The Morning After

Snow Sloughing

Snow Roof

Merely a Pause for Sunset

Beloved Bobo, Okay Today

Snow Cover Like Peace

Slanting Morning Sun

Merganser Sighting When Needed

We are renewed at dawn, but today my renewal is slow in coming. My eyes feel gritty and my throat scratchy. If this were a hint of a cold, I'd be drinking hot water, honey and lemon. But it's not a cold, it's just the morning after a long night.

Snow sloughs off the roof as the roof was designed to do. Its steep-pitched metal pushed snow all night with audible thuds as piles plopped below the eaves. If this winter accumulates as much snow as last, those plop-piles will be six feet deep or more.

Sunset last night--let me rephrase that--last afternoon (because the sun sets by 4 p.m.) was a promise of pink. Even by 8 p.m. a silver moon lit up the white night, so I thought we were beyond snowfall. I was wrong. Snow clouds slunk over the mountains like a coyote hunting a rabbit, silent.

And I spent a good portion of my night out in the snow. That was the easy part--cold, and wet as it was. Somehow the glow of the night and the quiet of the snow was comforting and I needed comforting.

The hard part was watching my Bobo thrash in the snow, fighting seizures. Heartbreaking. I didn't care a thing about that cold, just that she knew I  was there, sitting in it with her. Being outside is calming to her, not to mention she often loses control of bladder and bowels. It's been a while since she's had one.

Last night she had two. One at 2 a.m. and another at 5 a.m. The second one surprised me.

Then, as if all my cooing to her and desperate praying to God gets through, she stands up on wobbling hind legs. One step, two and she's off trotting around under the pine tree by the garden. The one thing Bobo wants most is a car ride, but the red car is in Moses Lake. So she stands in the driveway as if to wait for it. I coax her back into the house, get her water and calm her brother, Grendel who gets worried to the point that his teeth chatter.

Like the snow peacefully covering the mountains, she is tucked up into her own peaceful rest this morning. Thus gritty eyes and scratchy throat for me. Bobo is snoring and that signals a deep sleep. I am relieved.

Renewal comes at dawn or perhaps later in the morning. And as if to say, "It's going to be all right," I step outside to see the sun slanting in a mid-morning rise against the south and see a lone female hooded merganser floating on the only strip of open water left upon Elmira Pond. The sight renews me.

It is the morning after. We made it through.