This is one sick puppy
Sullivan ate something wrong. Something very, very wrong, judging from the fact that she ignored her breakfast this morning and ran straight outside to start gnawing on grass. She’s now sitting on my lap, despite the alarming sounds she’s emitting. I think she’d jump off before crapping all over me, but perhaps this is overly optimistic. Having had two infants, it’s not like I haven’t been there before, anyway.
I don’t actually mind her being on my lap right now because it’s so goddamned cold in this house. We haven’t turned on the heat yet — a combination of Yankee pride (you call this cold? I’ll show you cold!) and procrastination (we put off having the furnace checked until, um, next week). So Sully is a portable furnace, just the right size for a lap. A noisy, potentially smelly furnace, but she does the job.
I have another coping mechanism for this 58-degree house: My forty-year-old red & white wool poncho. My great-aunt Temple knitted it for my mom back in the late sixties or early seventies; when I was in high school, going through my faux-bohemian phase, I swiped it from Mom’s closet. I’ve had it ever since, and it always does the job. It’s really scratchy, and the fringe makes it thrillingly dangerous for me to, say, cook over an open flame, but MAN IS IT WARM. It’s generously sized, too — I could have worn it throughout my pregnancies, had I not already been equipped with the portable (nonremovable) heaters that are babies in utero.
Another effect of wearing this poncho is that I am flooded with memories of Aunt Temple. It was at Aunt Temple’s house that I ate my first pancake. Aunt Temple also gave me my first pinwheel, on my seventh birthday. Aunt Temple lived several hundred miles from us, but there was a spare room at my grandmother’s house that was understood to be hers, and it was always pretty and tidy — and clean, exotically so, compared to the rest of Granny’s house. And cats. Aunt Temple brings to mind, for me, cats. Cozy cats. Cats that sit in knitting baskets piled high with soft wool, or maybe in your lap, like this puppy in my lap, right now.
