Beltane                                                             New (Summer) Moon

Continued the deconstruction of the dog feeding stalls. Jon’s design was elegant and well executed. He put love into it for those dogs. That was in the time of the Irish Wolfhounds Morgana, Tira, Tully and for a brief while Scot (who died too young of hemangiosarcoma). It was also while the whippets Iris and Buck were still alive. (I think, my memory of the exact co-residence of our dogs is a bit fuzzy.)

As I removed the bones of the stalls and the doors into them, I stood inside the wooden structures, each about two and a half feet wide. It was then that memories began to surf my mood. The wood inside these crates has darkened, oil and sand and soil rubbed off on them while an eager animal ate their breakfast or their supper. There were, too, tooth marks on some of them, probably a dog frustrated with waiting for food or to be released back into the yard.

Their big furry heads would stick out of the sliding feeding doors, looking up with that quizzical where’s my food look that dogs have perfected through long years of living with humans. Those days the panting of the Wolfhounds filled the air with a sweet odor and the sound of them eating gladdened my heart. That time is long past, but the boards in the stalls look like stalls in barns, places where animals have been, pressing up against them and leaving the permanent record of their existence.