I just got back from a month in Texas, and I am still waking up an hour earlier than I need to, which is what happens when your body has been on bacon-time and you have not yet renegotiated.
The trip was, in the official version, a working trip. I went out to help Ron and Vicki at their two properties — Twin Oaks Resort, in Alleyton, where I started, and Jamaica Beach, on Galveston Island, where I ended up. They are two of the most generous humans I have had the luck to meet, and a "month of helping out" with people like that is, in practice, also a month of being looked after in ways you cannot pay back. You can only try not to forget how it felt.
I brought Pipes. This was, in retrospect, a moral hazard.
Vicki cooks. Vicki cooks the way somebody cooks when they want the people in their orbit to feel cared for in a non-negotiable way. Three meals a day, plus an Easter basket I was technically too old for and accepted with no resistance, plus — and I want to phrase this gently because I love her dearly — a small ritual where bacon was placed on top of Pipes' regular dog food. Every day. Cheerfully. With the conviction of a woman who has decided this dog deserves it. Pipes, whose previous mealtime was already an event of mild excitement, became, by week two, a creature who would not even pretend to engage with kibble that did not come with a topping. I am not exaggerating. She would look at the bowl, then at me, then at Vicki — checking the chain of command — and only resume eating once the pork situation was resolved.
Why Love Feels Like a Penitence
Love, a heavy chain we bear, Binding hearts in deep despair. It feels like penance, harsh and grim, Yet we chase it on a whim.
Read it in Echoes From the Heart →I would like, on the record, to thank Vicki for ruining my dog. I say this with love. Pipes has not been the same since, and I have not had the heart to start the rehabilitation process, because Vicki's cooking was, I think, also Pipes' way of being told she was loved by an unfamiliar adult, and that is not nothing for a dog who came up the way Pipes came up.
The Galveston part of the month was its own animal. Beach mornings before the heat. Long walks where the light came in low and the gulls did their daily impression of being scandalized by us. I worked on a few poems in the kitchen of the Jamaica Beach house early in the mornings, with the salt smell already coming in through the screen and Pipes asleep at my feet, finally not asking for bacon. Some of the best writing I have done this year happened in that kitchen. Not because the kitchen was special. Because the people who built it had built a place where work could happen without performance.
I came home tired in the right way and slightly heavier in the wrong way. My month was full of joy and a kind of family-by-choice that I do not take for granted. Some friendships are forged. Some friendships are seasonal. Ron and Vicki are neither of those. They are weather-systems-in-human-form, and a month inside their weather changes you a little. I will be back. I will eat slightly less bacon. Pipes makes no such promise.