It is the way of men to take from the Earth’s makings, wood and steel and stone, and to build things. To fill these things with hope of long use and admiration, so much so that, for the attentive ear, they will often sing. Sadly, it is also the way of men to outgrow their need for these things that they build, to forget, and to leave them to the slow dismantling of weather.    

Over a yawn of silver-green river, there spans just such a forgotten thing. A bridge that once sang as sweet as any sunrise, but having gone so long unused by both man and machine, its voice was seized by rust, and its song trapped deep within its iron bones.  

The River, wide and old, and slow as the summer doldrums, remembers when the bridge was young and bright and red. When it still sang, its voice strong and filled with hopes of usefulness. The River remembers. For it was the River who gathered the last of Bridge’s expectations, that fell, one by one, like the chips of its bright red paint, into the River’s deep, green waters. Gathered the expectations, and carried them away to the settling sea.

From time to time, bits of river bottom grow restless and long for sunlight, full and still. 
     Snagging grain after grain of passing sand, they add to their height, working their way upwards, until finally they reach the fabric of the river’s surface, its underside, where they push and push, until the gentle whorls are rent, and into daylight they rise.

Their first years above water, these bits of river bottom are perfectly content with being only sand, with basking in the sunlight, shells and driftwood collecting at their shores. But spring after spring, seeing the buds burst forth green on the banks that flank the River, they begin to ache, as earth will do, to be productive, to bear life. 
     So the Bottom’s snag at leaves, compostables. They build soil, rich enough to catch the eye of any seed aloft, breeze-bound and in search of a patch of bare earth to set roots. Soil, solid enough to coax to their shores the walnuts, hickory nuts and acorns, cast into the river, afloat.            

As he knew the story of the forgotten bridge, Peter Pan was thoughtful enough to cock his head when he came to it, sparing a moment to listen for any hint of the song trapped within its iron bones. 
     Hearing nothing but the slow churn of lost hopes in the deep green waters below, he crossed to the center, and with his own great expectations, poked his head through the bridge's riveted gridwork and looked down.

There it was. Just as the story told. A bit of restless river bottom, bare of briers and grown tall with trees, its width and breadth no more than a boy with a slight limp could run, at least once, without winding.
     And in the treetops, bare now with fall, the nests. Not of twigs and sticks as a bird will build, but great wads of leaves. One, two. Twelve. Fifteen. 
     Peter Pan shivered with the odds. The grains of sand, stacked one by one to raise the river bottom ... to build an Island. The gathered seeds. The hundreds of floods thwarted over the years to husband such a fair stand of trees. Trees with nuts no less, food for the Island's sole inhabitants, who, with neither wings or an inherent inclination for swimming, arrived there on a log, cast by a chance strike of lighting into the waters upstream.
     There it was. Cut off from the World. An island inhabited entirely by squirrels.  
     Squirrel Island.
     Just as the story told. 

Above the whisk and prattle of my rake, we heard a sort of burbling, the dogs and I, as if somewhere, stones had been laid out, and over them, an oddly boisterous brook had begun to flow. 
     We looked upward, and westward, and saw that the noise came not from a brook, but from a flock of black birds heading in our direction. 
     ‘Oh,’ said Silky Josephine, for it was an enormous flock. 
     ‘Are we going to be okay?’ asked Peter Pan. And Harley, for whatever reasons, licked his lips. 
     'We are,’ I told Pete. But he drew close regardless, just as the first of the birds were directly overhead. 
      They flew as if inside of a great undulating tube ...their chatter filling the clear blue sky .... a tube, which at one point in our watching, seemed to reach both horizons, its beginning and end lost to sight. 
    Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes maybe, we watched in silence, in reverence. 
     ‘This morning I dreamed I found one hundred dog bones in my bowl,’ Silky said when finally the last of the birds had passed over and again it was quiet. Her eyes were still intent on the place where the flock had disappeared. 
     ‘I thought that would be the luckiest thing ever,’ she said and then turned to me. ‘But now I don’t think I’m a wake-up-and-find-one-hundred-dog-bones-in-my-bowl, kind of lucky.’ 
     ‘I think I’m more of a ten-million-birds kind of girl,’ she said, and stretched out in the warm December sun, where the whisk and prattle of my rake could carry her off into sleep and the odd luck of dreams. 
     ‘Ten million birds,’ Silky said, and slowly closed her eyes.

‘Do you think an Indian dropped it?’ Silky asks of the hawk’s feather she found on our evening walk. 
     She’s been reading about Indians lately and has come to fancy herself half Cherokee, partly because of her glossy black hair and partly because of her keen ability to follow a trail, be it of cricket or mouse. 
     ‘Maybe,’ I reply. 
     ‘Or maybe ...’ 
     And I tell her the story of Tianuanaha, the Great Spirit Hawk. Of how, years ago, he let fall a single feather on to a meadow path much like the one we were walking. A path that he knew a half-Cherokee girl with a wish walked every day. A wish of becoming a whole Cherokee girl and Princess of her Tribe. And of how Tianuanaha's feather would grant the girl's wish if only her father would sew it on to her dress and then give her a true Indian name. 
     Silky’s eyes were wide. 
     I picked up the feather and touched her left ear, then her right, then the tip of her nose. 
     ‘I name you, Nautakwa,’ I said. ‘Feather Princess.’ 
     Then I stitched the feather’s quill through the eyelets of a strap on Silky’s halter, where it hung bravely until we got home and affixed it in a manner befitting a legend ... and a full-blooded, Indian Princess.




           

"How much does it say?" Silky Josephine asks. 
     She's on the scale at the Veterinarian's. 
     "You have to hold still Josie," I tell her. 
     Every day of the seven weeks she has been on her diet, Silky has looked at her reflection in the glass of the oven door and asked if she didn't look skinnier, asked if we can't go to the Veterinarian and confirm this possibility. 
     Despite her excitement, she manages to sit still on the big scale, not rabbit still, but near enough the devise can run its calculations. 
     We watch together as it sorts through numbers ... up and down, down then up, until finally it decides. 
     74, it reads. 
    "Two pounds, Josie!" I tell her. "You lost two pounds!" 
   Silky beams. "I knew it!," she says, "I knew I looked skinnier!" 

     Maybe Silky did see her loss in the oven door, but to be quite honest, I didn't. In fact, I was a little worried she had gained some. But the numbers don't lie. Two pounds down. 
     "You are skinnier, my sweet, silly girl," I say, and hug her deeply. "Light as an Angel's feather." 
     And walking through the Veterinarian's, past the other dogs and one grey cat in a box, I can see it, too, proud as Silky was, she really was light as an Angel's feather.               

“We had a little trouble out of that one,” Larry Gantt tells me from his porch. 
     I don’t need to look to where he is pointing. I know who it is. I’ve been trying to catch her for twenty minutes. She broke free again. 
     “Silky!” I holler, and she ducks into the woods, ignoring me.  
     Larry lives behind us. It’s down the graveled road that leads to his house that we walk every evening. Our woods on the east, his on the west. They entwine above, a lush canopy. In the swag, a live creek cuts beneath the road and falls into a pool of stone and toppled trees. Every foot is a new adventure of smells, deer and possums and squirrels. 
     Larry is the type of man who goes to town for his mail, whose food comes primarily from the property that surrounds him, the woods and the land he has cleared. Silky had been chasing his chickens that roam free in the yard. She bursts from the woods and collapses in a panting heap at my feet. I apologize to Larry, explaining, as I clip on her lead, that Silky is still young, despite her grown-up size, and just wants to play. 
     Larry understands, he’s a kind enough man ... has had a dog or two himself. But this is a world of fair warnings and we’ve been given ours.

"What was that?" Silky asks, the way she asks when her mouth is full of stuffed animal (which it was), ears perked and tan eyebrows raised. 
     The animal in Silky's mouth was a black and white cow, acquired from an enormous bin at the local second-hand store for forty-nine cents, along with a small pink cat and a giraffe with removable legs. 
     Silky had torn a hole into the cow and was shaking the stuffing loose, as she always does, when we heard the caplink, tink, tink, of something hitting the floor. 
     We found it beneath the table, a little red heart, no bigger than an apricot's pit. 
     There's a list of stuffed animals that we never purchase at the second-hand store: puppies, bunnies, nothing with beans, and no Pooh-shaped bears, which limits the selection greatly. How it was that Silky knew what she saw lying on the floor, is beyond me. But she did. And she looked as though she might cry. She lay the black and white cow down gently and touched its red heart with her wet nose. 
     "Can you put it back?" she asked me. 
     "I think we can," I told her. 
    And we did, Silky helping me nest the little red heart back into the cow's stuffed insides. 

     No puppies no bunnies, no Pooh-shaped bears, nothing with beans ... and no cows, heart-filled or otherwise.                  

"She's as big as a cow!" Priscilla says of Silky Josephine. 

     She and Carl have returned. They were busy the first couple of days, repairing their nest over the back porch light. There was mudding to do, before the feathering, and while the it dries, we have a moment to talk. 

     Priscilla tells me about their trip, about Anna and Luis, and I tell her what little I know about the mysterious disappearance of Bobo, and of Silky's curious growth spurt, our present topic. 

     "One hundred and forty dollars worth of tests at the Doctor," I tell Priscilla, "and all we learned was that she's just regular old fat." 

     We had suspected ... even hoped ...that Silky might have an 'issue', something glandular that could be resolved with a pill. But that wasn't the case. Silky is perfectly healthy ... other than, as Priscilla says, being 'as big as a cow' ... only a slight exaggeration. 

     We watch her chase a bumblebee, leaping and spinning and snapping, as if she were as delicate and dainty as a butterfly, which, inside, Silky truly is. 

     "She doesn't get any more treats," I tell Priscilla, "and she'll get more exercise, now that it's warmed up and she can be outside." 

     "I can help with that," Priscilla says, and like a bullet, she's in the air, swooping and tittering, and Silky, her eyes wide with delight gives chase. 

     "She'll be slim as a willow switch in no time," I hear Priscilla say. And if anyone is equipped to imagine a slender Silky Josephine, I suppose it would be me.

                        

I doubt that I will ever stop looking to that field through which he wore a path going to and from his daily adventures, or that I will ever stop hoping, that through the Timothy and Sage, be it golden or green, I will see him return.



   

If you sleep at night with your windows open ...for it's that time of year again ...and you hear something crying in the darkness that may be a dog or that may be a boy, but either way, clearly has a heart, broken by the loss of a dear and wonderful friend, go to your window, if you would, and blow gently on this sorrow as it passes, and lift it to the ears for which it was intended, the love for which it longs.



      

Silky is in her Terrible Twos. 
     I know this because sometimes she runs off in a mostly straight line away from me, and keeps on running even after she’s too far to hear me calling for her to stop, which is a very long ways. 
   I know this because sometimes she tears up the emergency potty pads, and then has her emergency on the wooden floor. 
     I know this because she chewed the shoe molding trying to catch a ladybird that was on the ceiling. 
     I know this because I’ve filled the very holes that I instructed her not to unfill at least twelve times in the past three days. 
     I know this because I have blankets now with fringes that didn’t have fringes before. 
     I know too, that if it weren’t for Silky's Terriffic Twos, I wouldn’t make it through her Terrible Twos, and I’ll tell you about those next, just to be fair. 

As you might have guessed, Silky grew. Upward first ...taller. Then longways. Then outward slightly. Then upward a little more, which was promising, but she began to grow outward again, steadily, until she was noticeably more round than she was tall and long, and it was suggested that she might have an 'issue', one that would require a drastic reduction in her much loved treats, and ice cream, and any sort of feed that is even mildly palatable to the most deprived of dogs, which clearly, Silky is not. 




     

These nights, so cold, I reach for Peter Pan, a lucky coin, deep in the warmth of my pocket.