Snap By Snap

 Do you know how many times it takes for something to become a tradition? One time. I learned this from my daughter, Amy when she was about 8 years old. One year we bought a gingerbread house kit and what do you know, it was a tradition. For at least 12 years, we have purchased a kit every year and made a total mess with it. With all the practice we've had, you'd would think that we would be really, really talented at gingerbread houses by now.

One of my own traditions is watching the yearly show about the White House Christmas decorations. As a part of that show, they always show the White House pastry chefs creating the White House gingerbread house. After all the years of practice we have had, I'm pretty sure we could compete at that level. Yep.



Half the fun of buying the gingerbread kit (besides revelling in not having to bake our own actual gingerbread) is purchasing all of the extra sugary goodies to glue on, and licking the stiff white icing off our fingers as we go. I don't know if more sugar goes in us, or on the house.

This year's effort was a kit we bought at Sam's club and it came with fondant, which we had never played with before - big excitement. If you look really closely, you might be able to tell we are new to using fondant. Of course the rest of the house looks pretty much like the one above.

Some of our Christmas traditions have been adopted from Mark's family. One of them is that we serve hot Dr. Pepper (yes, you read that right) with lemon slices during Christmas tree trimming. It originates from a recipe my mother-in-law found in a magazine, and you know what? It is really quite good. I have to say that the first Christmas I spent with the Dobbs, I wasn't at all sure about this one!

The best tradition is not really one particular thing we do. Rather, it is the value that people are more important than things. Being together trumps presents, perfection, and busy-ness. That's what the gingerbread house is really about - it's about Amy and me taking time out of a busy season to sit at the table together and create . . . a $10 house that eventually we pick the candy off of or that the dog one day licks the decor off of. This year Amy reminded me that last year I didn't really help much with the house (too busy). Obviously, it was time to fix that. So today, in the year Amy turned 20 and I turn 50, we put the original Miracle on 34th Street on TV, and sat down with a pile of sugar and some magic stuff called fondant to create this year's house. It looks just like the box, don't you think?



I guess it's a good thing that having fun being together is really the point . . . because that is what we really succeeded at!

I have a confession to make.

It was very, very quiet in our house. Too quiet.

By the time Goldie had been gone for three weeks, we were ready for another dog to love. We had first met "Elroy" just two weeks after Goldie died, when we wandered by an adoption day in the Petsmart parking lot. There was this whiskery faced black and brown terrier in a crate, looking lively. I looked over in time to see the little guy lock eyes with Mark and stick his paw out of the crate to him. It really was love at first sight. But, we weren't ready yet, so we went home - confident that when we were ready there would be a wonderful dog for us, and that Elroy would certainly find a home. Several families were also looking at him that day. How could you not want to take home that face?

It is a sad time here at the Dobbs' house. On Friday, we had to say goodbye to our beloved Goldie. Eighteen months ago she was diagnosed with a slow growing cancer, and we were sure the end was coming. But she stayed fairly symptom free and happy until earlier this year. Then she began having more trouble with arthritis, and her heart began to be enlarged. Her eyes were clouded with cataracts and she was almost completely deaf. Still her life was very good. She ate (lived to eat, actually), loved to greet us when we got home (although she now often slept through our arrival), and love to take walks (shorter and slower but begged for nonetheless). Our Goldie aged gracefully, for the most part. Her face was completely white, but she was still a strikingly beautiful dog. As she aged she lost all inhibition when it came to trash cans, or raiding the pantry, and she had no problem at all barking at us to get what she wanted. She was almost 15.

On Friday she ran across the yard as she always did - to bark at passing kids - and injured her back leg. She could not put any pressure on it at all. I carried her inside, and we drove to the vet, her head in Amy's lap. She had torn a ligament on one of her back legs, completely disabling it. The injury that would require surgery to fix; a surgery she could not survive. Her age and her arthritis wouldn't let her manage on three legs, even if  her heart would have held out. We also knew that in the last few days her lungs had begun to fill with the fluid that marks true congestive heart failure. As much as we'd prepared, as much as we'd known it was coming, we weren't prepared in one hour's time to hear that it was the end. And it definitely was. The three of us cried and told her goodbye as the doctor injected her leg and she drifted quickly to sleep. It was wrenching.

There is such a fine line between life and death. One moment she was living, breathing, connecting, loving and the next all that is left is the shell. We drove home without a word. Shocked. And so began the grieving process.

We are still very much in the  midst of the grieving for our Goldie. Little things stop us in our tracks - like not putting a dish on the floor for her to lick. Thinking we see her or hear her in the house. Coming down in the middle of the night and finding the downstairs empty and silent. Watching a movie without once pausing to let Goldie out. But one thing that has really helped us in these first days is our photos. Looking at the snapshots of her life makes us miss her, but they also make us smile and tell stories, and remember what a very wonderful thing our relationship with her was.

Her portrait, ball, and collar now have a special place on the family photo shelf and Amy and I are going through photo albums, digital files, and the many stories Amy wrote about her when she was young. All of these will go into a book about Goldie, along with each of our memories. But as much as we'll love having the book - it will really be the process of writing it and compiling it that will be the healing for us.

The dark side of grief would have us retreat, withdraw, and avoid the pain . . . but these images from our years with Goldie draw us out of that place. There's more pain but also more joy in remembering her life as we sort photos, tell stories, laugh, and cry. Together.  It helps us move beyond remembering the death, to remembering the life. And what an exuberant, passionate, energetic, fun, and loving life it was.

I have a restless husband. That much is true. Every few weeks, an adventure is needed. And so yesterday we ventured south to the Hoosier National Forest for a hike. An hour and a half drive through lovely farmland and an eight mile bump down a Tower Ridge Road (gravel) brought us to the Sycamore Loop trail in the Charles Deem Wilderness area.


We started walking along an abandoned logging road that would lead us out to Terrill Cemetery, our first stop. It was gorgeous weather - 80 degrees and dry. The path stayed fairly level the entire hike and flat roadbed was easiest portion of the trail. It was odd to be walking out into what felt like the middle of nowhere and find a cemetery without a town. But what is now forested wilderness was once completely cleared by logging and settled by subsistence farmers. The land was not suited for farming, however, and the settlers struggled along. When the depression hit, the farms failed, the U.S. Forest Service acquired the lands, and the Civilian Conservation Corps began rehabilitating the land for recreational use. In 1982 the area was designated as a wilderness area and it is now managed by the Hoosier National Forest.


From the moment you step out of the forest into Terrill Cemetery, it is obvious that life was very different back then. The hard ground would not yield crops and farms did not flourish. Neither did children.


So many short lives. The adults rarely lived past 60, and the number of children buried there almost equaled the number of adults. Some children's parents were able have a lamb carved for their tombstone. Most could not. The Axsom family lost Dora, Dartha, Dorval, and Delphia all in 1931. It appears that when their one year old Betty died in 1939, they came back and placed this marker for all five of their lost children. Unimaginable.

Many of the families were so poor that their markers were quite crude - just local stone, hand carved. All that survives of some of these markers is a stump of stone. Who were they? What are their stories?