Puppies

Earlier this year, keen followers of TSS might remember, the ‘children’ came home for a glorious week at the shack before C departed for NZ and A returned to NSW. What went under reported about this time was the absolute dog chaos of taking two corgis, a golden retriever, two retired work dogs, and our daughter’s Old English Sheepdog along with us. The chaos could have been the normal chaos of six dogs, except for the fact that Bess, (A’s dog) had arrived in Tasmania on heat. Our three boy dogs, collectively, lost their minds.

Best Dog Bess

A has always wanted Bess (gentle Bess) to have a litter of puppies with our handsome (well I think he is handsome, J disagrees) Geoffrey. Bess’s mother was a Smithfield and her father an Old English Sheepdog. Bess looks like the Dulux dog while Geoffrey is your classic Smithfield, shaggy, loyal and with a huge bark that makes sheep move fast. All going to plan the puppies would be 3/4 Smithfield, 1/4 Old English, the slight risk being they could have a splash of Golden Retriever or Corgi (but A was a very careful supervisor, despite Errol jumping through the mosquito screened window in an attempt to make Golden Retriever babies - see I am telling the truth about the chaos).

Geoffrey giving a bit of side eye

Which brings us to now, three months later. On Friday night, while I was away doing writing things, A arrived home with a very pregnant Bess. On Saturday, J and A made a whelping box out of an old potato bin and then on Sunday, just as the light pinked the hills and dappled the river, Bess had her puppies.

When I got home on Sunday afternoon the puppies were only hours old - tiny, mewling, helpless - FIVE beautiful black and white puppies. Their ears were plastered to their heads and their eyes sealed tight, but even in their almost embryonic state they were resolutely alive. I crouched by the whelping box, astonished again at instinct. Bess, her hormones surging, settled into her mothering. And just as the puppies’ instinct is to seek the scent of her milk, so hers is to stay still, to lick and lick her puppies, push them to her hot swollen teats in the nest she’d made, feeding, feeding, keeping them dry and warm.

Five fat puppies

*

The weekend had been unseasonably warm. I’d stayed with my friend in her beautiful house on the Derwent River, far upstream from Hobart. Each morning, before the busyness of the day, we’d lower ourselves into the icy press and swim out into the current. I felt my blood retreat, felt the cold nip at my lungs and I’d wait for acceptance, the expansion into the river, and (I know I’m mixing my metaphors) also a dissolving of sorts. All the tensions, the myriad of small conversations that made up a busy few days, slipped away. We rose, dripping, new creatures.

My friend, who has always lived by the river, tells me it changes during the winter, becomes a different beast, fiercer, stronger, less forgiving. She’ll stop swimming soon, the mornings will be too dark and the river turns unkind, wild even. But this weekend it has given me the gift of absolution and I drive the three hours home with its softness on my skin and in my hair.

*

On Sunday night the weather turned and the wind arrived from the southwest with all the threat of winter. Rain spat against the glass. I pulled the blankets up and hoped the puppies were warm enough out on the verandah. I remembered all the nights it was me getting up to check on litters of puppies, me getting up to babies crying in the night, the pull of instinct making it impossible to sleep deeply. But here on the river we’re in a gentler time. My daughter will check the puppies. I roll over and go back to sleep.

When I creep out in the first light of the morning, into the brace of cold air, there they are, shiny and fat, their little noses pink with oxygen, their tiny bellies full of milk. Their mother, her thick shaggy coat as warm as a feather doona, curled herself around them and they slept, oblivious to the world beyond.

A few things:

Continuing my obsession with silence and Celia Paul, here is Katy Hessel writing about sitting for her. While in New Norfolk over the weekend, I was able to have a heavenly 15 minute browse in The Black Swan Bookshop. I picked up Sylvain Tesson’s Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga. I started last night and cannot wait to get into bed to continue tonight. The blurb says things like “An unapologetic heir to Henry Thoreau’s Walden…’ An alternately rapt and sardonic diary of solitude fortified by vodka and books’…anyway, it’s what it says on the cover.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner writing the story she never wanted to write.

On the home front, Cath Kevin reviews Jess Hill’s Quarterly essay Losing It: Can We Stop Violence Against Women and Children. This is a topic I don’t want to read about, but this is a brilliant review and like so much of Cath’s work, she opens up the conversation and gives her readers a way into hard subjects.

For some light relief, Our Ads is back with brilliant interviews with Irish popstar CMAT, her voice! And then a lovely rambly conversation with Richard Ayoade, whose attitude to writing I wish I could inject into my veins.

Happy Easter Break Sitters, may you all enjoy a quiet moment.