I’ve been reading to Lori.

Lori is my husband, Peter’s, older sister. She has cancer and has been battling it for a while now. She uses oxygen to help out and catching this virus would be terrible for her, so Peter and I are extra careful, in large part because I’d like to keep reading to Lori.

I’ve been writing a novel. It’s the first time I’ve written fiction, so I honestly don’t have any idea what I’m doing. It’s the sort of thing a person learns how to do by doing -- and so I’ve been doing it, pretty much alone, since the end of January. Except that, sometime in there, I started reading it to Lori.

Peter has been cooking. Peter is an excellent cook. I strongly recommend, if you are a writer and it’s not too late, you marry someone who cooks because sometimes I get so wrapped up in my imaginary little world, I forget about cooking meals and, when I come downstairs, Peter always has a pot of something on the stove. He’s good about things like that and, since about the first of the year, Peter has been bringing food to Lori.

Unlike me, Lori has a good excuse not to be cooking. She’s not always hungry and her diet is restricted and sometimes, she just doesn’t have the energy to think about making food. Peter brings over food and when he does, I read.

As this virus has stretched on, these days of reading have become more important to me and, I suspect, to all of us. Sometimes I dress up a little. It feels good to put on a sundress for a change. We sit outside on opposite sides of her deck. Lori’s husband, Robert, puts Peter’s food in the fridge, and we find out how Lori’s been feeling and what treatments she’s been on most recently.

“Shelley called,” Lori will say. And she’ll tell us about phone calls she’s had from family.

Then the conversation sort of winds down because, let’s face it, none of us are doing much these days. That’s when I’ll read a chapter or two.

Sometimes the neighbor mows the lawn and I have to speak up. Sometimes we get some competition from ravens squawking in the trees. Occasionally, a little rain comes in. Lori and Robert sit under the patio umbrella and Peter and I sit under the overhang of the house. We let the rain pass and I keep reading.

Lori laughs out loud -- which makes me happy. She laughs at both the funny and the gruesome parts. When I am finished, she and Robert ask questions and Robert (who is not generally a fiction reader) asks some excellent ones.

We leave before it gets too late. I have a hike to take. Lori gets tired. Robert needs to heat up whatever Peter has brought for dinner. And when I get home, I always feel better than when I left.

I’ve come to think of the little gatherings on Lori’s deck as a sort of distillation of everything we need as humans. We need nutritious food and we need to sit together and we need to share stories. And we need to laugh. We need to laugh a lot more than we have recently.

Over the next few days, I write a little more and Peter keeps on cooking, and we keep in touch with Lori by sending a text or two.

Then Peter will ask, “When would you like to read to Lori?”

“Anytime,” I say. “Any day that works for her.”

Till next time,

Carrie

Carrie Classon’s memoir is called, “Blue Yarn.” Learn more at CarrieClasson.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

It seems I have acquired a reputation.

I have been handing out dog treats for three months. Every day, I take the same trail and every day, I meet many of the same customers. Dogs have an amazing memory when it comes to getting a treat -- particularly from a stranger.

One dog is not allowed treats. “No treats!” his owner says.

Before I knew her better, I suggested, “Maybe he’d like a treat?”

“Wouldn’t we all?!” she said. That lady sounded like she could really use a treat.

But she is the only one. There is an English family that walks their Bernese mountain dog, appropriately named Bernie, most days. Bernie always gets a treat. He does not even stop to greet me. He does a drive-by, taking the treat from my hand, then hurrying on to his important dog appointments.

There are two runner dogs, Fergus and Luna, who I see twice a day because their owner runs roughly the same route I walk in the opposite direction. I decided two treats every day was a bit much, so I only give them a treat on the second leg. Then, one day, they took a different route home. When I saw Fergus the next day it was pretty obvious he knew he’d been cheated out of a treat the day before.

Usually, the last dogs I see are two border collies, Ray and Cruiser. But yesterday, there was a big change. There were no longer two border collies -- there were three. And the third was a puppy.

“A puppy!” I more or less squealed.

The border collies’ owner, Ruthanne, was out with them.

“She’s not ours!” Ruthanne told me. The puppy, another border collie, was their daughter’s. The daughter was training to be a physical therapist and had a six-week rotation where her accommodations would not permit dogs.

So, the puppy, whose name was Scout, was staying with Ruthanne. Scout was only nine weeks old, which means she was nothing more than a black and white puffball of cuteness. Scout had been through a lot in the last 24 hours. She was scared of the new surroundings, scared of the new dogs, scared of the new people. At the moment, she was scared of me, offering her half a treat.

I waited.

“Come on, Scout,” Ruthanne coaxed. Scout got close to my hand and then scampered away. We spent more than five minutes this way, while Ruthanne held Ray and Cruiser and I sat on my haunches with the treat extended.

Finally, Scout took the treat. She looked surprised.

“Now, that was worth it, wasn’t it, Scout?”

I don’t see the border collies every day, so I thought it would be a lot to hope for to see them again today. But when I came through the woods, there were Ray and Cruiser. They ran up to me and sat looking at me, with that intensity peculiar to border collies.

Then Scout saw me. She came running, on her little fluffy legs. She scrambled through the woods until she got to the two dogs, sitting at attention. She stood on her tiny back legs and squeezed herself between the two dogs, who did not budge until she was wedged in the middle. I’m not sure when I have ever seen anything so adorable.

“Scout! You have to sit!” Ruthanne told her.

I gave a treat to Ray, I gave a treat to Scout, I gave a treat to Cruiser.

“Well, she’s only nine weeks old,” I reminded Ruthanne. “The rules don’t kick in until she’s 10 weeks old.”

Somehow, I’m pretty sure Scout will have it down before then.

Till next time,

Carrie

Carrie Classon’s memoir is called, “Blue Yarn.” Learn more at CarrieClasson.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

I was headed out for my daily hike. There was thunder in the distance.

“It’s getting lighter,” my husband, Peter, said. “I don’t think we’re going to get any rain.”

The air smelled like a storm to me, but what do I know? If my dog, Milo, were still alive, I would have asked him. Milo would huddle in the corner of the kitchen when a thunderstorm approached.

“There’s no storm on the radar,” Peter would tell him. Milo didn’t care what the radar said. We called him “Doppler Dog,” because if Milo was in the corner, bad weather was never far behind. But Milo is no longer with us and I was headed out on a hike.

“Do you think I need a hat?” I asked. If the sun came out, I’d want a hat.

“I don’t think you’ll need it,” Peter assured me.

It might be worth noting that both Peter and I grew up on the plains of the Midwest where you can see a storm coming from miles away and the weather is predicted accurately to within the quarter of an hour. We live in the mountains now and things are different.

I left the house without a hat and it started to rain before I’d even made it to the trail. That might have been a good time to turn around. I didn’t.

I go on my hike almost every day. I hike in the snow and the drizzle and the cold.

“There is no bad weather,” a naturalist in Alaska once told me, “only inappropriate clothing choices.” I like that.

So, when it started to rain, I wished I had my hat. But the weather was warm and, as Peter pointed out, it was getting lighter up ahead. Unfortunately, that’s not where the weather was coming from.

By the time I got to the trail, the rain was steady but it wasn’t cold. I started walking faster.

It was just as the trail goes into a ravine that the sky opened up. A sheet of rain fell and, in moments, I was as wet as it was possible to get. I was now going at a brisk trot.

It couldn’t have been more than five minutes later that the sky crackled with lightning. I have never had thunder crash so close overhead in my life. My hair would have stood on end if it hadn’t been plastered to my head. The lightning and thunder were simultaneous, so I figured I had walked smack-dab into the middle of a summer storm.

The rain was now coming down in buckets and the entire trail had become a swiftly flowing stream. I needed my hiking poles to hop along the newly formed riverbank -- jumping from one rock to another, my boots filled with water, my eyes stinging from the rain -- and all I could think was, “Oh my gosh, it’s good to be alive!”

By the time I was headed home, the rain started to slow. It came to a stop about a half-mile from home. I noticed the puddles getting smaller until the ground was nearly dry.

Peter was surprised when I got home. “You sure hiked fast today!” He had no idea what had been happening just a couple of miles away. At our house, it had hardly rained.

I got in a hot bath and, as I washed the mud off my legs, I knew I would never have gone on that hike if I’d known how bad it would get.

And I was so glad I hadn’t missed it.

Till next time,

Carrie

Carrie Classon’s memoir is called, “Blue Yarn.” Learn more at CarrieClasson.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION