“I want to write.”
Has your brain ever spoken to you so loudly that it feels like a voice external to you speaking?
Last night, in the dark, where just a moment earlier I had been falling asleep, came the not-sound, insistent.
“I want to write.”
I haven’t stopped writing. I write a dizzying number of emails. My journal is never far from my side. And yet, I don’t write.
Instead, the evenings and weekend hours when I would have written, I still write but I swap one language for another.
Javascript.
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I’m sure I’ll talk about that more some other time. For now, suffice to say, even in this moment when I’m writing (finally), I feel the guilt.
I’m writing, but I’m not coding. I’m not studying. I’m not working toward something.
Am I?
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Let’s not get distracted.
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Nova is curled up, a tight bun shape, on the couch. She’s tired because yesterday she ran.
Oh, how she ran!
We – my boyfriend, my dog, and I – went to St Vrain. There’s less snow than when he and I went last year, but the snow that is feels surprisingly soft. No melt freeze crust to punch through, just snow wind packed.
When I got Nova, I resigned myself to having a dog that might never be allowed off leash. Huskies aren’t known for their penchant for sticking around. But there is something else in her. And this other side is what I wanted – obedient, responsive, a white shadow at my heel.
Granted, she doesn’t actually know “heel.”
She is a mix of these things. A snow dog that loves to run and wander. An independent spirit who checks back to make sure I’m still there. Who learns quickly to run behind the skier, just to one side. Who comes when called – eventually.
But who gets distracted and has to be gone back for, calling her name as I carry my skis back up the skin track until rounding the corner I see her, just at the next corner up, looking down to be sure it’s me.
Can I try to tell you what it felt like to see her running with me?
I have new skis, new bindings, new boots, and new skins. I’ve skinned up this path on St Vrain before, but never with such comparative ease. The pain in my knee that plagued and crippled me all last winter, gone. The weight of my old equipment dragged me down and held me back. The right, light gear seemed to propel me forward.
And a white dog ducking in and out of the woods. She alternated between trotting along on the skin track and wiggling through the deep snow on her belly.
We hadn’t broken tree line when we decided to turn around for the day, but discomfort in my right foot (the previously broken foot) and rising wind speeds made the decision easy.
My partner and I switched to downhill, and so did she.
We alternated, finding it best to keep the dog between us as we skied.
When it was my turn to ski first, she ran at my tails as if she knew the command for “heel.”
She ran just at my periphery. A tilt of my head and there she was, tongue out and charging.
When we stopped to let her catch her breath, she dove into deeper snow. When we started again, she was there, running at the heel of whichever of us was first.
In me, with skis on my feet and dog at my heel, the sense of Vonnegut’s heaven; everything is beautiful and nothing – not my knee, not my tweaked shoulder, not my mind – hurt.
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Sidecountry Living 