The Thankful Widow

I woke up alone in the bedroom. The dog, who usually sleeps on my husband’s side of the bed, had moved to the living room sometime during the night. The traitor. Maybe I snore, maybe I get too restless or talk in my sleep and disturb his slumber. Maybe there’s a bit of board collie in his DNA. In the summer months, though, Levi will move from my bed to his own that sits near-by but it’s underneath a drafty window and he likes to be warm in the winter. I know this because during the day he’ll follow the sun around from window to window as the day progresses so he can nap bathed in sunshine. He could use an animal behaviorist to analyze his perchance for behaving more cat-like than Schnauzer. In addition to being a sun worshiper, he’s independent for a dog and the closest thing he does that could be labeled ‘affection’ is to lean against my leg while I’m at the computer. That lasts about five minutes then he’s off to scare the birds that come to our heated birdbath on the other side of the dining room window. And when he wants to eat, or doesn’t like what I serve him, he finds his voice and won’t let go until I play servant to master. He’s a cat in Schnauzer costume.

Usually, when I wake up alone it doesn’t bother me but when it does…well, it’s like a thermometer taking my widow’s temperature. Yup, today is going to be a long, miss-Don day according to my dogmometer. I can get out---the roads are good except for a few pinch points caused by melting snows that I’ll find by the river---but nothing is on my day planner. So I’ll go to the pet store to buy my cat-masquerading-as-a-dog some food. Then I’ll stop by my elderly sister-in-law’s house because we can make each other laugh and feel good. It’s always like that when I spend time with someone who has known me for decades. There’s no pretending I’m Miss Congeniality with her. She knows all my flaws and none of my secrets and I like it that way. Hint: What you tell her could easily end up on a highway billboard which could be a slight exaggeration but aren’t would-be writers allowed to do that? I, on the other hand, know all of my sister-in-law’s flaws and all of her secrets. She likes to talk and I like to listen.

I call her The Insider and she calls me Mother Superior. Thankfully, she has great respect for all the real Mother Superiors in her very long, Catholic past so I take that nickname as a compliment.  She would gasp with shock, however, if I ever told her I’m an agnostic. I’ve seen that reaction before. It’s like the declaration comes with a pair of ruby-red horns adorning the top of my head. It’s a hard concept for some Christians to accept that another person can be moral and upstanding without the benefit of church dogma stuffed in their head and oozing out their ears. Not that I haven’t been exposed to plenty of church dogma, I have but to me it’s more like a history of morality and values than Holy Scripture. I boil it all down into one guiding principle: Do the right thing in all situations because it’s logical, fair and best for the advancement of society, rather than because you might get punished if you don’t. Oh, brother, here I go again and it isn’t even Sunday. Where is that bushel basket? I need to hide something under it.

Thanksgiving is coming, a time to be thankfully for our blessings. Okay, here it goes---no sermon, just the facts, Ma`am. I am thankful to be alive and living in a country where roadside bombs aren’t a part of the landscape and food, water and shelter are reasonably obtainable for most of us. I am thankfully I’ve lived a life of my own choosing where the only people I’ve lost I lost to natural causes and however hard those losses were at the time, I was (and still am) strong enough to handle them without doing serious harm to my spirit. I am thankful that I won the parent lotto when I was born to my mom and dad and for the Powerball number, I get to live in middle class America. I am thankful that I met my soul mate and we got to spend 42 years together before he had to move on to whatever is on the other side of the Great Crossing. I am thankful that two days after Thanksgiving I can ditch the arm sling and spend the following two weeks doing whatever I can so long as it doesn’t involved lifting, shoveling or getting my arm above my shoulder, then the doctor will appraise the need for physical therapy. And last but not least, I am thankful for the mornings when I wake up and the dog is still sleeping near-by…which gives me an idea. Maybe I can get some rope and hog-tie him down to the bed each night. ©