Light in the Dark

Rainbow Over Yampa River Queen Park (now West Lincoln Park) - Oct 2023

​Fish Creek roars past me, its teeming flow slapping into boulders and ricocheting streams of liquid straight into the sky. Evening light, mellow and golden, settles amongst the rippling round green of aspen leaves. Sunbeams play in the creek’s shadows, illuminating sections of choppy water and the occasional tree stump racing by in the current. 

The chirps, chortles, tweets, caws, trilling and melodic sing-song emanate from the treetops and all around me. Happy birds. My eyes take in the green above, below, all around, and the many different shapes and sizes of petals in full bloom. I understand the phrase “drink it in,” I’ve been drinking along this path every evening. I drink it in partly because after those long frozen white months the overwhelming of my senses with the riot of things alive and growing and flowing I’m making up for lost time. But there is another reason I drink - the what if? What if I could no longer see or hear this beauty? So I try, each time, to imprint all of it, all of this sensory gorgeousness, in my body and brain. Just in case. 

When sweet doggie Haven and I are on our sniff outings, I wonder about her world, the darkness and silence since she can no longer see or hear. Does she long for the chatter and song of birds? Does she miss lying in the backyard sunshine and hearing the sounds of children playing down the street? The sound of her name? Would she like to see the faces of her people again? See the grass in which she buries her nose? See the water move past as she stands at the creek’s edge?

When I close my eyes, momentarily taking away my vision, the smell of rich damp earth, the sweet scent of flowers, and the tang of long green grass fills my nose. The creek-created breeze on my skin is cool, the sun is gentle, soaking deeply into my bones. Can Haven smell and feel these things too?

Smell is the strongest sense dogs have - up to 100,000 times the olfactory talent of humans. Their vision is dichromatic, so they see gray, yellow, and violet-blue - perhaps losing vision for her isn’t as much of a loss as I imagine it to be. Perhaps that smelling superpower unlocks beautiful things in Haven’s brain - similar to visual stimuli for me.

I hold hope that the smelling and feeling, and even tasting, help to make up for what is missing. Sometimes she stands perfectly still, nose pointed directly in front of her, neck slightly forward, like she’s smelling something on the wind. She’ll take a lady-like taste of creek water or morning dew. She’ll put her princess paws in the creek (well, when we could get there before the spring runoff) and sniff the life floating by. I watch her body shift as a breeze ruffles her dark coat - it seems she is feeling with her furry skin. 

Sometimes she sits down in the sun, allowing the light to warm her body. She has a little smile and when I give her a kiss she bends her left ear affectionately and gives me one or three in return. In her own way, she is drinking it all in too.