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I often wondered what he would look like when he grew up.

This is our newest dog Lacy. She belonged to my wife's best friend who passed recently. We had fostered her a couple times when Sandy was in the hospital and nursing home for a while. Haven't gotten any real good pics, she seems camera shy. Sweet little thing.

There's deer back there Dad.

Chihuahua or chihuahua mix?She's lucky to have an adoptive family

312. PRETENDER Angela threw her head back, looking up at the rafters, shadowy suggestions of straight lines in the arched ceiling of the big round barn. Her Daddy had her hand in his, and he had his arm around under her backside, and they whirled and spun with the other dancers: Linn swung his little girl, spun his little girl, held his little girl to him as best they could: while everyone else danced the regulation square dance, Old Pale Eyes grinned and danced and Angela scattered happy little-girl giggles all over the sawdust floor. Linn carried Angela over to where Esther was seated, regal and composed, having set out this one: they'd danced every set so far this night, and they begged their husbands' indulgence for a breather. Angela, on the other hand, wanted to dance. Her big strong Daddy obliged her. Angela laughed through the set, but when they were returned to the ladies, Angela frowned and considered and then planted her little pink knuckles on her waist and declared, "Daddy, I want to dance for real! That was pretend dance!" -- and so saying, she scampered off behind some folks, around a table, and was gone. Linn raised his eyebrows, looked at Esther, who gave him her very best Innocent Expression, at least until something feminine and spinning and all blue gown and smile whirled in like a Texas twister and landed neatly on Old Pale Eyes' lap. "Hello, Papa!" Sarah laughed, her cheeks pink, her hairline damp: she'd been in demand all night, and like any young lady her age, she was warmed up and ready to dance all night -- unless, that is, she could get into some happy mischief, and her Papa's lap looked like the right place to do just that. "Well hello yourself," Linn grinned, a sudden, quick, not-often-seen expression: "how many engagement rings and men's hearts have you collected so far tonight?" Sarah laughed, looking at Esther and at her Mama, both of whom gave her a cautioning, knowing look: they too had been young and beautiful once, instead of older and still beautiful, but both knew what it was to toy with men's feelings and come to pain and sorrow. "Why, Papa, you wound me!" Sarah batted her eyes innocently. "Only if I turn you over my knee." "Catch me first!" Sarah kissed Linn quickly on the cheek, rose -- she did not thrust her dancing-slippers against the earth to rise, it was more as if she floated up off the man's lap -- she laughed, spun, and was gone. Linn blinked and looked at his wife and said in a wondering voice, "What just happened?" "It's still happening, my dear," Esther murmured gently, nodding toward the middle of the dance floor: the sets were forming, and in one of them, Angela was towing a red-headed boy in his Sunday best, if you allow as he'd taken off his coat because the arms were too short and he was hot and coats were dumb anyway. Linn blinked, watched as the couples began to dance the Texas Star, and damned if his little girl and the fire chief's red headed little boy didn't dance right well with them. It was a little awkward when they made the star and picked up the ladies -- Angela was much further off the floor than her grown partner -- but her little-girl laughter was contagious, and more children paired off, and shortly there was a set made entirely of the young. "Now that's proper," Linn murmured, nodding his approval. "You know, my dear," Esther said gently, "I shall have to prevail upon Sean for his good graces." "How's that, darlin'?" Linn asked, puzzled. It was Esther's turn to bat her eyes innocently, to place gloved fingertips delicately to her bosom as she declared, "I shall have to prevail upon that great, red-headed Irish fire chief, to obtain for me a genuine Stick of Shillelagh, that we may keep the swains and suitors suitably distant from our lovely child!" Linn laughed again: Esther smiled, for it was good to see her husband's walls down: he needed this dance, he needed tonight, he needed to laugh. He needed his ladies, she reflected, and he needed them all ... the maidens, and the matrons alike. Levi took Bonnie's hand, looked at Linn: the pale eyed Sheriff with the iron grey mustache took his bride's hand as well, and they rose, and entered the dance floor.

311. I DO NOT PARADE Will looked thoughtfully at his twin sister. "How you holdin' up, Sis?" he asked. Willamina reached over, took her brother's hand, squeezed. They were in the back seat of Willamina's Jeep. Linn drove; Shelly and the girls followed his his Jeep. Willamina wore her black suit dress; Will wore his black suit as well. Willamina held a small box, unadorned, sealed: on top, under a strip of clear tape, a twist of fine hair, a curl clipped from a little girl's head many years before. "You're good at compartmenting your feelings." "I'm good at it." "Too good," Will cautioned. "It wouldn't hurt for you to let some of 'em out, Willa." Willamina turned her head and glared at her twin brother: Linn glanced in the mirror, caught the look. That, he thought, means trouble: he was glad he was driving, and not sitting with the pair, for Willamina's pale eyed glare could have frozen a mountain lake. "I," Willamina said, "do not parade my grief for the entertainment of the public." Linn heard his uncle Will sigh patiently. "That's not what you mean and you know it." Willamina looked straight ahead and made no reply. Linn knew where the grave was dug and ready; he knew his Mama had his older sister's body cremated; he had questions, but he had patience enough not to ask until the right time. He eased down on the throttle, just enough to make the grade, came through the big cast iron cemetery arch and then straight ahead, until he came to the family section. The small grave was opened; the funeral director stood discreetly aside, beside Reverend Burnett, who Willamina had asked to preside: the graveside service was brief, Willamina knelt on a folded rug beside the grave and laid a gloved hand on the featureless box with a little girl's curl of hair taped to its lid: she rose, her face expressionless, turned with her twin brother at the concluding words, paused before she got back in the Jeep. Will waited as Willamina's head bowed for a moment, her eyes closed, then she placed a hand on his shoulder and said quietly, "No parent should ever have to bury their child." Marnie watched, solemn and silent, as all this transpired: she looked around, and went over to a small gravestone, a stone shaped like a lamb. She tilted her head a little, looked past the lamb, smiled: a big white doggy was sitting there, looking at her with slanted yellow eyes, then the pretty white doggy yawned and laid down, licked its nose, looked to the side, and disappeared. Marnie's eyes widened as it turned into a twist of fog that seemed to sink into the ground. She turned and walked industriously back to her Daddy, who was standing with his Mama. Willamina looked down at her granddaughter, who looked solemnly back up at her. Willamina squatted down, held out her hands: Marnie stepped forward, took her Gammaw's hands. Willamina smiled, just a little. "You don't look like your Mama," Willamina said softly. "You look very much like your own unique self." Marnie giggled a little, then blinked and said "Gammaw, why doesit the white doggie disappear?" Willamina's eyes widened a little and she leaned a little closer. "The white doggie with yellow eyes?" Marnie nodded. "That is a very special doggie," Willamina whispered, "and only very special people see it." She touched Marnie's nose, delicately, carefully, bringing another giggle from the pretty little girl with pale eyes, and Willamina looked up at Linn and smiled. "She's ours, all right!" she declared happily, then reached for her brother's hand. "Here, help a decrepit old lady up." "What's de-cwep-pit?" Marnie asked. "It means she can't get up as easily as she used to." "Oh." Marnie frowned. "I'm sowwy." "Marnie," Willamina said, "we have a tradition in our family." Marnie looked up at her pretty Gammaw, blinked. "We have a banana split after a funeral." "Yaaay!" Mandy cheered quietly, bouncing on her toes and clapping her pink little hands, then she stopped and frowned. "Gammaw," she said, "what issit a banna spit?" Willamina laughed, looked at Shelly, looked at Linn. "You've neglected her education," she teased. "Saddle up, troops, I'm buying!" Linn held his counsel as his Mama and her twin brother talked quietly in the back seat. He drove Will home; Willamina declined his offer to come in, as did Linn: Will smiled and nodded, and said he understood, and he looked very directly at Linn and said, "Take it from a man who knows what it is to bury his son. Cherish your children, and spoil your wife." "Your advice is sound, and I shall take it," Linn said without hesitation. Willamina turned to Will, her hands on his shoulders. "Thank you," she murmured. "That ... was difficult." "I know." "You would know better than anyone." "She ... when she left, she might as well have spit venom." "She did. I was there." "I'm surprised she came back." "I'm not." Willamina raised an eyebrow. "She didn't give a good damn about herself anymore, Willa, but she loved that little girl." Willamina took a long breath. "You're right." Linn saw a slight smile to his Mama's face. "So do we." "I know." "Good night, Will." "Good night, Willa." Willamina looked at her son, waiting patiently, eyes half lidded. "You drive," she said. "I want to gawk."

Ready for a lobster dinner

And for the Buckaroo's:

A dog's prayer. Dear God: Are there dogs on other planets or are we alone? I have been howling at the moon and stars for a long time, but all I ever hear back is the beagle across the street! .

I love it. Our cat often camps out on the biggest dog pillow which means one of the dogs has to sack out on the floor. We try to convince the dogs that the cat is just a deformed dog, but I think they're suspicious.

313. ONCE HIDDEN, TWICE FOUND Angela Keller's cheeks were red, her hair was a single thick braid down the middle of her back: she wore a black divided skirt, a canary-yellow blouse and a scarlet-and-black short vest, with a flat-crowned, black Mexican hat with silver conchos around the band and a silver slide on her storm strap: her Daddy taught her how to polish her boots to a high shine, and they were: her spurs were silver, and gleaming, worn for show and not for use: a quirt hung from her right wrist, also for show. Angela was but one month younger when she took the quirt and deliberately slashed herself with it, searing a burning welt of startling agony across her own back, because she wanted to know what a horse felt when it was quirted. She'd also considered the bloodied rowels on the spurs of a truly bad man, a man who raked his horse without any mercy at all until he ran it to death: Angela did not know much about the man, save only that he was trying to escape her pale eyed brother, and didn't, and Angela watched with a grim satisfaction as her brother took the man by the throat, there at the last, after a long and desperate fight, after Jacob seized his opponent in a crushing grip and drove his boot knife up and into the man's belly, thrusting half a dozen times, until the bad man finally went limp and still and turned dark the way a dead man will. Angela was not the least bit distressed to see this happen. He'd hurt his horse and she had no liking at all for him. Today, though, Angela rode with the knowledge that she had to do something. She honestly had no idea quite what that might be, and so she puzzled as she rode: finally, she turned down an alley, then turned again behind the bank, and crossed the little field and jumped the stream -- more like her horse hobby-horse stretched across it, not a true jump -- and they climbed the side of Cemetery Hill and came out at the back side of the field of stone. Angela rode through the stones, frowning, until she saw the familiar double stone she'd stared at as a child. It bore her Daddy's name and her Mama's name, though it held only their birth dates, but this did not claim her attention. A huge white wolf did. Angela rode to within twenty feet of the wolf. The wolf looked at her, yawned: unconcerned, it blinked, drowsy-looking in the sun, and Angela leaned back a little to bring her mare to a halt. She dismounted, tilted her head a little as she looked at the wolf. The wolf was in front of a small stone beside the big double stone ... a smaller stone with a lamb on it. Angela knew she had a brother buried there. She'd seen the White Wolf before, on the day they buried little Joseph: she'd been much younger, much more impulsive: she'd happily cried "Doggie!" and started to run toward the big fuzzy doggie when she tripped and fell, and her dead brother's coffin caught the buckshot swarm intended for her Mama -- a swarm that flew low and left of its intended victim. Angela screamed when she fell, partly because she fell, partly because she was stung by stone spalls and maybe lead spatter: she heard the fast hammer of gunfire, and her Daddy told her later that a very bad man tried to kill her Mama, but they killed him, and his soul was going to boil in a kettle of buffalo fat over a bed of burning sulfur, and Angela approved of this because that bad man tried to hurted her Mommy. Angela looked at the White Wolf, remembering. "Hello, pretty thing," she whispered. "You saved my life here. What can you tell me today?" The White Wolf laid a paw on the stone lamb, her dead brother's tombstone: the wolf looked at her with old eyes, with very wise eyes, and then became a twist of fog, corkscrewing into the ground. Angela walked up to the carven lamb, looking around, then she hunkered down, balancing on the balls of her feet, laid her hand on the lamb, studied it. She considered the carving -- across its base, parallel with the ground, it said Joseph Keller Infant son Beneath the date, a single word, centered on the marble: Stillborn. "Mama," Angela asked, "what is stillborn?" Esther froze, and Angela felt something shoot through her Mama -- she felt things like that sometimes, she felt the wave of pain when her Daddy hit his thumb driving a nail, she felt the shattering blast of an impact when her pale eyed big brother Jacob fell off a rearing horsie and landed flat on his back, knocking the wind out of himself. Now, looking at her matronly, dignified Mama, she felt something else, something that scared her. Esther's hands went to her belly, an unconscious reaction, and Angela's hands went to her own belly, and for the same reason. She felt her Mama's emptiness, her Mama's loss, and suddenly she realized what the word meant. Angela turned and ran. Angela ran blindly, she ran fearfully, she ran as hard as she could, she slid between fence rails and across the pasture and across another field, she climbed a hill, she scrambled back into the graveyard, exhausted, out of breath: she collapsed, breathing hard, head hanging, on her hands and knees, and then she raised her head and her lips peeled back to reveal even, white teeth, and the Sheriff's pretty young daughter snarled like an animal and she came up into a launching sprint and ran again, ran for all she was worth, until she saw the big double stone and the lamb beside it. Angela stopped in front of her brother's stone and looked at that terrible word, that awful word, that word that caused her Mama such a soul-deep ache, and Angela ran her hand through a slit in her divided skirt and seized the handle of her boot knife: she brought it out, she went to her knees, she dug fiercely at the dirt, until she had enough loosened to pile up and hide that hated word. Angela pounded the dirt down into the words, she piled the dirt up on the edge of the stone, she packed it as hard as she could with her hands and the butt of the knife and then she wiped the blade in the grass and slid it back into her boot sheath, and she sat down suddenly and held up her dirt-stained hands, staring at them. She was shaking. Hard. Linn was beginning to regret his fine idea. His Mama's Paso was a gentle horse, a horse with absolutely the softest gait, but she was a horse and horses love to run. Linn was only just teaching Marnie how to ride, and he was teaching her to ride without a bit, using her weight and her hands to guide the horse: Marnie circled the corral easily, her head tilted a little to the side, as if hearing something he couldn't, and when he opened the corral-gate and said they would ride together in the meadow, Marnie's smile was quick and dazzling -- the way he remembered his own Mama's smile, when she was very pleased with something, or about to do something she perhaps shouldn't -- and he felt like he'd just touched match to too-short a fuse on a cannon cracker. Marnie stood up in her shortened stirrups, leaned over her mare's neck with her hands flat on either side of the silky mane and yelled "GO, HORSIE!" and Willamina's mare -- trained for the pale-eyed Sheriff herself -- appeared to cock her launch mechanism, set her hind hooves into the earth, and then fire through the gate like a ball from a field-gun. What Linn said in that moment does not bear repeating in polite company. Suffice it to say that, by the time he was in the saddle and beginning his pursuit, Marnie was most of the way across the meadow, all hooves and mane and twisting tail, her hair braided down the middle of her back and her hat bouncing along behind, held by its storm strap and absolutely nothing else. Marnie swung her mare gently to the left and the mare picked up speed, started the little down grade, thrust her nose straight out and her tail twisted straight back, held nearly level in her slip stream, and Jacob's heart launched from its cradle where it had fallen to boot top level and lodged up into his throat. Marnie had never jumped a horse. Marnie had ridden a horse less than fifteen minutes total. Marnie was heading for the chest high fence at an absolute wide open gallop. Jacob's stallion pinned his ears back and grunted and swung in pursuit. Too late. Marnie's scream shivered across the meadow as the golden Paso launched into low Earth orbit, lifting easily from the sod and sailing with no difficulty at all over the board fence, landing on the other side as she'd done many times before, but this was easier because her rider was much lighter weight than the mare was used to jumping with, and so she bore down all the harder, and Linn yelled "GET 'EM GET 'EM GET 'EM!" and his stallion drove hard against the earth and he too sailed over the boards, the stallion's off hind horseshoe barely scarring the white painted top rail as they passed over: the stallion's eyes were locked on the mare's backside as surely as gunnery radar, and the stallion, a herd animal, was not going to let this part of his herd escape him! Marnie's eyes were wide, her mouth open a little, her heart hammering with absolute delight: she and her Gammaw's mare rode up hill, struck a road, swung to the right. This was familiar territory for the mare: she slowed a little, slowed more, came into the back side of the cemetery at a brisk trot: she paced between the ancient stones, and Marnie laughed with delight as the mare stopped at a big double stone with a little stone beside it. Marnie tilted her head curiously, frowning as she did: the stone was shaped like a lambie. "Whoa, horsie," Marnie said, and sat up straight, and the mare obediently stopped. Marnie kicked her boots free, swung a leg, fell to the ground, landed flat-footed: she straightened, walked over to the lamb, frowned. She laid a hand on the smooth, polished marble, picked up a stick, started scraping at its base. Linn caught up with her as she finished digging dirt out of the letters: he saw her staring at them, frowning at them, her lips moving as she sounded them out like she'd been taught, looked at her Daddy, then back at the lambie. "Daddy," she said, "what's stillborn?" That evening, after Linn reported back to his Mama, after he and his little girl rode some more together, after Willamina showed Marnie how to groom down a horsie, how to check its hoofies and its shoezies, after they grained the horsies and hung up saddle blankets and saddles, Marnie said "Gammaw, what's stillborn?" It was the first time Marnie felt someone else's grief, someone else's loss: Willamina's hands went involuntarily to her middle, and she sat down, hard. Willamina smelled blood and cordite and hot oil and she felt the life leave her body, and for a moment she was in combat again, in a Humvee that just hit an IED. Marnie doubled over, her hands to her belly, and as she collapsed to her knees, she realized with absolutely no doubt at all, exactly what the word meant.