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Peach the survivor
Friday, March 13 2026
I went out into the forest to work on the east side of the Chamomile Wall twice today, though the second time I brought the big chainsaw and the firewood backpack so I could gather some wood on the steep slope west of the Stick Trail just north of its Chamomile crossing. I found a piece of standing whiteash there big enough to supply two backpack loads of wood, though it getting it down the slope was a little tricky due to the slope; two of the pieces I hoped would come to a rest on the terrace of the Stick Trail bounced over the edge and had to be recovered from the gorge below, which provided additionally opportunities to look for nice rocks for the Chamomile Wall, which I'd then take a break to work on.
Meanwhile Gretchen was in the kitchen making food and blasting Joni Mitchell's back catalog, which features some truly impressive songs full of unexpected chords and harmonies.
Remember that couple who'd lost both their dogs at the beginning of the big January 25th snowstorm, whom Gretchen befriended at the bookstore, and brought food as they grieved? One of their dogs, Peach, returned over a week later, but the other dog Yoshi vanished without a trace. Tonight Peach's human parents, Ashley and Andrew, came over for dinner. They looked to be in their 40s, and Peach is a black dog with a white hand who looks a lot like Charlotte, but with a longer snout and less of a pitbull appearance. Neville and Charlotte were delighted when Peach got out of the car, though our dogs, especially Charlotte, were perhaps a little too smothery at first. But once we got inside, things gradually settled down, though not after lots of running around and playing between Charlotte and Peach. Peach also briefly met Lester the Cat as he was escaping into the house through our pet door, and Ashley was pretty sure that was Peach's first experience with a cat.
While Peach and Charlotte were running all over the house, Ashley was a little nervous about what Peach might be getting into, and this inevitably led everyone into my laboratory, which kind of blew Ashley & Andrew's collective minds. It looked, Ashley said, like something she'd seen in a movie. They both seemed to find it both amazing and even inspiring.
For dinner, we all made individual pizzas using topping Gretchen had prepared with dough she'd bought from Mother Earth's Store House ("Mother Fucking Earth"), which turned out to be not as good as the dough from Adam's Fairacre Farms. Among the topics discussed over dinner was the man scammers, many who seemed to be based in Nigeria, who tried to get Andrew to send them money because they'd purportedly seen his dog. Such people apparently troll lost pet messaging systems and then try to scam bereaved people who have lost their companion animals. They even resort to photoshopping pets into novel scenes or doing similar things with artificial intelligence. I'm familiar with romance and finance scams, but apparently there is a scam for everything.
Later in the living room, Andrew said something kind of woo-woo about how when we lose a pet, that pet "sends" us another one. Gretchen, who is one of the least spiritual people in the world, said, "I'm not a spiritual person, but I can see how that would be a conforting idea." It was clear from what Ashley had said about ayurveda medicine and the like that she is a spiritual person, and she circled back to that later, saying she thought Gretchen is a spiritual person, because how else would she be so enamored of animals? She then went on to definite spirituality as "love," which didn't seem to make anything clearer. Gretchen supposed that maybe she is spiritual in that sense, and that it was a matter of how one defines words. But nevertheless, Gretchen would never, for example, believe in the statement, "everything happens for a reason." I chimed in to say that I would find it more distressing to live in a world that is supposedly ruled by benign forces when it is filled with such suffering for the undeserving and glory for the evil. It's much more comforting to believe that there is no good or evil, only chaos.
Peach and the still-missing Yoshi, from the poster made in hopes of finding them again.
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