The winning wine

It’s unfortunate when you emigrate halfway across the globe with your Italian wine-making skills, only to find there’s a growing movement in your adopted homeland of America to ban alcohol sales. That’s what happened to author Kevin Ferguson’s great-grandfather, John Gemello, in the early part of the twentieth century.

It was 1914 and Gemello had just run into an old buddy, Giovanna Beltramo, from Piedmont, Italy. They just happened to be in the same little tavern in the same little town in Northern California. What were the chances?

Beltramo, more than twenty years older than Gemello, had established himself at a prominent winery in California and so the two men had a lot to talk about. Plus, Beltramo kindly offered to loan Gemello enough money to bring his wife and daughter to California from Italy.

That’s one of the many fascinating stories in Ferguson’s forthcoming book, Rain on the Montebello Ridge, a memoir about health, aging, and winemaking.

Bristling with excitement, Gemello and two partners purchased a vineyard in 1917, but as the war ended and Prohibition was enacted, they sold it, taking away a nice profit. With the cash, Gemello bought a fleet of trucks and began delivering his vegetables to homes in the Santa Clara valley. Each day, however, each week, every year, Gemello dreamed about buying another vineyard, opening his own winery. And then one month after Prohibition ended in December 1933, he did just that: with the help of his seventeen-year-old son, Mario, Gemello opened the Gemello Winery in Mountain View, California.

As Gemello experimented with different grapes, he created and bottled claret, zinfandel, cabernet sauvignon, petit serah, and pinot noir. He tasted this one and that one, rejected a few, improved others, stamped his approval on some. A label was created. A winery was born and took its place in the Santa Clara Valley.

John Gemello retired ten years later, but his son Mario continued operating the winery for the next thirty-eight years, after which he sold the Gemello wine label to another family member. After eight more years, in the 1990’s, the winery was torn down and a park was built in the spot with a plaque commemorating the history of the area, including the Gemello winery.

Then it happened.

In 2002 at the age of 86, Mario Gemello received a call from a journalist with Wine & Spirits magazine telling him that a bottle of his wine had won a prestigious award. A re-enactment of an event depicted in the movie Bottle Shock had brought together a group of wine writers, winemakers, and collectors for a blind tasting of fourteen wines from the early 1970's, and Gemello’s wine had ranked number one with fourteen of the sixteen judges.

It was a slam dunk - and Gemello had known instantly which wine had won. “Oh yes,” he said, casually but with a great deal of pride, “Martin Ray planted that vineyard up on Pierce Road in Saratoga.” More than thirty years later, Gemello knew exactly where the grapes had come from.

I asked Ferguson if he ever got a taste of the wine.

“Oh yes,” he said. “When we were kids, we got a taste straight from the barrel.”

“And?” I ask.

“A little sour,” Ferguson laughs.

No matter. One of the wine-tasting judges would soon write in the New York Times that the Gemello cabernet was “obscure and legendary”, and Gemello agreed. “It was one of the best vintages my grandfather made,” he said, “from one of the best cabernet vineyards in the area.”

If you’d like to read more about this story, along with the story of Gemello’s wife who, at age 101, still does her daily walk in her neighborhood park, follow Kevin’s blog at https://gemello.substack.com/ . Connect with him on Twitter at @gemello100

Photograph of John Gemello, age 98 in 1980. Used by permission from Kevin Ferguson.

Dear denise

Dear Denise -

I was only eight when you and Caprise were born but I was beside myself with excitement at your arrival. Within months the two of you became live dolls for my friends and me. Nancy set one crib at one end of the house and another crib at the other end and I became your pretend mom, or Caprise’s. My friends and I would meet in the living room, halfway between our “homes”, and we’d discuss our babies and whether you’d cried that day and if you’d taken your bottle, things all new moms talked about, we figured. In my room lay Chatty Cathy, Chatty Baby, Baby First Steps, Pollyanna, Barbies, every doll you can imagine, but you and your sister were my favorite ones.

Most kids are jealous of the newest babies but I never was. I adored you both. I loved babysitting, taking you to the park, letting you ride my pony, helping you climb trees, and lugging you around on my shoulders. Sometimes I was the only one who could tell you and your sister apart. It was easy, really. Just look for the ornery facial expression. That was you. Mischievous and funny, your smile lit up my heart.

When you were two the family had been painting a room in the house and we were all in the kitchen taking a break. Suddenly we realized you and your sister were missing and someone yelled, “The twins!” Chairs were flung backwards and everyone ran into the living room. Too late. You guys had painted the bathroom, my dad’s truck, the porch and the dog.

One Christmas Mom bought me a record player with a record by the Archies. I was too excited to even drag it into my room and I put the record on and twirled you girls around the living room. Mom stood nearby recording us and through the years she must have played that tape a hundred times, you and your sister’s baby voices shouting out “Bang Shang a Lang!” as we danced.

You sang at church, also. Sister Ruth would say, “I think we have a song from the twins today,” and the two of you would toddle to the stage and belt it out. I hadn’t thought of that in years and then the other night as I was about to go to sleep, I heard you. “Jesus hold my hand.” YAWN. “I need thee ev’wy ‘ow-ah” (every hour).

Dad built me my own room when I was nine or ten and you girls thought it was magical and when I got home from school, I’d catch both of you in there going through all my stuff and playing with all my toys, even though you had plenty of your own. I made Dad put a lock on my door but you and your sis figured out how to unlatch it. He put the lock up higher where you couldn’t reach it, but you guys pulled a chair over, climbed on top of it, then moved onto the washing machine, tag-teaming my lock loose. You little cuss. I probably was just nervous that one of you would toddle out with my diaries.

Several years after I got married and moved to Texas, you came out and worked for Mike and me in our chiropractic clinic. The patients loved you. We trained you as therapist and from the front office where I worked, I could hear your infectious laugh, watch your skilled hand, and see your happy face. But like all teenagers, you seriously misbehaved and we had to send you back to Illinois. A few months ago you told me that saved your life. Thank you for telling me that because I never stopped feeling guilty.

I came to see you after you got married. You were working as a waitress in a nice diner and you waited on my parents and me. Holy crap you were happy and beautiful. Your hair was braided and looped up behind your head and your smile enveloped the room. Soon you’d have your two boys and I’d never seen you so in love or so proud. Not long ago you told me that you’d never stopped loving Keith, even though your marriage fell apart rather early. Tears rolled down your now-creased face when you told me that. Most of us know first-hand what it’s like for our expectations and dreams to come crashing around us, but I’m so sorry that happened to you.

Each year I drove to Illinois a few times to see my parents and there was never a time that we didn’t get together, usually every day. Those were often troubled years for you but we always loved you. One time I had three nights of dreams in a row about you and the following morning Bob and I hopped in the car and drove to Illinois to check on you. We sat on the front porch and talked about life. You were OK. Bob and I bought you a scooter because your old one had been wrecked.

One of the best decisions I made for my life was to move back to Southern Illinois nearly two years ago. I missed this land and the people and the family I had here. You and I had lunch at Giant City, munched fries at Sonic, and hung out at my house. I tried to get you to go to the spa with me but you said, “Um, I’m really not much of a spa person.” Oh, yeah. How could I have forgotten the little girl on top of my Shetland, climbing trees, being a tom-boy?

When your mom moved into assisted living recently, you started fixing up the house that the two of you had shared. You found roommates and made a work and shopping schedule and bartered some of the rent for yard work. Every week we told you how proud we were of you, how you’d stepped up to the plate and figured out how to manage a less-than-ideal situation. At your insistence I stopped by several times to see the progress you were making with the house and you bounced from room to room, showing off what you’d done. Sometimes you Facetime’d me to show me your latest project, or just texted me pictures.

Good job, Denise.

Oh God, I will miss you so so much. I really don’t have any set beliefs in the afterlife except that I believe there is one. Something beyond this world. I love our niece Carma’s words, who writes this so beautifully: “I hope you’re up there in the heavens giving the darkness a run for its money. I hope you’re setting stars on fire.” I also hope you’re running into Mom and Dad. And Keith. Because recently someone told you that Keith had never stopped loving you, either. I know you clung wildly to those words.

No one wanted you to leave, Denise, but here’s what’s made it almost bearable: you left us on a high note. You were happy and proud. You knew you were loved by all of us.

Fly high, baby girl. You’ve left a huge hole in this world but you’ve filled one in the heavens.

I love you.

I miss you.

Memoirs and Working Through Pain

There’s a misconception about memoir writers in general that bugs me. It’s that we all write to process our pain. Here’s the truth, though: many of us, perhaps most of us, write for the same reason everyone else writes: to share a story. To make people laugh and cry. To offer up a world that’s different from the one in which our readers live. To take people away from their own problems for a little while.

We write because we love art and because we believe our stories are art. Or at least that we can construct them artfully.

We write because some particular story won’t let us alone. It tugs at us like a whiny two-year-old wanting to be noticed. It needs to be manifested, fleshed out, given life. Novelists often say that their stories and characters choose them, not the other way around. Memoirists are no different. Our stories claw at our hearts, wanting out.

As I worked on my third memoir these past couple of years, I contacted two men who had been intimately involved in the subject about which I was writing. I told them I was writing a book and would love to hear their perspective on what happened in our childhood. I wasn’t prepared for their reaction.

“This is utter bullshit,” K said. “Do psychoanalysis. No one needs another shitty book out there that tells us all how damaged you were.”

“I can only offer you my sympathy,” added B. “The rest of us have moved on.”

I responded kindly, calmly, and apologetically, assuring them that I had changed names and details to protect their family. Their anger, however, seemed odd to me. I could talk and write about my childhood without animosity. I had indeed long since moved on and forgiven the people involved. I understood the circumstances of the story in a way that I was sure these men did not. Why were they unable to talk reasonably and calmly about this when it was supposedly I who hadn’t moved on?

Yes, writing a memoir - if it involved pain - takes you back into that pain. Deeply. Memoir is a slice of life, centered around a theme, so memoirists plunge into that slice, examine it, flip it over, let it sizzle from another angle. It scorches us. We even lug it around with us, although we do so for the same reason as other genre writers: so we can figure out what happened next, what emotions were involved, and how we can improve the art of our storytelling.

Like all authors, memoirists are headed towards redemption. Even when in the end there’s little to no forgiveness or understanding, to write a book means that the author has found a way to move on in a healthy manner. That’s redemption. I was fortunate that forgiveness came to me decades before I began writing. But although I hadn’t anticipated it, I also reached an entirely new level of understanding as I researched and reflected and wrote.

I moved on from childhood traumas many, many years ago. And now I want to share that story of how I did it, to make you feel with me, to laugh and cry, to plunge you into my darkness and lift you again into the light, to share my family’s humanity. Thanks for coming along on my journey.

Bookstores

Check this out all you memoir lovers: readers and writers. Let’s encourage all bookstores to follow this Dallas bookstore’s example and devote space to a genre called - drum roll, please - MEMOIR!!

It’s a genre.

Give it space.

Plague Number Two

When Bob and I first moved back to my home area of Southern Illinois, I was excited that we had a small pond with a waterfall right outside the back door. I opened the windows at night and fell asleep to its tinkling. Only one thing was missing, though: frogs.

Years earlier Bob and I had honeymooned in Vermont and had stayed at a beautiful inn. At night we could hear a melodic chirping in the back yard of the inn. It soothed me to sleep. The second day I asked the innkeeper what kind of insect it was. Turns out it wasn’t an insect at all. It was a tiny frog called a spring peeper.

That night as darkness settled in Bob and I tiptoed out to the pond. At first we could see nothing and were baffled. Then, as our eyes adjusted to the dark and we focused more intently, there they were: hundreds of frogs about the size of my thumb. It was enchanting.

Now, settled on forty acres in the gorgeous Southern Illinois countryside, I wanted frogs.

I called our local pet store and the young man with whom I spoke thought he knew what kind of frog I was talking about. He usually carried them, he said, but he was out right now. Damn. I really really wanted frogs. So badly that I began to call pet stores thirty miles away, fifty miles away. No one had spring peepers. So I called a bigger store in Missouri, a hundred miles away. They should be getting some in a few weeks, the manager told me.

I was elated.

A week later I was curled up in bed listening to coyotes in the distant woods when something gurgled outside my window. It sounded just like a bullfrog. Tossing the comforter aside, I headed to the back yard, and sure enough, we had a bullfrog!

By the end of that week the sound emanating from my backyard was deafening. Crrrrrr. Gunk-gunk. Cheecheechee. One part of the symphony would start up, then die down, while another section began. Back and forth, all night long. Turns out, we not only had a bullfrog, we had what must have been hundreds of thousands of frogs: spring peepers, gray tree frogs, and cricket frogs, at minimum. My dogs stood at the window and barked hysterically, then went into a room where the windows weren’t open.

Bob didn’t want to complain and I tried to convince myself I enjoyed the racket. In truth the frogs kept me awake most of the night and aggravated my tinnitus. Another week passed and I wanted to shoot them. Eventually I turned into a crazy person, standing at the edge of the pond and screaming at them to shut up. They didn’t listen.

It’s our second spring here now and I kept the windows closed during the height of the mating season this year. One of my dogs has since passed away but the other one whimpers gratefully from his bed. A few nights ago the clamor died down and I opened my windows again. Glunk, glunk, goes the solitary bullfrog.

It’s the only sound I want to hear.

Never Forget Their Deaths

If you have ever known anyone who died in the coal mines, please add your brief memory after you read this.

From 1838 to the middle of the twentieth century, when approximately a half million men were working in the coal mines in the United States, nearly 30,000 men died. They were crushed by roof falls, burned in fires, drowned, fell to their deaths down mine shafts, and were blown apart by dynamite blasts and explosions. In the early years, immigrants often weren't counted. Bodies were never found because there was nothing left to be found. Men who died trying to form a union weren’t counted. Nor were men who died of lung-related diseases. So the number of coal mining deaths is certainly far greater than the official count.

My dad, several of my grandfathers, and most of my uncles spent their lives in the mines. My uncle Jewel lost his leg when it was crushed by a roof fall. My uncle Crody lost his fingers when a coal car ran over his hand. My uncle Floyd was shot at a union meeting with a bullet meant for my grandfather. My dad escaped three explosions, broke his ribs, broke his toes, developed pneumonia, and had black lung. In those years, few men left the mines whole.

Even though fewer than 100,000 men and women work in U.S. coal mines today, there have still been more than 10,000 additional deaths since I was a child in the 60's.

So here’s what I would ask you to do. In 2009 Congress declared December 9 as National Miners Day, chosen because on that day in 1907 in Monongah, West Virginia, 362 miners died in what remains the single worst coal mining disaster in United States history.

For me, it isn’t enough to cite numbers. Yes, the number of men killed in the coal mines could populate my home town several times, but who were these men? We have a beautiful ritual in my home town where, each December 21, when Orient 2 exploded and killed 119 men in 1951, each man’s name is read and there is a moment of silence at the time the explosion occurred. The picture I have here is from that memorial.

So would you please take just a few minutes to remember someone you knew who died in the coal mines? Or even a name you’ve run across. Let’s put names to those enormous numbers of men who have died.

If you know nothing but the name, that’s OK. Please add it here. If you DO know something about the person - their birth or death date, the mine they worked at, how they died, some sweet memory you have of them, whatever you want - would you please add that, also?

Thank you.

I will read every post. I will record every name in a document for a memorial event I would like to conduct each year.

I will make a donation related to the coal mines for every twenty-five names that are listed here.

Please share this post so we can reach every coal mining community and every miner’s family in the United States.

Let’s do this.

Thank you.

Mental Illness

I once had a close relative, let’s just say an older cousin, whom my mother told me had a mental illness. This woman, whom I’ll call Maude, had breakdowns with the birth of each of her children and had to be hospitalized. Later in life she had recurrences that were never diagnosed and she ended up homeless. It was months before my mother found out and arranged for her to move in to a pretty retirement center where she would be cared for for the rest of her life.

As a child Maude was my favorite older cousin, more like an aunt. Thirty years older than I, Maude would stop by the house to see if I wanted to walk to town with her. I always did and my mother never objected. Maude held my hand and we walked to an area of town we called the Heights. At a little café Maude bought me a hamburger and a Coke and asked me questions about my life. I knew few adults who were interested in my life and I’d talk Maude’s ear off. After the meal Maude and I walked across the street to a store with a giant picture window that displayed all kinds of penny candy. Maude handed me a quarter and I’d choose long laces of red licorice and sheets of tiny pastel-colored button candies that I’d eat during the walk back home.

My mother told me that if Maude “had a fit” that I should grab her tongue to keep her from swallowing it. Since I was only eight, this frightened me. My mother evidently didn’t think about what might happen if I stuck my hand in Maude’s mouth and she bit down. Fortunately, that never happened. When we reached my house Maude would slip a dollar into my hand and thank me. I never understood this. She had just taken me to town, bought me lunch and candy, given me money, and then thanked me. But Maude was lonely. All of her children had been taken away from her because of her illness.

One hundred years ago this month my local newspaper reported this: “Almost every insane asylum in Illinois has reached its limit of available accommodations for patients.” I cringed when I read that. And the “remedy” hasn’t been good. Now institutions release patients as quickly as they can and some have been caught literally dumping people onto sidewalks in homeless areas. Surely there are better solutions for those struggling with mental illness.

I last saw Maude in 1990 when she’d lived in the retirement center for a couple of years. She had occasionally been in touch with one or two of her children but they rarely came to see her. The lobby was quiet and smelled like lilac air freshener and looked out on a cluster of bright rose-colored hydrangea bushes. Maude had her own room.

After I returned home Maude wrote me a few letters, thanking me for packages I sent, telling me that she dreamed of her children, and telling me her favorite snack was a cheesy treat that had been my favorite as a child, a snack I hadn’t even remembered until she wrote that.

In her last letter she said this: “When you first came to see me, I hadn’t seen you in seventeen years but you were still fresh in my mind because you befriended me and were so sweet.” I finally knew what she meant. She had lost her own children but way back when, for a day now and then, she had me. And then she went home and searched, in her dreams, for the children who were frightened by her mental illness and who never got to sit across from her, eating hamburgers, and telling her about their lives.

Bob and the Mouse

Today while we were eating lunch Bob noticed our Labrador, Damsi, sniffing around the wooden rocker in the living room. “What do you think he’s sniffing at?” Bob asked.

“Probably a mouse,” I said, mostly serious because recently we’d found some toilet paper gnawed over and also because we live on forty acres that are partially wooded, next to farm animals.

So Bob gets up and walks over and then screams, “Oh! My! God! A MOUSE!” And he perches like he’s going to make a run for it.

I walk over and inspect it. It’s the tiniest mouse I’ve ever seen. And it’s dead. “Bob, it’s dead,” I say. “Just get a tissue and get rid of it.”

Bob looks a little panicked but he goes out to the garage and in a couple of minutes returns with the largest of our four shovels, along with a relatively large gardening spade. When I question my husband, he tells me he was going to take the mouse into the woods. “OK,” I say, “but it isn’t going to come back to life and crawl up the shovel handle. Plus, you’re taking the trash out today so you could really just throw him away.” Bob looks uncertain but he complies.

Since moving back to Southern Illinois last year (my home), Bob has decided he wants to be a farmer and now I’m unsure if I should tell him that the mice in our house? They come from that field he wants to farm. Honestly, though, Bob doesn’t really want to farm. He just wants a tractor. Every time we pass a display of tractors Bob visually sorts through them. Recently he’s had his eye on one that has been compared to a mining machine and he wants all the doohickeys that come with it, even though neither of us have any idea what any of them are used for. He wants one with a cab and air conditioning. Thankfully, we can’t afford a tractor.

That mouse incident is even more ironic since we just moved here from the mountains of Colorado. A bear crawled through our window. Another bear plastered his face against my office window, scaring the crap out of my dogs, who were lying just below the window on a big ottoman. Bears lumbered across our property from time to time, and Bob and I occasionally saw them when we hiked. One time a mountain lion brought down a moose in our next door neighbor’s yard and it lay there for a few weeks before they could get someone to haul it off.

In comparison a mouse hardly seems a threat to our safety, although yes, I know, they carry diseases. But this one was so tiny that even Damsi sniffed it and walked away.

I remember having mice sneak into our house when I was growing up. My parents were fans of d-CON and of course, after the mouse ate it, it would crawl into a back corner where we couldn’t get to it and our house would smell like rotten beans for several days. Sometimes dad would find one live, scampering across the house, and he’d sweep it up in his bare hands, chase me around the living room for five or ten seconds, then flush it down the toilet.

Dad got his practice with mice at the coal mines, where he worked all of his life. He had a boss named Arlie who he said was terrified of mice, so naturally my dad would catch one and put it in Arlie’s toothpick box so that when Arlie opened it up, the mouse would jump out at him.

“I’ll kill the guy who done this!” Arlie would rave. “Kill him!” And while Arlie was in the bathroom composing himself, my dad would catch another mouse and put it back inside the toothpick box and the dance and threats would start all over again.

A few minutes ago Bob arrived home with an armload of mouse traps. I won’t let him put out d-CON or traps that snap a mouse’s neck or those sticky things where the little critters sometimes pull their own legs off trying to get loose. But I get it that we can’t have little rodents running around so I relent as long as they’re the little boxes where they get trapped and either die or get released back into the field.

I just know that once Bob figures out how many mice are out there, he’ll probably decide once and for all that we’ll hire someone to mow all of this grass. Either that or I’d better watch my step. We just may end up with a field full of mouse traps.

Going Home

What do you do when a lifelong dream turns out not to be so dreamy?

Here’s what I do: I find another dream.

For my entire adult life I’ve wanted to live in the mountains. My first husband and I actually packed our stuff and headed to Tennessee at one point, scoping out a place to live. We were very young then, in our 20s, and as we tooled around Nashville, we just knew this would be our new home. Circumstances, however, got in the way and we settled elsewhere. Some time later I discovered Colorado and the Rocky Mountains and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

Once or twice a year I began driving to a cabin in Winter Park or Allenspark for solitary spiritual and writing retreats. When I would first pull into northern Colorado and spot the mountains I’d start crying for joy. When I had to leave I’d cry in grief and it would take several days after I returned home for the depression to lift.

I’d begun writing for a number of periodicals by this time, and I’d rent a cabin and spend the day hiking and journaling. I never felt so inspired, never wrote so freely, never came up with as many thoughts and ideas as I did when I was in the mountains. Soon I was writing for around 60 different periodicals, and a publisher had paid me an advance for my first book.

Years after my nearly 30-year marriage with Mike ended, I met Bob, and shortly after we married, we traveled to Colorado. Bob fell in love with the mountains the way I’d fallen in love with them and we rented a funky four-story home with seven decks overlooking stunning mountain vistas and forest. It turned out to be an awful house, though: the well broke, a leak somewhere caused the kitchen floor to rise like a yeasty loaf of bread, and my home office felt like Siberia. Bob and I moved around a few times and then bought a home on a river with the forest stretching out endlessly behind us. We decided that this was the blissful place we’d live for the rest of the our lives.

Except that it wasn’t.

The pipes froze, the electricity went out, and the water was brown. So we hired someone to put in new pipes with heated insulation, we bought a generator, and we had a filter installed that fixed the water problem. But I had begun to realize that it wasn’t so much the physical problems that had been getting to me; it was the emotional isolation. I had always loved Colorado, always wanted to live here, loved hiking in this beautiful place, but there was an essential connection missing. It had never felt like home. Why?

I remember talking to two new friends just months after we arrived here, friends who’d lived in Colorado all of their lives, and they said, “It’s the West. There’s an independent spirit here and it’s tough finding community. It’s just the way people are.” I was baffled. People were friendly and warm. We got invited to lots of parties and had fun. But my friend was right. We all left the parties, went our separate ways, and didn’t see one another again until the next party. Further, Bob and I lived in the mountains, isolated from what may have been an authentic community in town. I finally got that completely when, about six months ago we went out to dinner with our neighbors, whom we rarely saw, and they said, “At least we all have one thing in common up here in the mountains; we came here essentially to be left alone.”

That day I knew that this place would never be my home. I didn’t share that desire with my neighbors. I moved to the mountains for the beauty, for the opportunity to hike more than a couple of times a year, and to be a part of a place I’d only loved from a distance, not to be left alone. In fact, I thought mountain living would be an extra special type of community, where you had neighborhood potlucks and drank wine on the river together and occasionally planned communal hikes or walks in nature. But my neighbor understood this place better than I. People come here to be secluded, left alone, isolated.

So our movers started packing out stuff yesterday. I am moving “home”, to Southern Illinois, to the place where I was born and raised. My husband and I found a beautiful place on 40 acres and when I was there, I felt the warmth and security of being home. I remember when I was growing up, how it was every young person’s dream to escape that little coal mining town, and how a number of us did just that. Yet now all I want is to be back there.

I believe those who say you can’t go home again are wrong. Sure, most of my closest friends are gone, my family has scattered or they have their own busy lives, but I believe I’ll feel a connection there that I’ve not felt since I left 45 years ago. I already felt it when I was there buying a home, hiking through state parks where my family picnicked when I was a child, interacted with people like the ones I’d grown up with. Whereas the mountains had begun to seem aloof, indifferent, even hostile to me, the literal physical land of my childhood felt as if it remembered my very footprint. The people there belong to me and I to them in a way that no one else ever has.

I will visit Colorado again, probably every year, to hear the elk rutting, to find a place of solitary retreat, and to walk through the mountains, but living here was a dream that both did and didn’t come true, and I’m grateful for both sides of that dream, my years here and the realization that it’s now time to go home.

Cow-Dogs

One of my dogs, Plotinus, thinks he’s entitled to room service. In the morning, when I’m lying in bed trying to finish an essay, he stands at my bedside barking maniacally, but when I get up, he immediately lies back down rather than follow me into the kitchen. When I climb back in bed and reopen my laptop, he starts in again, and it’s as if someone has put an amplifier on a piano and is banging on one emphatic note - a high C - over and over. I stand up again. He plops back down.

Plotinus wants me to go into the kitchen while he lies there, stir up a little canned food into two cups of dry food, walk it back into the bedroom, and lay it in a precise spot between his front legs. Plotinus eats lying down, and if I set the bowl beside him in the wrong place, he’ll stare at me like I’m some kind of idiot, which of course I am since I follow his unspoken but extremely clear orders to a ‘t’.

I brought Plotinus, along with his litter mate Damasio - we call them Tinus and Damsi - home from a shelter more than nine years ago. When I arrived at the shelter, which was really a person’s home licensed as a shelter, there were easily 100 dogs running around the house and yard and barking from kennels in the side of the yard. Tinus was playing happily with other dogs in the yard while Damsi was hiding, terrified, under a bed. It took a long time to coax him out and when I finally did, he streaked across the room and into my lap, which should have been my first clue that he would be a sociopath the rest of his life, which he is. I had come for only one of them but of course I took them both.

In college I had written a number of papers on Plotinus and Antonio Damasio (the scientists, not the dogs) so I thought it would be original and cool to give them lofty names, but I should have named them Bessie and Elsie because both of my dogs graze like cows every day in the yard. When I let them out to do their business, they walk along the edge of the creek where the weeds have grown up with the wildflowers, snatching up strands of grass, and looking at me while they chew, long pieces of green hanging from the sides of their mouths.

The dogs are male litter mates, Labradors, weighing around 100 pounds each now, and are completely opposite in their personalities. Damsi would sprout gills and live in our creek if that were possible. Let a few drops of water splash from the sink around Tinus, though, and you’d think he was a cat who thought we were trying to drown him.

The other day when I was walking them, Damsi ran into the creek as usual and when he came out, Tinus crept cautiously to the edge to get a drink, at which time Damsi decided he wanted to go back in. He plowed into Tinus (Damsi’s sole method of movement) and knocked Tinus into the creek. Tinus’s legs splayed in four directions and he froze in terror, so I went down to get him, but I slid and fell into the creek in my hiking shoes, socks, and blue jeans. While I was trying to get up and save Tinus at the same time, Damsi charged me as if he were a bull, knocking me back into the creek, simply because Damsi hasn’t figured out the difference between solid things and air.

If I throw a ball for Damsi he looks at me as if to say, “Excuse me. Did you not realize that cows don’t chase balls?” Tinus, on the other hand, goes after balls like a narcissist in a house of mirrors. Once, when we were walking past an outdoor basketball game, Tinus darted into the middle of the court, chomped down on the ball, and resumed his walk. You couldn’t have pried that basketball loose with a hydraulic rescue spreader. When the kids grabbed a second basketball, Tinus went after that one, also. At one point, he had three now-deflated basketballs sticking out of his mouth, and had destroyed three others before we could drag him away. We had to make a three-hour round trip into town to buy the kids new basketballs.

Damsi remembers all of those dogs at the shelter and has for 9-1/2 years acted nutty around other dogs and humans. When I used to take him to the dog park, he’d immediately tie into some breed that could rip out his stomach in one chomp, like a pit bull or a Rottweiler, then run and hide in between my legs. I’d stand there while the shocked Doberman gathered his wits and bared his fangs and charged me, unable to get to Damsi. Damsi also gets stressed when we have company and humps them until they leave. Then he humps me as if to say, “You witch. Don’t you ever bring those god-awful kids back into my house.”

Tinus, on the other hand, dribbles delight everywhere. I’ll coo-talk to Damsi, and Tinus, who sleeps right next to his food dish during the day because that’s his happy place, will flit his tail back and forth. He knows I’m talking to Damsi but he doesn’t care. He’s delighted by the sound of my voice and the good words coming out of my mouth. He apparently has a lot of happy dreams because throughout the night, in his bed beside ours, his tail makes thumping sounds on the wood floor.

We live in the mountains and one time a bear came and plastered its face onto our window, about two feet from where my dogs were sitting, and they went absolutely wild. The bear stood there for a good while, staring at them, and then ambled off, looking over its shoulder from time to time at my dogs as if they were brain-damaged, which they are. Another time my dogs charged a giant moose that was grazing with her baby and the moose had the same reaction as the bear. A small piece of wire fencing separated my dogs from the moose, and my dogs, apparently baffled that the moose wasn’t running from them, stood dumbfounded and stared at it for at least 15 minutes. I’m pretty sure they were simply wondering if that was gourmet grass over there and could they have some, please?

Between my two dogs, they’ve split open a stomach when trying to jump a decorative fence, almost died from the venom of a baby rattlesnake, tore two CCL’s, had seizures for two years, had some sort of tic-related disease, and suffered from anal bleeding that sent one to the emergency vet. We estimate that in less than a decade we’ve spent about $35,000 on food, medicine, shots, blood work and other vet bills, toys, treats, grooming, emergency visits, surgeries, petsitting, and fencing in the yards of two different homes.

Yet when I thought my dogs might be in danger from a creek so fierce it nearly wiped out our town seven years ago, I jumped in to save them (even though I might have thought about it for a half hour first). I can be livid with my husband over his half-second attention span and when my dogs walk in, I’m like, “awwww come here and get love, babies, what good boys, I love you sooooo much” even though they are on equal footing with Bob for driving me crazy on a daily basis. I have a couple of small spots reserved on the living room furniture for Bob and me, guarded by piles of pillows when we aren’t sitting there, but otherwise, the dogs have their choice of seating. And that’s even though they shed enough for me to open a Build-A-Dog business and sell a dozen toy doggies a day. Bob usually gets the third kiss when I arrive home.

I admit I don’t understand our attachment to and love for our dogs except that they know when they’re being cute and take advantage of it, know exactly how to place their heads on your leg when they want table scraps, are the absolute best cuddlers in the world, and are always scattering globs of happiness around the house - in addition to poop and vomit from all that grass-eating. I’ve had dogs since I was a toddler, but I swear these will be my last. I’m tired of my life revolving around dogs. Then I boil an egg to put on their dry food, slip them a piece of the expensive reserve cheese I just bought, and Bob and I know I’m lying. Although lately I’ve been thinking a lot of about cows. They don’t shed. They don’t lie on furniture. They don’t bark....