Natalie Costanza-Chavez

Redstone Review

FORT COLLINS – Cold out, too early, and I wake, dull with the anticipation of routine: this morning, a gerbil on a wheel.

I raise myself vertical and move to the kitchen to make oatmeal, not because I’ve resolved on hot breakfasts, but because my border collie’s thyroid pill has to sit in his gut for half an hour before he can have food.

This is a newness for him, after 12 years of  watching me turn on light, pick up red bowl, open pantry, scoop food, and put bowl down in the shadows, far from any rising  sun-dots that flit along the floor seemingly just to  spook him, he now has to wait as I open a green glass jar that I’ve taken from a hook hung under the coffee-cup cupboard, turn to stroke his wide, white, head, slip my finger over his freckled pink gums, hook his bottom jaw down, and push a pill deep and quickly into his throat.  Then, so far as he can tell, I do nothing to move closer toward the truly important moment when I load his bowl with chow. He finds this perplexing, and resolves to control me in the way he knows best – with his eyes.

Thus, the oatmeal. If I don’t busy myself with something besides waiting for the coffee to finish dripping, his untiringly unflinching, unblinking, unwavering stare will bore a hole right to my spine. I shuffle, in my fleece slippers, to the stove, ducking my head to avoid his eye-lock, his truly superior powers of glare and hold. He needs to wait 20 more minutes.

Our other dog, adopted, and much less dignified by virtue of her breed name alone –  Chinese crested powder-puff –is simply leaping around like a flea on a slick surface – bouncing in confusion and anticipation of the commencement of her now oddly  delayed routine: feed me. She’s like a small wind-up circus doll – except she has no top hat.

I turn the mush to low-simmer, step around the lion-solid collie, still avoiding his gaze, move out to the driveway for the papers.

I want something whoop-worthy to happen. January: we wake, we eat, we work, we sleep.  I return to the house, wake my son who sputters at me with his sleep-fat lips. “Raptor center – physical day remember? – we leave in 20 minutes.” All I see is his chin as he does a half-turn away from me, burrowing under a flip of flannel sheets.

Thirty-three minutes later we’re in the car – oatmeal full. We drive to the raptor center down a street that seems stilled not by early morning, but by some sort of halt, or boredom. Ornaments sag on the trees, the snow is broken into frozen pieces, piled, dirty.

January, and  everything looks the same, only slightly less glistening than it did a month ago and yes, my attitude is near dismal; I’m bored, over holly-jollied, and fat with chocolate cherries bought in bulk. I miss shiny things. I want some zing-flint-spark. Instead, we wake, we eat, we sleep, and we wake – again.

We spend the next several hours caring for seven raptors that are permanently disabled and housed at the educational learning center – an outdoor, publicly accessible wooden cage compound. They need monthly vitamin injections, wing inspections, foot care, weighing. We clean and feed, check feathers and keels. One bird at a time until it’s all done.

Later I try to defrost my hands in warm water, check under my fingernails for prey-blood, fish in my bag for Triscuits and Amaretto cookies that I unwrap and pass around to other defrosting volunteers. All of us figure our hands are clean enough, and this alone, is extraordinary. Plus the great horned owl is healthy, the shivering vultures are tucked back on their heated perch, the Swainson’s hawk isn’t underweight. There is glory in normalcy as I defrost and think about slogging home, filling the washing machine with uncoverings, muddy gloves, damp socks.

I vow, tonight, not be such a twit, such a shiny-hungry varmint, only looking for glint around the bend. I vow all sorts of things – abstract and poetic –  as I bend my neck side to side, tighten and loosen my sore pectorals, draw circles in the air with first one shoulder, than the other,  working out the muscle hitch and tight of the glorious day.

Natalie Costanza-Chavez is an award-winning journalist and freelance writer living in Ft. Collins with her family. She writes a column called Grace Notes.  She can be reached at grace-notes@comcast. net or at her website www.gracenotescolumn.org.

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