Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

  I vividly recall walking in to one of the bedrooms in our house back in Ohio. It was an older home, and at the time the registers to transfer heat upstairs were on either side of the walls opposite each other, one in each bedroom. There were metal vents that could be opened or closed so that you could heat one room, but not the other, if you so desired.   I must have been around two or three years old, and for some reason I had awakened early, before my folks were up. I knew that there was a Santa Claus doll filled with sand in the bottom drawer of a dresser in the room I came in to. I had been told in the past not to play with it because the doll had a small hole in it, and the sand would leak out.   When you're a little kid, Santa is like a hero. He's never crabby, doesn't make you eat broccoli, and even if you're sometimes bad, he seems to have forgotten all that by the time Christmas rolls around, because he's brought you a bunch of toys. He never gives you so...

 Tonight I'm going to write one of the saddest posts that I've ever done. Today around noon, our beloved dog Rigby passed on.  These pictures were taken just over a month ago, but when he passed today, he was just a fraction of the size that he was when these were taken. Over the past month he had steadily been losing weight. His ribs were starting to show and the skin on his belly was hanging. He's always loved to eat, and I indulged him. The kids were constantly telling me he was spoiled, but I don't care. My feelings were that if you were going to have a pet, and especially a dog, he was going to be getting the royal treatment. I've been thinking back over his life, from the time that our daughter Autumn first brought him down from Wasilla in a small carrying case that fit under the airplane seat. He was as cute as a button. For the first week or so he slept in that case in the laundry room and would cry at night. Eventually we purchased a small bed fo...