Author: Becky

May Day!

Anime in January after dental surgery.

I don’t know how your May Day went, but part of ours was planned back in early January. In the first week of the new year, I thought Anime had a toothache and possibly a loose tooth, so her vet told us to bring her in. The poor girl ended up getting twenty teeth extracted because she had an infection in her bone! (Dogs have 42 teeth, so she lost almost half of them.) She had a tough time of it for a couple of days, but she’s so naturally happy that she bounced back with lots of affection and good meds. It took a while for all her sutures to dissolve, and she loved her modified diet so much that we’re still spoiling her by making it part of her daily meals.

ANYWAY, it was so sobering, that vet visit and the dental surgery, that Tom immediately called a vet where Pollock once got his teeth cleaned, and made appointments for Delta and Jack. The earliest they could get them in was today (four months later!), so off they went. Things went much better for them. When we picked them up this afternoon, they were quite stoned and the reproachful looks they gave us…. BUT neither of them needed any extractions. And while they were under, they also got their nails trimmed.

Not to leave out the others, while Jack and Delta were at the vet, Tom took Eva and Anime separately to Petco for nail trimmings, too. Here are a few pictures to show you the dogs’ May Day moods.


Delta says: My mouth hurts, something happened to my toenails, and I am high AF. Why do you treat me this way? Is it because I’m the middle child?


Jack says: I won’t forget your betrayal. My dew claws seem oddly shorter. My breath is not frightening people away. It was my superpower! I think I’m just gonna try to sleep the rest of this day off.


Anime says: The gentleman at Petco said I was a very good girl when he cut my toenails. Fooled him: I am ALWAYS a very good girl. I deserve a treat.


Eva says: It took two Petco people to handle me and my aversion to pedicures. No. You may not see my toes. I had JUST gotten my talons to dragon length, like the fierce creature I am, and now they are nothing but stubs. Maybe if you bought us all…

BALLS! Tom got us an entire rainbow of new balls!

And then all the dogs were able to eat, even the two with sore mouths, and so were Tom and I because I prepared a good meal to cap off this busy May Day of errand running and dog drama.

Hope you had a great first day of the month whatever you did.

Button Sunday

Heed the crow, friends.

Today is Great Poetry Reading Day, and you can learn more about it at that link. As for me, as soon as I realized this, I went right to the Houndstooth library and took out this book. I don’t know why I thought to check, because I rarely do this anymore, but I looked inside the front page and I had, indeed, written my name and the date I got the book, which in this case was 1997. I wonder what prompted me to purchase it that year, whether I had a hunger to read more poetry or I was in a bookstore, saw it, and decided, I need that!

I paged through the book randomly, reading poems, and came to a section with work by the American poet Robinson Jeffers, who I’ve always read with pleasure. Full disclosure: In 1995, I bought the book Safe As Houses by Alex Jeffers and wondered if he was related to Robinson Jeffers, but these were the days before I had the entire world of information at my fingertips. I reminded myself that just because two people share a last name… Lucky for me, one of my literary icons, Edmund White, had blurbed the novel on the back cover, and he shared that Alex is Robinson Jeffers’s grandson. Curiosity satisfied. Since I’m off-track already, I want to reiterate that it’s among the highlights of my writing and editing career that I queried Alex about submitting a story to Timothy and me for Best Gay Romance 2014, and I was delighted with his submission, “Shep: A Dog,” and really excited to include it in the anthology. If you have interest in reading an excerpt, I provided one at this old post.

Today, I relished Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Love the Wild Swan,” because I really hungered for more of the validation I got last week that yes, I am a writer, and no, I’m not on the wrong path, I’m on my own path, a path where I can and do love the wild swan.

I even crafted a bit today to showcase Jeffers’s poem in between periods of writing, all while listening to music. If you can’t read the words on the photo below, I’ll add the poem at the end of this post. The swan outline came from ColoringAll.com, and I bought that floral paper (to the right) the swan is on at the bookstore where I was an assistant manager in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I met so many good people there, one of whom, of course, was another of our assistant managers, Steve R.

I didn’t forget for a minute that today is Steve’s birthday, and as I do every year, I whipped up something chocolate in his honor (we’ll be adding a dollop of ice cream to those brownies). We love you always, Steve.

Love the Wild Swan

“I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.”
–This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast,
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your. . . self? At least
Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

Robinson Jeffers, 1935

Thank you, Taylor, for today’s creativity soundtrack. Your lyrics mean a lot to me and to some of my characters.

Fun fact: In An Aries Knows history, I launched Button Sundays on September 17, 2006.

Assorted Saturday thoughts

I had plans when I woke up today and they mostly included writing. I’ve been able to write in bits and pieces this week, but most days found me in a bit of a gray mood, including about writing. Then an old friend of mine who has a knack for getting in touch in the most timely (and usually amusing) of ways did so, and suddenly our conversation, as well as one it provoked me to continue with a cousin, turned things around and gave me the incentive I needed. (Also, it gave the friend and me reason to read an author I’ll discuss in a post next week sometime.)

I was looking forward to getting back to the saga because one of my favorite characters is in the chapter I’m writing now. She always makes me smile, and at this point in the timeline, I believe she’s four years old.

Regrettably, a terse email from a stranger that I read shortly after I woke up derailed my plans. I took care of her request, and then I decided I was overdue to make changes I’d long intended to make to this blog. No one will probably ever notice but me, but it took me eight hours to handle that project, and I wasn’t in any mood to stare at a monitor for the rest of my waking hours.

I did, however, color a wee fairy that I was able to download for free from this wonderful site, The Graphics Fairy, whose terms and conditions are more than fair, and I love her coloring pages. I colored this page in honor of my favorite fictional, magical four-year-old. My photo doesn’t do justice to all the sparkling fairy dust I added under the title or to the spots under her eyes that were on the original page.

Photo Friday, No. 906

Current Photo Friday theme: Mother


Dorothy Jean, March 2007

Her 81st was her last healthy birthday. Tom and I took her out for dinner (she chose Red Lobster), and she ordered a decadent chocolate dessert to celebrate. When the waiter, Bryce, couldn’t find a candle, he lit his Bic while we sang happy birthday so she’d have something to blow out when she made her wish. She was ready to make him an honorary grandson. Photos like this one keep me grateful for cameras.

Fun fact: I did my first Photo Friday post on An Aries Knows on July 14, 2006.

Just breathe (a letter to note April 25)

Lightness and darkness. Lightness and heaviness. Sometimes, I feel heaviness settle. I try to find ways to sit with it, consider it, and then let it go.

I sat outside and blew bubbles for you. Bubbles are nearly weightless. They float on air. They catch and reflect light. Their beauty is fragile and fleeting. Each bubble carries a bit of our breath with it, but the air and our bodies are quick to replenish our lungs. Inhale. Exhale.

When the heaviness and darkness come, I try to remember the lightness of you and our time together.


I tore out another reverse coloring page. I took circles from Kendra Norton’s book, and then I outlined them and as artist Andrea Nelson suggests, “rounded off the corners.”

The original from the book.
I added a few strips of “light” here and there and a label from one of the bottles. The “bubbles” in the drawing are all of us, imperfect and interconnected. We bump into and absorb one another.

I remember to breathe.

Mood: Monday

Happy Earth Day 2024! I have few details to provide about the creator of this art. I paid for and downloaded it digitally from the Etsy account Unlimited Extra, where it’s listed as Earth Day 2024: Everyday, Protect Environment, Save The Planet.

Every day should be Earth Day for sure. I hope you find a way to honor and provide stewardship of our beautiful planet today. I’ll shoot and add photos to this post later to show a little of Nature’s beauty at Houndstooth Hall.


Growth returning after I pruned these a few months back.

Scenes from Debby’s work around Fairy Cottage.

Some of Tim’s plants in the Hall’s front beds.

Tom always prunes the lantana after it freezes, and this one is already flourishing.

And in the other bed, this one always blooms later and is starting that now.

A peek at the tops of the mimosa and magnolia trees from the back yard.

Fun fact: I did my first Mood: Monday post on An Aries Knows on December 3, 2018. I used BluntCards until May of 2020, then used my own photos or photos from the Internet, including Wititudes, until March of 2022, when I began featuring art, until the last one on April 22, 2022.