No Mouse in This House

Hubs borrowed our computer mouse for work so I'll be writing to you live on the iPad (and therefore sadly without pics because I think there's an app for that) until the mouse returns to his rightful nook soon.

In addition to there not being a mouse in this house, we are also dog less. Which, for me, is the equivalent to being only half alive.

Sadie is fine, she is on loan to Pop so they can start up a workout regimen together. She has been loving all the exercise lately and this week is jammed packed with stuff and appointments for us so I won't be able to get her out as often, if at all. Pop offered to take her hiking, strolling for squirrels, sniffing for chipmunks, and perhaps chasing some deer and it was all I could do to keep my husband from packing himself along with her dog bowl too.

Let me tell you how strange our house is without a Sadie in it. It is eerily silent. I can hear the refrigerator thrummimg and the walls of our house drawing in just to resituate themselves from time to time. Inanimate things making sound is something completely drowned out when your house is filled with the organic buzz of life. I have forgotten what it is to hear the kind of quiet that comes from absence. Things that should be sounding off are not. Nails clicking over the kitchen tiles, the slide of metal rings as Sadie shoulders the shower curtain aside to climb in to the tub, the low vocals we hear as she pushes her arthritic elbows down to the floor. Her presence is so large that she fills our house with a soundtrack I have come to rely on.

Missing Sadie has reminded me how to cherish the rest of our soundtrack I'm sure has been taken for granted because everyday things often are. Today I will listen when I hear all my living cohorts. Instead of wanting to shove my ears with Kleenex when the kids begin to amp up their kidness, I will remind myself that it's lyrically richer than the refrigerator dropping ice. Toy car wheels banging into the stove will always bring more melody than breathing roof tiles. Abby's deafening soliloquies about bathing her baby girls will always be more in tune than than the nothing jumping through my eardrums until my teeth ache for the sounds that were once the only thing I knew.