📿100 Feet from Home

Thoughts on stepping back a bit. Also, it's alive out here.

IMAGE ID: June in the snow at dusk. This is after her afternoon walk, before her before-bedtime walk. May we all experience the joy that she feels outdoors.

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Hello you, Adreanna here with this week’s dispatch of The Laundry —

There’s a small space in my evening routine, between zipping Ruby into her pajamas and refilling our bedroom humidifiers, when our pup June informs me that it’s time to go outside. She wedges her body between my calves, and looks up with pleading eyes. This is our shared signal that it’s time to slip on my puffer and Wellies and take a walk around the yard. 

At night where we live, it’s country dark. I understand why people were fearful and reverent of this dark before electric lights were invented. It’s deep, wide, like the gaping maw of something endless, teeming with life that I can sense but can’t perceive. Only the phase of the moon and the evening cloud coverage inform how far I’m able to see. On clear full nights, I can make out the yew trees that are set an acre back, and sometimes the deer that shave their lower branches clean in the famine of winter. 

The snow is quiet. June and I crunch through it. I imagine life in the darkness scattering at the sounds of our arrival. We circle past the lilac and Eastern redbud trees, towards the rickety fence where a groundhog has burrowed its summer home. I keep June on a leash within 100 feet of the porch lights. February is peak mating season for the coyotes, and though I can’t hear them in the fields yet, I trust they’re more active than usual. 

Once we’re near the fence, June sniffs the tracks of our smallest neighbors. Chipmunks, field mice, a local rabbit. Maybe one of the feral neighborhood cats. When there’s snow I can see what she smells, like the powder that detectives use to make fingerprints visible. 

After wedging and pleading to come outside, she really takes her sweet time to squat. Each night I’m tempted to call her bluff. Tell her that she’s fibbing. This evening sojourn happens an hour before her bedtime walk - honestly, she can hold it. I have humidifiers to fill and bottles to wash and laundry to fold before bed.