Fleeting

Summer rockets downhill so fast once August starts. It's almost over, but it's so beautiful. Please just wait. The more you relax into it, the more beautiful it is, but then there is the end, coming over the horizon, concentrating happiness because you know it's ending. Like the fleeting sweetness of a peach. There is a big white bowl of Colorado Palisade peaches on the table. Yesterday, they were hard but fragrant, today, they are so ripe that you can smell them coming down the stairs or opening the door to the house. Exactly like my Grandma's house when we would visit her in Denver. I walk in and out of rooms just to smell it again and go back in time.

But that intense peachiness always means, tomorrow they will be rotting. So there is today to slice them into small white salad bowls for dinner, which I did, and cut them up for ice cream, which I didn't do. Nothing really changes from when you were a kid. It's like three months of a weekend, where Friday night (June) stretches out in front of you, and then it's Sunday night (mid August).

This summer, suddenly we have a puppy, and talk about fleeting. Entire days go by where I just maintain and make meals and supervise and exercise and read books out loud and, since the neighborhood pool is two doors down, swim and swim between breaks to run home and let Charlie out of his kennel. Then that night, I can remember nothing of the day. But R and the puppy are happy and healthy. I have made a sincere attempt at all the good advice from the Monks of New Skete and Kathy Santo and the Dog Whisperer. The wisest and funniest books when you read them at 12:30 at night when all the work is finally done, and you memorize what to do and can't wait to wake up and inflict all your wisdom on the dog.

Some of it actually sticks in your head and helps. He's a very good dog. We went for a walk with R and her cousins, and he behaved very well.

I love his face in this picture.