Moving day is less than two weeks away and just about everything is going smoothly. I’ve rented a cargo van to cart some furniture to my sister’s for safe keeping tomorrow after work, arranged to have new tires put on my truck and scheduled Samaritan House to come get whatever is left in the house the morning of the 22nd before leaving Virginia Beach to spend Christmas with my family in Louisa and then head out to Los Angeles on the 26th.
Between now and then I have one full day left of work, 3 chiropractic appointments, one hair appointment and a date with the dentist to remove the only existing wisdom tooth in my head. I’d like to set aside some time to get together with friends but I just don’t know if that is going to happen. The last few months seemed like they would last forever and I figured I had all the time in the world but now I have a house full of furniture and boxes that need to find a home, fast. I placed a few things on Craigslist but up till now I’ve only managed to sell a couple of rugs.
Fortunately I spent yesterday with two of my best friends from my college days at the ODU Oceanography Department. Julie and Carole have been with me since LA trip number one in 1995. They have always supported my dreams, even when logic was not a deciding factor. Saturday I had dinner with SuzeCate, my long-lost elementary school chum brought back via FaceBook, who it turns out has been less than 10 miles from me for most of the past 20 years. Friday night the best neighbors on the planet cooked me a vegetarian dinner and we whooped it up in our usual fashion of unusual entertainment like reading How the Grinch Stole Christmas, playing the piano and dancing swing (or attempting to) by the fire to Christmas tunes while banging on bongos that only one of us truly knows how to play.
And a couple of weeks ago I spent a brief but oh so magical afternoon in Louisa with three of the OBX Skanks, Debra, Pam and Steff. We were blessed with a pretty cool snowstorm that dropped some cozy Christmas cheer into our quick but memorable day and took a few pictures for Lee Lee out in Colorado. My friend Brenda is coming all the way from Lynchburg to spend this weekend helping me pack and keep my sanity, and last night’s work party provided a great last chance to be merry with the colleagues. Christmas I’ll be staying with my mom and Hosa and having the annual oyster breakfast with my sister (both of them, I hope) and it’s the one time of the year I eat oysters, even though I still only eat them fried. New Year’s Eve I’ll be in Colorado with my best-est longtime friend Lee Lee. But there are still people I want badly to see before I go.
It would be easy enough to schedule a couple of hours this weekend to meet in one of the local pubs if it weren’t for the one snag in these perfectly flowing plans, and that is LolliPop. My baby seems to be suffering from some sort of spinal problem for a few days now and both a trip to the chiropractor and strong doses of drugs have helped only slightly. We spent last night sleeping in the living room floor, her head curled against a pillow between me and the sofa, Daisy above us keeping a watchful eye on her while I slept.
I’ve massaged, held, and sung Unchained Melody to this dog, but despite muscle relaxers and pain killers she’s shaking and whining, and when I went to check on her at lunch today she hobbled over to me like a little old woman, scooted her head into my lap on the floor and tried to curl up into my body as much as she could. I’m wearing my big girl panties because I’m the mama and I’m not the one hurting, but it’s brought me close to tears more than once already today and the Christmas songs, bittersweet as they are, are not helping. Logically I know she will be fine but with me logic is usually lost to emotion, and hearing O Holy Night back to back with Dan Fogelberg’s Same Old Lang Syne sends my thoughts to the summer of 2008 when I lost Pearl just weeks before the last scheduled move and synchronicity swirled in like a mist over the full moon to change my plans for awhile. Quite frankly I’m not willing to go there again.
So Lolli and I head into visit Dave, another dear friend and in my opinion absolutely the best veterinarian in Virginia Beach. He thinks Lolli’s got a bad disk in her back and takes x-rays and amazingly, her back is fine, perfect bone from top to bottom. But she’s also full of crap, from tip to tail, so much so that it’s clearly visible on the x-ray screen. Turns out, my dog is constipated. Her back hurts because the muscles around her spine are going into spasms made worse by the fact that she’s packed full of poop. The irony of this revelation isn’t lost on me at all ~ not after all I’ve been through here. The thing is, my instincts were telling me this was the problem but I jumped to the worst conclusion, even thinking she had a tumor, instead of trusting what I already knew.
Lolli got an enema and I got a reminder to give myself a break and trust what I know, which is that things are going to be just fine. Now it’s 9:30 at night and I’m eating a late dinner while standing outside in the freezing cold encouraging my dog to relax and just let it flow. Change is good, especially when it’s change you’ve put in motion yourself. Times like these, when there seems to be so much to do and the memories are swirling and the friends are saying goodbye and you feel one door closing and the other one opening, it’s just good to remember that selling the rugs is not the same as having them pulled out from under you.
