Dear Gretchen, (the best Dachshund ever)
Do you remember the patchwork blanket Grandmom made for you? And the patchwork PJ’s she made for me out of little 4 inch squares of flannel? How about the time we got a blue ribbon at the county fair when I dressed you up homemade Thumbelina doll’s Santa Outfit ? You were an awful good sport about it. What about the little deerskin booties we made for you to swim in, to keep your nails from scratching us, with your flailing doggy paddle? And the time you ran through the screen door and tore your itchy stitches out and I had to sleep with you in that scary dog box to keep you from crying all night? I couldn’t stand to hear you crying but we couldn’t let you jump up on the bed until you got healed.
And I know you remember that horrible day when you were hanging out under the kitchen stove and the hot bacon grease flashed on the stove and then spilled down onto your poor head. I had never heard anyone scream in that much pain before. It was awful. You ran,
Gretchen and Her Scar
yelping and screaming, all the way down the stairs into the basement and tried to hide under the couch. I had to drag you out so we could get you to the vet, you poor thing. After that you had an inch wide hairless, black skin, scar that ran from your left eye all the way to your right ear and you couldn’t see out of that eye anymore.
You used to dig up all the mole tunnels in the yard and turn them into Dachshund sized ditches instead. And you brought home antlers bigger than you and chewed on them for ages. And there was that time you killed a mama bunny and brought home all her babies and nursed them with your precocious milk. You must have wanted your own puppies pretty bad to go through those false pregnancies, even getting milk and then to steal baby bunnies. It was cute though. And we had to blast you with a soapy water pistol to try and break you from chasing cars down the road after they paved it. You were way too small to be chasing cars, you know. It was really dangerous. You liked to ride out in front on the sailboat and your ears would flap in the wind. You kept me warm at night, sleeping under the covers and letting me use you as a knee pillow. Even your head was under the covers.
Gretchen gnawing on antlers
It was hard to leave you behind when I left home but I couldn’t take you to West Virginia when I moved. You were old and half blind and mostly deaf by then. I was afraid you would follow a ground hog down its hole like it was just a little mole and get all torn up.
Dad brought you home for me when I was eight years old, after Aunt Peg came back from Tripoli and wanted her Dachshund Shotzi back. We had kept him for more than six months and I had fallen in love with him . I had to give him back and could not bear to be alone again. There is nothing else like having a best-friend dog who loves you no matter what. I really appreciated Mom and Dad allowing me to have you since you were not exactly a hunting dog like the Irish Setters they raised.
You lived to be thirteen years old, which is pretty good for a Dachshund. I was not there for your last two years and I feel I let you down in the end. I wish Mom had let me know when she decided to put you down. I didn’t even know until months later. I wouldn’t never have wanted you to suffer though, and I have to trust that Mom did the right thing for you. You were in pain and unable to function anymore. You were my closest friend and such a good dog. Thanks for being you.
Written by Wendy lee, blogging at https://www.edgewisewoods.com
The so-called air was thick with red colored fuzz and coughing was heard from just about every lung in the suffocatingly closed in sewing factory. Great. Today would be red fabric all day which automatically put all the women in a foul mood. First shift had already been at it for quite awhile and stirred things up nicely. Just what I needed. I had just gotten over having bronchitis from living in the cold damp cow shed I called home and this was not going to help. I stashed my lunch under my machine and quick went to get punched in on the stupid time clock. I was early but it wouldn’t matter, they wouldn’t pay me for that, they’d only dock me for being late- never reward you for being early; it’s just that there was a line and I as at the end of it. There was a one way street here and it did not go my way.
The buzzer sounded and like a bunch of cattle we all headed in single file lines to our machines and took up our work. The country music station played in the background, interrupted by an occasional announcement from management or call for a supervisor over the loudspeaker, but mostly we heard sewing machines and cutting machines humming –probably about 150 of them at once. .Zip…Zip… Thunk… Zip… Zip…The movements were automatic-no thought required. Mine was a Five-Thread Overlock machine with a razor cutting edge. The fabric I sliced off with every line of stitching helped create a lot of the red dust floating in the air. The same dust that causes Brown Lung disease, especially when using the most toxic red dyes, like today. The female mountain mama equivalent of Black Lung but not really talked about or even acknowledged by most people- even those who know of it. None of the other colors made us cough like that- just the red. We were making ladies shirts and I was just making the hems on the bottom of the sleeves- all day long. Dozens and dozens of them all day long. Zip…Zip…Zip…Thunk..Zip…I got really fast, really quick because it was really boring so what else was there to do? The other ladies gossiped and took it easy, but I do not have any friends here, so I just get into the work. Zip…Zip…Otherwise, the day would drag by so slow I couldn’t stand it.
Another BUZZER!-really loud, breaks my reverie, and the momentum. Break time! Everybody jumps up and practically runs for the break room with the coffee pots and vending machines. I feel like such an automaton already that I have to break away and walk the other direction and go outside. This is seriously frowned upon. Why am I being different? What is wrong with me? Why can’t I act like the others? They will not let me near the coffee pot anyway, so what would be the point? I am an outsider here and there is no room made for me in the break area and not enough time anyway for me to get to a machine or a coffee pot through the unfriendly lines. I bring my own hot drinks-sometimes herb tea with honey, sometimes coffee and a snack, and I sit outside and enjoy the five minutes of solitude and the weather, whatever it is. You can’t tell what to expect when you open the door. There are no windows in there, at all. This is my idea of hell.
The BUZZER! sounds again and back we all go, single file, moving slightly slower than on the way out. This is way worse than high school ever was and the pay absolutely sucks. But it IS pay, and for where we are, in the middle of nowhere West Virginia , we are all lucky to have a job at all. We work piecework with a guarantee of minimum wage, which at this crappy Neanderthal place means minimum wage only. If they were intelligent I would be able to make more and they would also be able to earn more off my productivity, but for some reason they do not want to do that. Zip…Zip…Zip…Thump…Zip…Zip … .As soon as I get good at a skill and start making more than the minimum, they quick, switch me to a new one and have me learn that, to slow me down. Zip…Zip…Zip..Thunk…Zip… I have only been here two months and have learned most of the machines and could probably supervise the entire place, plus fix the equipment, but I am still just making the minimum wage of $2.10 an hour. Go figure. Zip…Zip…Zip… The problem is I have a brain and I am using it and it seems to make them nervous. Most folks here do not bother to bring their brain to work as it would be wasted and they learned that long ago. Like I said, I am new here .Zip…Zip…Zip…Thunk…Zip
BUZZZER ! Again. Lunch. Back outside for me. Don’t know what I’ll do when it gets really cold out here – the heater in my Volkswagon is not worth much. I do not want to think about working here too much into the future. I am only here because I am desperate, but surely not forever. Not like the ladies inside who have been here twenty some years. God, how depressing. I have to do 144 dozen sleeves today-a gross. That about sums it up.
BUZZZZERRR! Again. That thing is really grating on my nerves and giving me a splitting headache. Zip…Zip… Zip…Whine, Ping…Oh, good. I get to take the machine apart and do some repairs and maintenance to it. Yeah! A break in the monotony! Sometimes I take it apart and put it together just for the heck of it but now it actually needs it. We have repairmen for this but they are kept pretty busy with the other women who use them regularly as their ‘spice’ for the day. Looks like I broke a knife so I will have to go get a part out of the repair shop up front which could take a little while. I will probably catch some flack from the floor- walker for that. She feels it is her job to give me (and everyone else) a hard time whenever possible. I think she gets about a quarter extra an hour for that job and now everyone hates her.
I got the part, swapped it out and… Right back to work. Zip… Zip… Zip…”ANNOUNCEMENT! THE FOLLOWING LUCKY WOMEN HAVE WON OUR ANNUAL THANKSGIVING TURKEY GIVEAWAY! Please report to the office when your shift is done to claim your prize.” Well wouldn’t you know, lucky me, the vegetarian, won a turkey. Guess I’ll have to give it to a friend. How bazzaar. Zip…Zip…Zip…Thunk…Zip…Zip…
Afternoon break BUZZZZZERRRRRR! goes off. Headache now pounding. Decide to go out and get some aspirin out of the car. Superviser stops me and accuses me of stealing fabric, smoking pot, etc, didn’t stick around for the rest. Got the aspirin out of the glove compartment and came back inside for some water from the fountain. All the folks who won turkeys were standing around chattering about how sweet it was of management to do this for them. I got to looking at them all and realized that we were all the latest hires. None of the old timers had won a turkey at all. This was strange and I said so. It was obviously rigged. What was going on?
“Oh, give it a break. Just because you don’t like turkey you have to go and ruin our fun”, said the ring leader of the group of local girls who all ate meat, married and had kids before they even got out of high school.
BBBBBBBUZZZZZZZERRR!! All thought stops and we head meekly back to our machines and pick up our work right where we left off. With…out… thought…. Zip…Zip…Zip…One hundred forty four dozen shirtsleeves… finished.
BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZER! This long day, in a string of long boring days without sunlight is finally over. I pack up my stuff and head up to the front office with the other lucky winners where we stand in line to await our frozen dead rewards. After awhile the manager comes out, gives the nod for the turkeys to be handed out and then he comes down the line and personally hands each one of us a note which says “Do to unforeseen circumstances we are having to reduce the workforce here at — —–. Unfortunately, since you are the most recently hired you must be the first to be laid off. Thank you for your services. This will be your last paycheck. If we need you in the future we will call you.” Awesome.
At first we stand in stunned silence, then a general murmur is heard. These women are very upset by this news, especially at this time of year. I, however, am grateful to have no reason to come back here next week, or ever again. I feel as though I have been let out of jail and am overjoyed at being unemployed without having had to quit. I have food put by in jars from my garden this summer, goats giving milk, chickens producing eggs, tons of potatoes under piles of straw. I might be broke, but I am not going to starve, so to hell with this job. I am free. I jump in my VW and head home and do not look back. I made a quilt a few years later using scraps from that job which serves to remind me of that time, definitely not one of my better job memories.
They actually had the nerve to call me back a few weeks later to rehire me. I enjoyed telling them it was the last place I would ever return to. The final blow was when I realized if they had kept us for even three days longer, they would have had to pay us unemployment when they laid us off. Calling us back was restarting that clock and they could and would keep doing it. This was just one of the many garment factories enslaving poor folks in the U.S. before they did us all a favor and shipped these factories and jobs to even poorer areas overseas. Good riddance.
Wendy lee , writing at https://www.edgewisewoods.com
For about a year and a half, in the eighties, I lived down the road from my place, in Owl Hollow. It was the cutest little house in the back of the Thackers farm. I had to get out and open and close the gate each time I came through the lane, to keep the cows in. The drive was about a third of a mile long and in the winter, my VW bus tended to be parked out by the road, and we walked in. There was only one bedroom, up in the attic, and the three girls shared that. I divided it up with a fabric and two by four wall so my older daughter could have a modicum of privacy from the two little ones. I slept out on the screened in porch on a futon on the floor. When it got cold, I installed insulation and plastic to keep it warmer. The woodstove was in the tiny living room and I kept the window into that room open for the heat. I don’t know how I managed to fit it all in, but I had my weaving loom, treadle sewing machine, and an armchair in there. The kitchen held a sink with gravity fed cold water, an old fifties style refrigerator, a gas cookstove and the kitchen table. I also had my big shelf of canning jars and the China cabinet (turned sideboard) I helped my Dad build when I was a kid in there too. It was pretty tight but homey. There were two tiny little sheds coming off the kitchen. One had a short iron bath tub in it and we kept a pee pot in there. The other was the mudroom entrance with the chest freezer in it and a flap cut into the screend door for the dogs to come and go through. I’ ll bet the whole house measured less than 500 square feet. It was simple and really cheap. Rent was $65.00 a month, electric was maybe $30 dollars and the phone was like $25. I was able to work off the rent by helping the landlord with chores sometimes. I painted the walls up at his house on the hill, mucked out the barn, repaired fence, chased cows, cut firewood. I finally managed to convince them to let me install a hot water heater. They were sure it wouldn’t work on a gravity fed line and the cows got first dibs on the water. It was esy to set up though and I sure enjoyed being able to use that bathtub inside the house. We still had an outhouse for a toilet but we were used to that. There were two large Sugar Maple trees in the yard and the kids had two tire swings hanging from them in the shade. I had a job as a cook at a conference center about 15 miles away and things were starting to look up. I was hoping to build a house on my land nearby as soon as I could swing it but this little house was a fine place for us in the meantime.
The critters who lived in the hollow with us shared the space freely. Cows would wander right up to the door. Skunks and raccoons came in the dog door into the mudroom. Something lived in the walls and I was hoping it was not rats.
One night, while asleep out on my futon, I felt something run right up the covers on top of me. I was not really thinking, being asleep, and I just grabbed at it, fast like. It was warm and furry and definitely alive. I jumped up, grabbed the empty water glass, pushed it inside, and turned on the light to check it out. I had never seen one before, but I was pretty sure it was a flying squirrel! The poor thing was as startled as I was. He didn’t bite me though. I got a half gallon wide mouth jar from the kitchen, rigged up a screen lid for it and went to wake up the kids. I was so relieved we didn’t have rats. I hate rats. Flying squirrels, on the other hand , are cool. He had the biggest round eyes, although he was smallish in size. The kids were good sports about being woke up and after we all had a good look at him, they went back to bed. I took him outside and asked him,
“Please to not come inside again. Living inside the walls is OK, but running across my bed is not. OK?”
He was quiet but I think he got it. It never happened again and when I heard them in the walls at night, it no longer bothered me. Now that I knew who it was.
I was woken on another night by a scritching sound on my pillow. I could not imagine what it was but it was constant and it seemed loud to me. I got up turned on the light, and looked back at my pillow. There were hundreds of honeybees walking across my pillow! Not flying. Not buzzing. Hundreds of tiny feet, walking across my pillow. They were all headed in the same direction and seemed to not notice what was in their way. I st down cross legged on my bed and watched them for awhile. It was very strange for them to be up at night I thought. And strange to be walking, not flying. Quiet too. I decided to have a conversation with them in the same quiet way. I sent my thoughts to them. I asked them ,
“Please, do not walk across my pillow or come inside the house anymore. I don’t mind sharing the house with you, but you need to stay in the walls and use an entrance on the outside. Please don’t sting the kids or scare them and you can stay right where you live now. I don’t want to hurt you. I can’t have you walking around on my pillow though. Please?”
The bees kept marching. I opened the door to the outside for them and they left. I closed the door , went back to bed, a little nervous about noises on my pillow. In the morning, I put my ear against the wall and could hear them working inside, but they never came inside the house after that. I appreciated their cooperation. Bees are usually fairly calm and docile if you treat them right. They have work to do and like to be left alone to do it. I think of them fondly these days while I tend to my bees at home.
Coming home one day, while living up in Freshwater Cove, I crossed the low water bridge and saw a critter in the creek. I stopped and watched as a beaver played around in the water. Hmmm.
“Wonder where he’s headed?”
Two days later there were two up at the pond. They started cutting down trees and dropping them in the water. It took them only two days to gnaw through a Tulip popular that was probably 24 inches in diameter. We started to worry about all the trees on the North slope of the pond. A lodge was built pretty fast and then the tree cutting slowed up. Winter came and went. In Spring, cutting began again and baby beavers emerged. It drove the dogs crazy, seeing those beavers swimming around out there in the middle of their pond. Geshen attempted to outswim them a couple of times, but a dog is no match for a beaver in the water. They would circle around the dogs, making them turn and turn, and eventually exhausting them. I had to go out in the canoe and bring Gesh in before she drowned. She would not give up. When I got her back to shore she lay heaving and gasping on the shore for a good while afterwards.
When the water got warm enough for us to go swimming , the beavers were still there. I could get within about three feet of them if I swam quiet with my eyes right at water level. It was kind of cool to swim with the beavers. Then they started expanding their universe. They built a dam right next to the driveway where the feeder creek came in. The water rose and then started swamping the road out. It was getting really mushy and muddy to drive through. Jimi tore the dam down numerous times but they kept building it right back where it was. He even had a backhoe come in a dredge the creek back out to clear it. We would find him down there , waiting with a gun, daring them to rebuild it. They just waited until he went to bed.
I went down and had a little talk with the beavers.
“If you all want to live, you should try heading on down towards my barn and build a little dam on the creek down there. I could use a little drinking pond for the horses.”
They seemed to understand that and they walked over in that direction directly.
“Wow. That was cool. Didn’t know I could talk beaver.”
Unfortunately, the dogs didn’t get the same message, or not in the right way. Before the beavers had managed to get their new dam finished, and a protective pool around them in the process, Gesh and Poss had ganged up on them and taken them out. They were trying to be good dogs. I felt bad for the beavers but at least the trees were safe again. The rest of the beaver family moved on out shortly thereafter. We didn’t see them again.
