she’d spend all her summers running back and forth between the water slide, the dock, and the rope swing barking at the campers from the moment they jumped in until they made it safely back to the banks. 

It’s at this point that my Bo comes to join us with his usual expression, “There’s my girls.” She gets up to greet him with her helicopter tail flying and continues to go back and forth through his legs until her excitement wanes. She loves him the most. It’s hard for me to admit, but she is enamored, and I think to myself ‘same, girl, same.’

I sit back to give them space to lay in the dirt on the banks and that’s when I realize I was wrong about the steak. It’s this that I’ll remember for all time. 

The prompt for today was start with one of the following “I don’t want to write about”, or “I want to remember”, or a description of the day.