PAW PRINTS ON MY SOUL

Monks, nuns, and sisters in Orders that practice the Benedictine way of life are noted for hospitality when newcomers knock on their monastery or convent doors. The Anglican sisters in the Community of St. Mary, a Benedictine Order, carry on this tradition here at Sewanee, Tennessee. As an associate of CSM, I’ve met a diverse group of pilgrims who come here on individual and group retreats, as well as regulars who attend services at the convent and share breakfast with the sisters after weekday and Sunday Eucharists.

Last week Deb Gerace, an overnight guest from Kennesaw, Georgia, sat next to me at breakfast in the refectory, and I learned that she was only here for an 'overnight' —“just to step back for a little while,” she said. I asked her if she was a priest on retreat.

“No, a chaplain and therapy dog handler.” She laughed, assuming that I’d think this a strange vocation.

“At a church?”

“Everywhere. My husband Mike and I, and our two former rescue dogs who have become therapy dogs — Sammy and Babycakes — minister to homebound at our own church in Kennesaw, Georgia, to people in nursing homes, rehab centers, and schools…wherever we’re needed.”

Gerace has told the story of training two dogs (who have their own disabilities) for this ministry in Paw Prints on my Soul, describing the dogs as having good dispositions, energy, loyalty, and a willingness to please. Two initial “gigs” for which the dogs trained were at Christ Episcopal Church Gerace attends, the church’s pre-school and in a visit with a cancer patient. On another occasion, they dressed in costumes while Gerace, also a singer/guitarist, gave a music performance and Sammy entertained with a learned wolf howl at a special Halloween show.

Lap sitting, bed sitting, performing to music, the dogs became the inspiration and therapy for the sick and dying, “often triggering a stream of consciousness from somewhere deep inside the jumbled memories of bed-ridden people,” Gerace writes. She and her husband Mike later joined a Chaplain Crises Training group so that they could visit post-disaster areas and share Sammy and Babycakes with traumatized survivors.

St. Mary’s Convent already has its special healing dog, Penny, an adopted part pit bull, part Labrador retriever who has never had any training in healing or crises intervention, but she’s the Convent’s hospitality hostess and has her own “pew” in the chapel — a basket lined with blankets right behind Prioress Madeleine Mary’s chair. This gentle, calm canine attends all the Chapel services and knows when to settle in for the prayers and when to get up at the dismissal. Sister Elizabeth says that Penny has tended several sisters when they were ill, not by invitation but by intuiting that she’s needed, sleeping in their rooms until they recover. I’m allergic to animal dander, particularly cat dander, but I can now be near Penny without suffering allergic reactions. I’ve never heard Penny bark! Sister Madeleine Mary relates that she’s known Penny to growl at strangers they encounter on walks near the Convent because she knows they aren’t sisters or associates, but she isn’t the kind of dog to greet people with aggressive behavior; in contrast, she runs up to greet Convent visitors, gently brushes up against them, receives a few pats on her head, then goes her way. All of us associated with St. Mary’s Convent know that Penny joins the healer dogs, Sammy and Babycakes, in being a creature that leaves paw prints on others’ souls.

While doing research recently, I read a book entitled Mystical Dogs by Jean Houston that described the mystical qualities of dogs and the comfort they provide during dark nights a human may experience. She tells the story of a prison pet partnership program in which inmates train dogs to serve the physically disabled, the elderly, and the blind. “…Our present day canine friends inspire and support us through that stage of the mystic path known in some traditions as ‘the dark night of the soul…over and over again throughout my lifetime, with its share of personal dark nights, my dogs have known not only what my soul has needed, but also that I would survive, even when I felt that I would have a hard time doing so…they have known how to supply the faith, the warmth, the rapt attention, and the bodily presence that human friends and helpers cannot always provide…”

Houston believes that animals aren’t afraid of the darker aspects of life and are happy with us even when we feel broken, explaining that they like nothing better than searching for lost things, whether it’s a buried bone or a missing part of a human soul.

CAMPOUT

This morning I moved a stack of books, and a little black notebook filled with the memorial postcards my mother collected on my family’s “moving west” adventure, circa 1946, fell out on the floor of my study. Every time I see the postcards of a roadside park near Burnet, Texas I wonder why my parents didn’t settle in Hill Country near Buchanan Dam. By the 40’s, Buchanan Dam had become known as the largest multi-arch dam in the world, and the area had begun to bustle.

At this time, we were on the famous Diddy Wah Diddy adventure to California — and, no, my father hadn’t quit his job to set out to pan gold — in fact, none of the family ever knew what his goal was, beyond following an inclination to “drop out.” We spent a month roughing it at a park I’ve never been able to relocate, even after two searches in the Buchanan Dam area during the 90’s. I surmise that we camped out near the Dam, probably on Lake Buchanan or Inks Lake — both major retirement and recreation places today.

Seven decades ago, this Hill Country paradise offered primitive lodging and places to eat, but my mother, a seasoned Golden Eaglet Girl Scout in her youth, and my father, always good for an outdoor adventure, thought it was a fishing, boating, and camping haven — and they were right. But why didn’t they settle there? At the time my father had sold everything we owned and replaced our worldly goods with camping equipment. We were virtually homeless!

The memories that well up in me are of a hot Army tent large enough to hold six Army cots and an old black trunk Mother used at Mississippi State College for Women with minimal clothing in it; of a charcoal grill on which my mother cooked everything from oatmeal to grilled chicken; the dubious “reading lamp” of a Coleman lantern; and the daily job of hauling water from somewhere in a park that also held a couple of public toilets. We bathed in one of the lakes and on a side trip to Austin, skinny dipped in the Brazos River along with TeeNap, our cocker spaniel that accompanied us everywhere. I was dubbed the “luxury-loving girl” because I didn’t have the proper respect for camping, but I only feared the experience would become permanent, and I loved school, a facility that didn’t seem to be open to us, in my father’s opinion. “Gypsies go to school in life,” he said.

Despite this experience, I feel inexplicable nostalgia every time I visit hill country. It was a place of cedar, oak, and mesquite, and in the nearby towns of Burnet, Llano, and Marble Falls, residences were built of beautiful native rock, a material that inspired my mother to use some kind of rock to embed in our memories… forever. When we returned to Franklinton, Louisiana and she became pregnant with #5, she hauled rock from a creek near the stucco house, in which we finally settled, during her sixth month of pregnancy and supervised the building of an outdoor table and benches made completely of rock similar to ones she had seen in Texas roadside parks.

I will never know why my parents didn’t settle in the Lake Buchanan area as it has mushroomed into an ideal place to live. I suppose that the area offered no employment for my father who was a certified civil engineer, and the Dam had already been built. He returned to Louisiana to sell Ford automobiles with my Grandfather Paul a couple of years before going back to the drafting board.

The great Diddy Wah Diddy trip that was the Great Buchanan Dam Camp-Out was recounted at every family gathering until my parents and four siblings passed into the campground on the other side.

HOW GREEN IS THE VALLEY

Rain falls on the 4th of July, threatening the flag raising, Arts and Crafts Fair, the cake contest, Cornhole Contest, the parade, and the Air Show, not to mention the fireworks blowout at Sewanee, Tennessee where I live part of the year. However, for Valley farmers near Cowan and Winchester, Tennessee, I give thanks for the recent heavy showers.

I’m glad I went down to Lapp’s in the Valley to garner my week’s supply of corn yesterday. This small market of plants and produce has been selling yields of the sweetest, most tender corn I’ve tasted in many a year, and the fields, amply watered by rain this year, are still a robust shade of green. In fact, the entire valley is a verdant carpet right now, and not all the ironweed and milkweed along roadsides have been sprayed or mowed down. However, recently we did have to search for Chicory plants to photograph for a book of poetry I’m writing.

Tennessee harvested 830,000 acres of corn last year, and if the Valley is any indicator of production, growth should exceed that harvest in 2017. I missed National Corn Cob Day June 11, but I appreciate the hoorah given this succulent vegetable. Coupled with barbecue ribs, corn on the cob is the quintessential food for 4th picnics, and I have six ears on the kitchen counter waiting for consumption.

The corn sold at Lapp’s is homegrown in fields behind his flower and produce market, and he should know how to cultivate this plant because he formerly lived in Amish country near Lawrenceburg, Tennessee where farming is part of the Amish lifestyle. Some of Lapp’s produce includes giant tomatoes that exceed the size of the usual store-bought mushy-fleshed tomatoes, and when cooked make delicious homemade tomato sauce for pasta.

Lately, I’ve enjoyed riding down The Mountain from Sewanee to The Valley — Cowan, Winchester, and Tullahoma — a drive that reminds me of coming out of the desert onto the curving road leading to Big Sur, California in the spring/summer. Sometimes I envision living in the Valley where I can look up at The Mountain, rather than living on the Cumberland Plateau and searching for places where I can peer over the bluff at the Valley below; however, I have no desire to live on the bluffs near Sewanee because I’ve heard that winds and storms in these areas are fierce.

Rumors are that property in the Valley is $100,000 cheaper than on The Mountain, but, alas, temps in the summer are often as much as eight degrees hotter. Yet, when I round the curve near Winchester and see the green fields (unfortunately, some of which are brown from herbicide enthusiasts) stretching out in the foothills of the Cumberlands, and the red barns gleaming on the landscape, I have a yen to drop down into a more pastoral setting … where I can buy fresh, sweet corn every day when it’s in season.

Happy 4th! Hope your picnic lunch includes a sweet ear of corn!

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan