I’m having a strange month.

The details don’t feel like my story to tell, but my stepmother is on the health roller-coaster, the one that goes slowly up and then much too quickly down, down, down. She’s been sick since we were in Belize and now she’s in intensive care again, or she was yesterday.

As a result, Gizmo is living with me. That’s been 90% pure pleasure. He’s a nitwit, but so sweet. The 10% is that as I have been falling more in love with him, Zelda has been getting a little more suspicious, a little more inclined to shove him out of the way and glare. He’s completely tolerant, he lets her be the boss, but I feel sad for her. Jealousy isn’t pleasant, even for dogs. I’ve been making sure she knows she’s first dog, but Gizmo does need to get brushed and loved, too, and she just has to put up with it.

Requisite cute dog photo:

One of the positives of having Gizmo is that he’s helped me stop missing Trill quite so much. Ironically, given how often she bit me, her loss has been the hardest pet loss I’ve ever experienced. My childhood dog would have been first, but when we lost him, I’d been gone from home for five years. I sobbed for hours, but he wasn’t a fixture in my day-to-day life, and two days later, it was a sadness, not an emptiness. Trill left an emptiness. A silence. It’s been almost a month and I still miss her every morning. (That’s an improvement, though, over the first week, where I cried every day and felt ridiculous almost every time. She was a bird. A grouchy bird! But she had such a big personality. Ugh, I probably have to go cry again.)

Moving on… worrying about C — and in relation, worrying about my dad, who seems older every time I see him, more tired every time I speak with him — plus all of last week’s horribleness, has got me hovering in a state of existential dread. I want to feel like the world has good things in it, positive outcomes, happiness. Instead, I’ve got that sense of generalized anxiety that grinds away in the back of my head, reminding me constantly that life is fragile, the world dangerous. I’m not enjoying it.

Anyway, I’m not going to go on and on about that, because I don’t particularly want to be reminded of it two or three years from now or whenever I re-read this post, but it’s all a long-winded explanation for this picture:

Seeing birds like this, views like this, when I’m just out walking the dogs, reminds me to be mindful of the magic around me. It’s a reminder I really need at the moment, so I’m going to be trying to post pictures of my morning walk for a while. Probably not a long while, because I’m not that organized, but expect to see some flowers and birds for the next few days.