Twelfth Night … and more about dogs and magical creatures

 

Jacob on Twelfth Night
too many years ago

We celebrated Twelfth Night, the liturgical end of the Christmas season, with our family tradition of each burning a small branch of evergreen and making a secret wish. I spent the morning making a large batch of potato salad and a marinated green bean salad while Christian fixed barbecued meatballs, so it was sort of anticlimactic that two of our guests cancelled because of illness and two others had not shown up by the time I came back out to the cottage.

My twig always misses, but I
don't think that's an omen

But we had a lovely ceremony at the front porch fire pit on this night of the full moon. I love that Jacob has been doing this every year his whole life and hung around with the old folks to make his own wish—then he was off to find his friends. Jean was with us, and Amye Cole, and Jordan burned a secret wish, written and sealed in an envelope, from a friend who was not able to join us.

The news about Sophie continues to be good—this morning, her fever was gone, her kidneys were improving, and she was eating canned chicken. We will go visit her tomorrow morning, and I am hoping we can bring her home Monday. June Bug, who had us as worried on Christmas Day, continues her sudden miraculous recovery. Christian found some pad for dogs’ feet to keep them from slipping, so now Junie is confident in walking—and wanders constantly all over the house.

Since my mind is on animals tonight, I have two things to share. First is a story I stole from Gabe Fleisher’s “Wake Up to Politics” column this morning. (If you don’t read this online bipartisan column of news from D.C., I urge you to look it up—now a college junior in D.C., Fleisher started it some ten years ago as a young boy. It is reliable, accurate, informative, and—as I said—bipartisan, to the point that I sometimes wish he’d lean a bit more left.) Fleisher likes, when possible, to end his daily column with a human interest or humorous story. This was this morning’s:

The Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control recently received an unusual request. “I would like your approval if I can have a unicorn in my backyard,” Madeline, age six, wrote straightforwardly.

Luckily for her, the bureaucracy relented and cut through the red tape. Director Marcia Mayeda wrote back, granting Madeline a unicorn license, so long as she complied with the county’s “conditions,” including that the animal be given “regular access to sunlight, moonbeams, and rainbows.” So nice to know that bureaucracy has a sense of the magical.

Responding to my news about Sophie, a friend sent me this lovely quote from President Joe Biden: “Dogs’ lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you’re going to lose a dog, and there’s going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with him. You can’t support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion. There’s such beauty in the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while always being aware it comes with an unbearable price. Maybe loving dogs is a way we do penance for all the mistakes we make in life.” Thanks to Jaimie Smith for sharing this—it has been a greatly comforting thought to me.

Make a wish for the coming year, if not on an evergreen branch thrown in the fire, how about on that full moon? And sweet dreams as we had full steam ahead into 2023.