unravled

When my uncle (my dad's brother) died rather prematurely, his wife (my aunt) took their 16 year old son (my cousin) and went to live on a South American vanilla farm for six months. They came back tanned and happy, full of stories, and with a million pictures. They rescued a baby monkey! Why does this make me happy today, you ask?

We happened to meet up with them at my grandparents house in the course of our exodus from California, and they gave us vanilla pods they brought back with them straight from the farm.

So yesterday I stopped by the (gigantic, awe-inspiring) Whole Foods just two blocks from my new job and picked up some eggs and fresh cream. Tonight I made the most amazing vanilla ice cream ever to exist.

It's the little things that make me happy.

My dad wrote today to tell me that my childhood dog died a few days after we left his house. She was such a good dog. When my dad bought a house out in the countryside of Northern California, my grandpa decided I needed a dog. We scoured the papers, found a promising ad, and drove a hour even farther out into the sticks to look at a liter of half Queensland Heeler, half Australian Shepard pups. I picked her out of a liter of eight, and knew right away that she was perfect. I named her Meggie on the car ride home, since I was sort of obsessed with The Thorn Birds (hey, I was 15) at the time, and she was an Australian Shepard, after all.

She instantly became my dog. She followed me everywhere, even jumping in the car and refusing to budge when I went to school, then chasing the car down the street when my dad finally pulled her out.

Eventually I moved out (my dad remarried a woman with two kids, so she always had someone to play with her) and moved on, and got a dog on my own. Meggie got hit by a car a few years later and broke her leg. She lived, but walked with a limp, and didn't get around as well after that. But every time I went home to visit she was the first to greet me at my car, every single time.