Fog…every morning, lots and lots of fog…weird time of year for it but there it is…thick, dripping, volumness fog…
Our usual early morning ritual…4:00 a.m. walk…return home, open the door to the backyard and fix breakfast while the kids run around digging in the way too muddy soil from all the fog.
I heat the water for tea while Ron lays down the breakfast bowls…the boys enhale their food almost instantly
Kobi finishing his breakfast first, hears some way to high pitched sound and off he goes…disappearing somewhere deep in the yard…Little Guy Oscar following close behind. Suddenly Kobi reappears digging in his favorite muc pie near the front of the winter flower bed currently devoid of color. He looks up at me then returns in an instant back to his favorite hole. I watch as he wrestles with the muddy brown mush thoroughly engrossed…nothing but all too wet air and a hole filled with dirty brown muck waiting to be once again folded into an even greater hole of dirty brown muck.
Then just in the nick of time Oscar, the four legged Boy Wonder appears jumping into the hole with both front paws assisting our hero Bat Dog. And, as if on cue, the two look up at me for an instant but with their task yet to be completed they return to their dirt digging duty.
If only I could dive that easily into the darker sides of my muck and mire. As I approach my underlying emotional turmoil over my now not so recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s, I rise to the surface and push my front paws out of my hole, pretending the personal dispair has moved to a distant planet far, far away.
Once again Golden Kobi, our Bat Dog extraordinaire raises his head out of the dirt with a moustache and beard full of dripping muddy goo. He wags his tail joyously, urging me to dig in…”Come on Mom…it’s so much fun getting down and dirty”…
I ponder…”Am I ready?”…”Can I go that deep?”…”Am I willing to dig in and let everything surface as it needs to?”
Little Guy Oscar, the Dog Wonder, leaps effortlessly out of the hole tracking mud through the kitchen…I grab a wet rag and head to my knees cleaning up the remnants of his dirt digging…Golden Boy follows close behind almost step for step on the same trail as the Little Guy…all my cleaning for naught…ah well…
So I wipe up the second set of muccy paws…but now surrendered to the fact that there will always be messes to clean…there will always be a hole filled with mud awaiting my excavation and when I throw my front paws into the fray, keeping a light heart will go a long way towards making the clean up that much easier…
Returning to our morning ritual, Ron and I take our tea back to the bedroom to sip while watching the KTLA Morning News…Kobi and Oscar join us soon after with newly black stained muddy paws…our bed covers become magical works of art ala Jackson Pollack…up Ron gets to grab a wet wrag. wash the paws, wipe down the covers then climb back into bed to finish sipping our tea with Golden Kobi and Little Guy Oscar.