I did not realize how big a hole our dog would leave. Every day I feel the oddness of the house as we put our pre-Christmas routine back into play. She was old and slept most of the time. Apparently not as much as I thought because there is a strange silence where there used to be the clatter of her nails on the wood floor and the jingle of her collar when she shook her head.
She was a golden retriever and so I have lots of golden hair about the house. I managed to keep the floors mostly clear of it but I've been working to clean up my car and her travel bed in it and her regular bed in our room. It makes me sad to do these things even though it used to gripe me that I had to deal with the dirt.
Everything we have done this week has this odd self-consciousness about it. It's like we are starting over doing things in a new way. Every event is cast in a new light. The most noticeable was when the gardner came yesterday. There was no one to bark fiercely at him when he blew the leaves away from the doors. No, the most noticeable was NOT taking her with us to the art center.
Heather is at a drawing class there today. She gets a lot out of this class designed for adults. She just makes the cut age-wise but her classmates are all much older than her. It's a good thing she has lots of experience with older people because she holds her own quite well with them.
Wednesdays are a little light due to this long afternoon class. Heather worked on her math this morning and we did some reading of a novel. Math used to be torture but she turned a corner last spring and now it's just regular work. Reading any literature together is pure joy. We try to do that as often as we can during the week. We read it aloud. I used to do all the reading but this year we trade off. For some reason we are always reading long books together. So it will take a long time to read the whole book. Good thing we both have stacks of books on our nightstands to read alone at night.
