The Post I Didn’t Want to Write

I’ve been avoiding my blog, the phone, people, email … for a couple of weeks now. Every time I have to tell someone that my puppy Audrey passed away, it just makes it a little bit more real, and even though it’s been a week and a half, I haven’t quite gotten past the point where I hope someone will tell me it’s all a big mistake, a joke in terribly poor taste, and that she is coming home soon.

It’s not a joke, though, her kidneys just didn’t want to work anymore. Back in December when she first got sick we had hoped it was an infection or Addison’s maybe, something we could fix, because she was just 9 years old in June. But it was the havoc that age wreaks, and age has a terribly uncompromising inevitability. For Jeff and I it’s been a long, sad, difficult year and a half of caring for sick animals, balancing good medical care with their quality of life, and finally making the decision about letting them go.

We cherished the 8 years and 9 months we had with Audrey. Audrey taught me much about what’s important in life, and what isn’t. She brought immense joy and exuberance to everything she did and was full of life and mischief every day. Her greatest gift was her limitless capacity to love. I miss her terribly.

Cute and warm

I am sitting here waiting for some medication to take effect.  I am sick again.  This hardly seems fair, and I am endeavoring to not be a grumpy Gus about it.  So I find myself with a half an hour until sleep, just enough time to post pictures of my dog. As promised, I have completed Audrey’s dog sweater.  See?

The sweater was originally a different project, a sweater for a cousin, begun way before this blog started.  It began to be a dog sweater when I messed up the stitch and ended up with a fairly wide bit of fabric I couldn’t use and wasn’t sure what else to do with it.  I discovered that the length of fabric fit around Audrey well.  She was then 11 pounds, which is a tad bit on the hefty side for a Yorkshire Terrier.  Now she’s about 9.2 pounds through cat-inspired exercise and illness, which means the sweater had to become a wrap sweater in order to fit.  I still need to shorten the wrap ties, but those ties make this one of the easiest-fitting sweaters I’ve ever wrestled onto a dog.

Honestly, dog clothing is on the silly side, and Audrey doesn’t like wearing it.  I mean, she’s a lapdog, but she’s still very much a dog‘s dog, if you know what I mean.  Nevertheless, I made this because Yorkies have fur issues – they don’t actually have fur, it’s hair, and they don’t have an undercoat. That’s good ’cause they don’t shed, but bad when it’s freezing out, because she takes a step out the door and starts shivering so much her paws skitter on the pavement.  So you can see that her getting deathly ill in January sorta made me think – hey, where’s that sweater!?

This one was designed to be loose in the right places, cover her tummy but leave her legs bare.  Audrey has this funny (really hysterical, actually) problem with her legs and feet – if they’re covered, she stops dead and refuses to move.  If you really want her to stay in place, put shoes on her.  She’ll stand there for hours on three legs.

As a last step, I am going to sew a harness right into the inside of this sweater, because separate harness + sweater = 15 minutes wrestling with dog.  That way I’ll just put this on and clip on her lead, and there will be less fuss for everyone, and a dog that doesn’t end up shivering pathetically!

Now I’m going to go collapse in bed.

P.S. So the Lion Wool (the royal blue in this sweater) … after about 5 minutes I had to get a hand covering.  It started to feel like I was rubbing my fingers with steel wool or an emergy board.  That can’t be good.  I guess this isn’t what it feels like to people who aren’t allergic?  What does it feel like?  I really don’t know.  Surely Lion Brand wouldn’t sell any if it felt like that to everyone.

The Dog Sweater

While Audrey was seriously ailing, I just could not stop thinking about a sweater I was making for her.

When I’m upset about a given situation, I usually fixate on some object, and can be found weeping brokenheartedly over whatever it is as if the world is ending.  It’s usually not the object itself that’s upsetting, it’s that I’ve picked an object that symbolizes what it is about the situation that’s really bothering me.

Audrey's Unfinished Sweater

In this case, I found myself crying over an unfinished sweater, one I started about a year and a half ago, and have not made much headway on since then. I’d been figuring I could put it off, that I had plenty of time to finish it, because Audrey is just 8.5 years old, and what’s another winter or two when I have so much to do all the time?  And then to find that maybe she’d be gone before I could finish it … So I cried over it and well, I guess it was just my turn to get smacked upside the head by the realization that I don’t actually have all the time in the world.

There I was with this sweater, and I’m thinking that my priorities in life are out of alignment.  If I do not have all the time in the world, it stands to reason that I ought to do what’s important first, and get rid of what I don’t care about. And what’s important to me is the people/animals I care about, my ongoing need to make/create things, and particularly to create things for others, learning and experiencing new things, and my strong sense of personal philosophy and ethics.  These things are really crucial to my well being and happiness.

While I think my life generally reflects those things, I still think I make too many compromises.  I know perfectly well what I think I ought to be doing and why, and since I’m not exactly the type that’s comfortable with compromising, just what do I think am I doing?  It’s not as though I’m going to get this time back that I spend on things that are not near and dear to me, or that aren’t in line with things I believe in.

So I am back working on that sweater, by the way, which will be finished this week, although it’s been a balmy 70 degrees here. It will be ready if it gets cold, and I will feel better knowing I put the time in now, and I made an effort to take care of my pup, because I noticed what she did and didn’t like about sweaters and did something about it.  It might be a small step, but in the right direction at least.  I’m also back working on my birches quilt also, which is why I’ve pulled out pictures of branches here with this post.  Inspiration from nature is always helpful.

Now if I could just get past the fact that I decided to make the sweater with part wool, even though I know perfectly well I’m allergic to it …