Reflections on the Tenth Week of Spring – Walks Through My Heart

A Mary Ann Oil Painting

    Mary Ann, as refreshing as her still life paintings, led a life that was anything but still.

    In the late 1990s, when Spence and I weekended at Wells Wood, she moved into the century and a half old farm house a third of a mile away and she walked along the township’s dirt roads. She walked and walked

• enjoying nature,
• finding neighbors for chats,
• exercising her dogs, and
• getting exercise looking for her dogs.

    The last is how we met.

    On a ninety degree day in August, a black dog stood in the middle of the garden when Spence and I arrived around noon. With head cocked, the dog looked us over.

    I jokingly called, “Hey, Ralph,” and the gigantic dog bounded toward me. Doubting the wisdom of calling the mutt with a head the size of a wolf’s, I gulped and Ralph placed his front paws on my feet. His entire hind end wagged while I took in his bulk―part husky, part German shepherd, and part mystery.

    He dashed back and forth between Spence and me to collect pats, shake paws, and sit on our feet. Then he rolled onto his back with four paws up begging for tummy rubs.

    While I grabbed his collar and squinted at the metal tag, Ralph nuzzled against my legs. No doubt he came from a loving home. Before I deciphered the tag’s faint print, Ralph dashed to Spence. After five minutes of Ralph’s shuttling, Spence and I stood side by side so I could concentrate on the tag while Spence rubbed Ralph’s ears.

    It reported that Dr. Hopkins, a Meadville vet, gave the dog a rabies shot. No name. No address.

    Again and again, Ralph trotted through the woods to Deer Creek. We’d convince ourselves he’d headed home, but he came back.

    Around four o’clock, Ralph sat by the porch door of the old red cabin Spence’s parents had built. Inside, on cots without black snakes underneath―I checked, Spence napped and I read Pride and Prejudice.

    From a slow moving car, a woman’s voice called “Arby.”

    We jumped off the cots and hustled to the road.

    Empty. And wagging Ralph sat at our feet.

    Half an hour later, Spence raked hay, and I waded in Deer Creek with Ralph.

    From neighbor Hutch’s woods, a woman and child called, “Arby! Arby!”

    Ralph’s ears shot up then he dashed toward the voices.

    “I see him!” the youngster squealed.

    Good. Ralph found his family.

    Sunshine glinted off burbling water.

    After splashing out of the creek, I moseyed up the path to the cabin where Spence stood with Ralph.

“I thought he found his family.” I rubbed Ralph’s ears.

    Spence shrugged his shoulders, picked up his rake, and headed back to the field.

    While he raked, I packed gear for the drive to Cleveland.

    The woman and child called again. “Arby! Arby!”

    Patting the big dog’s rump, I said, “Come on, big fellow,” and jogged up the driveway.

    Ralph followed.

    We met Spence at the top of the drive.

    From around the bend came wiry Mary Ann carrying her dimpled cheeked grandson Jacob piggyback. Silver hair fell in wisps around her worry etched face, and she slumped as if being flattened into road kill by Jacob’s swinging legs. Beside them strode Mary Ann’s lanky, autistic son Dan. All three cried “Arby!”

    Tail whacking his broad hips, Arby circled his family.

    “Gosh, Arby,” Mary Ann said as she rumpled the fur around his neck. “Where’ve you been?”

    “He’s been here most of the afternoon,” I said. “We’d hear you call. He’d disappear. We’d think he’d gone home, then he’d turn up again.”

    Mary Ann laughed. “He’s got an independent spirit. He’s been hunting for baby raccoons.”

Spence, Arby, and Mary Ann

    Countless times during the next year, Mary Ann and I coaxed Arby into the back seat of her car in the Wells Wood driveway or shoved him through her kitchen door so he wouldn’t follow me away from the old farm house. And we built a friendship that flourished through decades, the building of our log house, and three more dogs―Isabella, Muffy, and Jed.

Mary Ann and Jed

    The Friday after Mother’s Day 2014, Mary Ann and Jed walked over for a chat. I grabbed a pair of scissors and, while Jed circled the perimeter of the log house, ambled with Mary Ann to the towering lilac bush blanketed in flower clusters. I cut lilacs and handed them to Mary Ann. Though the fragrance permeated the air, she buried her nose in the flowers and inhaled deeply. “You’re as sweet as these flowers.”

    “Mother’s Day brings lilacs and trillium,” I said while she hugged me. “I hunt in the woods for trillium this time of year.”

    Three days later, Mary Ann walked to the log house.

    I let her in and gasped.

    She clutched a dozen trillium in her hands.

    Because I wanted trilliums to keep growing wild, I never picked them. But bunched together, the flowers looked awesome.

    She grinned. “I climbed down a bank halfway to pick these because I knew you liked them.”

    “Oh, Mary Ann!” I reached into the cupboard for a vase and filled it with water. “They’re lovely.”

    She stuck the flowers into the vase. “I almost fell, but I wanted you to know that I love you.”

    Hugging Mary Ann, I said, “You’re so kind. Thanks.”

    “I can’t stay,” she said reaching for the door knob. “I’m on my way to clear branches off Hutch’s yard.”

    This winter on the afternoon of February 7, Mary Ann’s eighty-fourth birthday, Dan opened Mary Ann’s door and shouted to his mom, “Janet Wells is here to see you.”

    I juggled a ripped paper grocery bag leaking a few of its three dozen potatoes. When Mary Ann got up to greet me, I sang, “Happy Birthday,”and handed her the lumpy mess. “I bet no one ever gave your potatoes for your birthday before.”

   She cradled the bag and chuckled. “No. No one ever gave me potatoes for my birthday.”

    We walked to the kitchen where she rested the green cast enclosing her forearm (broken when she ran across her icy yard to hop in a friend’s car for a grocery shopping trip) on the table while we talked for an hour and a half.

    Four days later, without a driver’s license and so blind she couldn’t recognize a person’s face from two feet away, Mary Ann lost her reasoning, drove her car into a ditch along Route 173, and landed in a Pittsburgh nursing home where she died May 8, 2018.

    In a dimly lit viewing room of Dickson Family Funeral Home, Spence and I murmured condolences to Dan and signed the guest book. Staying closed to Spence, I searched for Mary Ann’s coffin or urn. Not there.

    Instead, her oil paintings, posters of family photographs, and pots of flowers formed an arc at the end of the room.

    Son Jonathan rehashed Mary Ann’s gradual decompensation.

    Daughter Rebecca recalled dire phone calls telling her “Your mother stuck a knife in her cast trying to get it off.”

    And daughter Katrina talked about wheeling Mary Ann outside the nursing home for fresh air and having to restrain her from dashing to freedom.

    I soaked in Mary Ann’s still life paintings and mentally escaped to the time she and Muffy took a winter woods walk.

    Mary Ann trudged.

    Muffy bounded.

    Over the crest of a hill, they met a doe stuck in a foot of snow.

    Barking, Muffy charged the doe.

    “Stop, Muffy!” Mary Ann bent and brushed the snow away from the doe’s front legs. “Can’t you see she’s in trouble?”

    Muffy cocked her head then licked the doe’s nose.

    Mary Ann tamped a section of snow in front of the doe, reached into her pocket for cracked corn, and sprinkled it on the ground.

    Would anyone else carry corn in case she met a critter in trouble?

    Mary Ann, a friend as refreshing as her still life paintings, walks through my heart and mind―still.

Mary Ann's Trilliums