Dog Nappers

We had a bad neighbor. He was always putting notes in the mailbox about our dogs (or dog), about how they were killing his chickens. He never actually called or talked to us face-to-face, but he threatened us via notes taped to our fence. He even sent a cop one time to give us a special message. We were confused. We had 4-5 large Golden Retrievers at any given time, but often when his cryptic messages arrived, the fence was closed and nobody was missing. Not to say our dogs never got out....they did, and often, unfortunately. Golden Retrievers are never content to stay home, even with five acres, multiple playmates and a splashy creek to play in. If they believe there are other humans within shouting distance, besides the half-dozen living in your house, they will seek them out as well as any body of water located within a few miles. More than once, we found them 4-5 miles away, where they'd trolled down the Dog River for a fun afternoon of socializing and playing in the creek. I'm not excusing our slum-dog ways of forgetting to shut the gate, not keeping the fences tight, or failing to pay attention to all sorts of things...it's just a fact that we were busy and often distracted (particularly me). So when one day we came home after a long day of work and school, opened the (then-shut) gate and rolled up the long driveway to no dogs, we began to parse together the fact that even though the gate was indeed shut and locked, we were missing two of the four dogs. The other two happened to be inside the house. To this day, we think that he let the dogs out, but we can't be sure.

After much calling of neighbors and driving about the streets around us, we got concerned. After checking with the pound and putting many miles on the van, we began to be despondent. We started distributing flyers everywhere. We made a map and with multiple kids in the car, covered half the county with our brochures. Time and weeks went by. One of our sons, Daniel, was particularly vigilant. When school was out each day, he'd implore me to get out with him and hit the streets we hadn't flyered yet. One day, I (of course) was out shopping when a man called our house and talked to the boys. He said that he knew where our dogs were and that they were being taken care of, that he might call back sometime, but that he wanted to be sure we would be responsible dog owners before he decided to bring them back. Good luck with that. When I checked on the number, I discovered that it was from a payphone at a trailer park 10 miles away. On another day, a woman called and told me she had almost hit them when she was driving by the river. I noticed her name on the caller ID: Debra S________. We must have talked for 20 minutes or so. She asked all sorts of questions about them and said that we might should look near that part of the river. We did, with no luck.

More weeks went by. We despaired of ever seeing Chloe and Bethany again. Then another call came. This time from a woman who had been talking to people at the Corn Crib trailer park when she saw two magnificent Golden Retrievers at a woman's trailer. She thought that they didn't seem to belong there. She couldn't remember which trailer or street, but suggested I start canvassing the area to find them.  Daniel, Jesse, Liz and I headed that way. We went door-to-door, until a homeowner asked us to wait a minute. I heard her printer running inside the house and she emerged with a picture of Chloe. She said that the dogs had been at her house for a few days, and she had put up flyers at the local gas station....but then they ran off and they were now down the street at a different house. We pulled down the street to the house, which was locked up tight. We could hear dogs inside and in the back yard, but no one was answering. A lady walked up and asked what we needed. We asked her if these people had any Golden Retrievers and she said yes, they did. I was about to faint. She said, "But they ain't your dogs. Her boyfriend gave her those dogs. They're show dogs." She asked me what their names were. I told her and she said (no kidding), "That's not your dogs. These dogs' names are Buster and Katie." Oh. My. Word. 

We went to the animal control office, where a policeman told us that they didn't have time, but that if we wanted, we could stake out the place and call 911 when someone came home. Daniel and I set up reconnaissance on the hill above the trailer and waited. Soon, a boy came outside into the yard. We called 911 and waited on the police to arrive. The policeman asked the boy to release the hounds, and out they flew, nearly knocking us over. I showed him their papers and pictures of them. About this time, Mama Bear arrives, madder than a wet hen. She asked what was going on. We explained our story. The cop filled out a report and asked her for her name. She refused to tell him. Some tough talk ensued and she tried to keep me from hearing her say it. Eventually she whispered it to him, but I heard anyway. Deborah S________. 

Now that's just pure meanness right there. We got our dogs back and that's all that mattered. But I definitely wanted to punch her in the nose. 

The Short, Wonderful, Winding Road

A driveway is really just a private road. There's plenty of coming and going in a lifetime, and it could be only a practical thing...but it's really so much more. I think of our land, when we first looked at it in 1996. It was so thick with brush and trees on the front side, you couldn't walk through it. We had to circle around the back just to get to the house site. We brought chain saws and machetes and hacked a trail from the road. It was then that I began to realize what we were in for. We worked and sweated for a few days and it was still little more than a walking path. Eventually a tractor was hired and the real muscle was applied. I remember shouting and jumping up and down when that machine started moving. Since he was already there, I had him whack down the front part so we could have a pasture. Ken never forgave me for that. All that front field ever did was erode and look sickly. 

We paid for trucks and trucks of gravel. I never knew there was so much skill involved in laying a strip of crushed rock. Then there came the day when we moved onto the property in our camper and we started using that blessed, 400-foot driveway. Ken and the boys laid out an area to be paved, with three parking pads. I thought it was ridiculous to have that much concrete. It looked like a runway. Ken reminded me that all these kids would one day be driving. I didn't want to think about that part. Then there was that time the menfolk sawed a failing, 50-foot tree and landed it straight onto the pavement (and not on the house). My brain has all these memories of life lived on that place. I see our kids playing monkey-in-the-middle and some kind of baseball-related game in the driveway, always with much yelling and running. There were years and years of basketball games. They would adjust the basketball goal so they could dunk and I would hear loud thumps reverberating off the walls. Each child had an epic story in that driveway. Our oldest, Jon, was running full-tilt down it when one of our 100-pound Golden Retrievers intercepted, causing him to crash and scrape his hip and elbow down to the bone. Our second-born, Daniel, decided to race his Pa down it (Pa was driving the car. Daniel was running), slipped on the gravel and got his leg run over. Try explaining that to the emergency room doctor. Miraculously, he was (mostly) okay. Our third-born, Jesse, hitched a ride, grabbing onto a ladder that was extending out of his Pa's truck, only to get bounced high in the air and into space when the truck  skidded onto the concrete. The law of gravity prevailed. Then there was fourth-born Liz, who had the misfortune of backing over two of our animals. Don't ask. 

I think of the joy of coming home from somewhere, children running out with laughter and smiles to greet me. Pa always talked about the way it felt to pull in there after a long day at work, how he could breathe once he turned off the road. In the end, it wasn't about just that house, or that property, or that driveway. It was about a place called home, where you could be ugly and still be loved. Somewhere, where you felt safe and knew that the earth was going to keep turning. Not everyone's home is like that, but I pray that some way, somehow they can find that place. In this life or the next. 

Wishing and Hopin'

I hauled my four kids all over metro Atlanta, looking for a perfect piece of land.  We drew a circle around Norcross, GA, where Ken worked at the big Lucent plant….anything within an hour of there was fair game.  I’d throw everybody in our pimped-out conversion van with  PBJ sandwiches, a box of Little Debbies and a jug of frozen water.  We’d map out our route and then drive around looking for land.  We did this for years.  This was our main form of entertainment and certainly the main reason I put so many miles on that van. It had 290,000 on it when we sold it to an enterprising paint crew.  We’d finish school before lunch and I’d pull out of the driveway, so excited that I had to make myself slow down and not get another ticket.  The cops in Cobb County are not very sympathetic to people like me….I never have figured that out.  They must have some sort of heat-seeking beacon that finds me.  I cry, I argue, I act stoic, I tell them funny tales….but none of those tactics work.  I tell them about my kids and how I was distracted by the bow and arrow that my son was shooting or the addition of a stray cousin was just too much for me to keep my focus.  But in a cold, hard voice the cop tells me to hand over my license and registration.  They never act like they like me. Why is that?  Everybody likes me. Well, everybody but cops and librarians.  If they could know that I understand the rules but that they don’t apply to me. If only.

Me and the kids would hike all over the land, some of it beautiful, some of it ugly and barren.  We’d narrow down the places we liked, and then we’d haul Papa out there on the weekend.  We’d find a piece we liked or an old homeplace that needed renovating..we’d put an offer on it, contingent on our house selling, and then wait.  We did a lot of waiting.  After we put our house up for sale, we waited over 2 years before it sold.  Do you know how hard it is to keep your house “show-ready”with four young children who are home all the time, just so people can look at it and say, “Well, the floor plan is weird”?  Or – they’d put a contract on it and we’d wait for a month and at the last minute the lender would figure out that these people couldn’t qualify for the loan.  I began to get very jaded with real estate agents (maybe that's why I decided to become one later?).  I'd tell them over and over what I wanted to see -- either a house on land or just plain acreage.  How hard can that be?  They'd take me out to look. We'd pull up into some cul-de-sac in a neighborhood and there would be this cookie-cutter split-level house, when I had clearly told them we wanted land, not an acre in a subdivision.  Later, I found out that the realtor's mantra is "Buyers are liars and liars are buyers."  Well, I hate to lie and I certainly don't buy things, particularly large investments, that I don't want.  When I’d pray, I would get very frustrated that God was holding up this process.  Well-meaning people would say that maybe we weren’t supposed to move.  But we had to move, had to get out of Marietta/Smyrna.  It felt like we were aliens in a foreign land.  Now that we’ve been in west Georgia all these years, I am still astonished at how much I feel at home here. 

We wanted to get out of debt.  We had already bought and sold several fixer-uppers since early in our marriage.  We had a dream of fixing up and selling homes until we were able to pay cash for one.  We had read and heard Larry Burkett and Dave Ramsey, but particularly the Scriptures that said, “The borrower is servant to the lender.”  We had seen other people do some pretty crazy stuff, and we really didn’t know we couldn’t do anything, so in our youth and ignorance we dove in.   People talk about how wallpapering with your spouse can break up your marriage….honey, we’d already tore out, put back, fixed up, chinked it, sawed it, spliced it, painted, sold it and moved 7 times before we’d been married 6 years.  Every year we either bought a fixer upper or had a baby.  When we were pregnant with one, we bought a big 5 bedroom, 3 bath house that was half-built and we finished it.  I painted, stained, sanded, etc. every inch of that house myself while carrying a 11 pound, 2 ounce baby in my womb, breathing and ingesting every known fume to mankind while hanging precariously on a ladder.  Actually, it was a good situation, since my big belly hung perfectly between the rungs and acted as a sort-of counter balance.  I have worried about that child, however, and wondered if that’s why it took him so many years to learn to read. We eventually did find our land -- a serene 5 acre, rolling piece of heaven where we built a lovely farmhouse while living in a camper. I remember those difficult days and they seem like a dream. We sold out and moved to Villa Rica four and a half years ago, fulfilling our long-awaited wish of paying cash for a house. We're overhauling a big closet in our old Victorian right now, making it into a bathroom. It's taken us virtually years to get it done, but we're very close to finishing. It's taken us as long to outfit this bathroom as it used to take us to fix a whole house. But who's counting?

Bends in the Road

On the heels of another whirlwind weekend, I stand back and think about the many mysteries of life. About how one goes and one stays. One moment in time can change everything. How scarily, divinely we stand on the edges of bedlam, literally all the time. 

We spent yesterday in north Georgia, at the ordination of our youngest son into the ministry. As he stood at the front, tall and proud, handsome and bearded, I remembered the baby. Long ago and not very far away, he treated my uterus like his personal jungle gym, bouncing from one side to the other, hands and feet dancing. I wanted to name him Isaac, since it means "laughter" and he was having a party in there. We wound up naming him Jesse Caleb because he was strong and it just seemed right. The day that I birthed the 11 pound man-child, I labored without drugs because I had tried an epidural with the first-born (which didn't work well) and then a drug with the second-born (which only made me drunk and unable to cope with the pain). Every time I tried to get up and walk, as I had done before, my afflictions grew more intense than I could bear. Eventually, the midwife urged me to limp into the restroom, thinking I might jostle something loose. As he and my husband talked me through a few contractions, suddenly Jesse began to make his entrance, with me standing up. The midwife yelled for the nurses to bring the cart: "We're having a baby in the bathroom!" What went through my mind were two things: #1 - my Mom and Mother-in-law will miss the birth! - and #2 - I am not having my baby in a bathroom. So I held his head and walked back to the bed, where Ken and Daddy picked me up (no small feat) and carefully laid me down. The next push brought the baby, who presented with the longest cord known to childbirthing, wrapped neatly and tightly around his neck not once, but twice. The next few blurry moments still move through my brain like a movie in slow motion. The panic, the blue baby, the low Apgar score, the team of nurses rushing in. We were afraid to breathe. But then a lusty cry. Pink skin. More fussing. A man-sized sneeze and we all tilted into laughter. It was really years later before I fully contemplated what conspired in that bathroom and how God intervened. If I had remained upright, there's a high likelihood that this child would not have made it. I was compelled to walk to the bed, no matter what it took. Then the midwife knew just what to do to treat him, with a dicey situation looming. 

With deacons and pastors lining up to pray for Jesse and his wife, and then later as his three darling babies were passed around at the reception, I couldn't help but think about how God precisely kept him safe. There are a trio of extra hearts beating because of a split-second decision that came not from wisdom or knowledge, but because that's just how He does it sometimes. There are peoples' lives that Jesse is affecting as he ministers, not to mention the blending of families and his marriage to his lovely wife. In the turning of the pages, we won't always be safe. There are horrible things that happen to good people and stories that don't end like this one. At the same time, none of us knows all that we have been spared from so far....a curve in the road, a narrowly-missed boulder under the water, one more drop of cholesterol down the wrong tube. There are a thousand praises to be made every day for all that we don't know. And a thousand praises more for all that we do.

View from the Gutter

Looking across an exquisite ocean view, with the sun dipping into a lake of fire, I think of this earth and all its scenery, all its substance. In our days filled with technology and hurry, we forget about that giant sphere that's turning underneath our feet. I'm not a tree hugger or an environmentalist, but don't judge me. I love this ravishing place that God made. There are wonders at every turn, though I (and we) forget to notice them. I'm staring now at the magnificent trees just off my porch, leafing out their splendor. Just standing there, showing off, clapping their hands for the glory of God. People want to deny that. I read a comment yesterday from a cynical soul that challenged anyone to come up with just "one shred" of evidence that God exists. Dear man, you have been wounded or perhaps you've gone and puffed yourself up to be your own god. Look out thy window. Look down at your feet. Lay on the earth and feel the warmth, crumble the dirt there that feeds and sustains your health. A massive cycle of symbiosis throbs all around you, yet you imagine that it invented itself. Your cells work in an impossible orchestra, made with such precise design that it defies explanation. You want to argue about all the flaws, about what doesn't work. You hate me for loving Him, for believing in Him. You deny that there is such a thing as sin, yet you rail about the warts. I pray that someday you will see, that the scales will fall and your heart will nearly burst from the love that finally frees you. This not from a place of pride, nay, from the life of a beggar who knows her weakness and yes, warts, but who has been redeemed anyway.