In The Puppy Pile
High clouds race across the crescent moon. A chattering flock of revelers from the recently christened “La La Land” descend on the Hemlock house, to investigate the newlyweds’ newly established home with its inviting spring green and deep warm blue interior. The eclectic furnishings, art and memorabilia reflect a fresh twining of identities, tastes, and dreams, but the community supporting it is well established, deep rooted and strong, bound by something more intoxicating than the booze brought for the impromptu baptism.
Called by the soft spring night, guests slowly drift outside, cluster on steps and the blanket island in the lawn. Tobacco and clove smoke wafts and weaves its way thru the sometimes raucous congregants, riding fumes of applejack, whiskey, beer and wine, the spirits that elevate spirits at the end of the work week. (As do cupcakes offered to passersby by the Grand Dame of Polka Dots and Pearls.)
The celebrants exude an irresistible force manifest in the ease with which they unfurl an arm to beckon you into a loving embrace, the retelling of shared stories, the way they fall trustingly into each others arms and laps, giggling and wriggling like puppies in a pile to accommodate one more soul during amoebic reconfigurations for beverages, smokes, or a sudden tickling frenzy.
Conversations splinter, mutate. Limbs unconsciously entwine for more intimate sharing, tales of journeys, wounds and gifts, offerings of comfort and wordless exchanges of humanity. Tears mark upwellings of profoundly tender emotion in one corner of blanket world, while brows furrow with philosophical musings in another, and seismic outbursts of laughter ripple joy in every direction under the night sky.
The puppy pile is a place of uncommon comfort with our divine animal nature, the instinctual seeking and sharing of warmth--physical and emotional--conveyed directly, viscerally, mammal to mammal, one lightly furred hide to another, an innocent and unapologetic fraternal burrowing deeper into the sacred heart of things that sustain earthbound souls. This, my daughter reverently points out, is “pack.”
How is it that something so essentially human is so rare? Why do we allow the pure, playful, inquisitive spirit of youth, the contact high of oxytocin, that hormonal elixir vital to animal and human bonding alike, to be usurped by hard backed chairs and isolating barcoloungers? Furniture presumes to elevate, separate us from the very earth of which we are made, cooly conspires to keep us upright, affectionless, apart from one another. Straitlaced socialites preach propriety and homophobes with the devil firmly fixed between their own eyes demonize the very touch that would bring divinity dancing into their cold, contracted hearts... but there are things more potent than decorum and ambiguous righteousness.
After 23 years of motherhood I am nearly undone by the tenderness of my grown daughters, playing with MY hair, petting MY head, snuggling a shoulder, curling into the crook of my neck . Madame Polka Dot turns and begins tickling me, making me yip and squeal like all the other young pups in the pile of moonbeams, magic and lost prayers answered, prayers that one day I would know how it feels to be utterly at ease in my own skin, safe, unconditionally loved.
Called by the soft spring night, guests slowly drift outside, cluster on steps and the blanket island in the lawn. Tobacco and clove smoke wafts and weaves its way thru the sometimes raucous congregants, riding fumes of applejack, whiskey, beer and wine, the spirits that elevate spirits at the end of the work week. (As do cupcakes offered to passersby by the Grand Dame of Polka Dots and Pearls.)
The celebrants exude an irresistible force manifest in the ease with which they unfurl an arm to beckon you into a loving embrace, the retelling of shared stories, the way they fall trustingly into each others arms and laps, giggling and wriggling like puppies in a pile to accommodate one more soul during amoebic reconfigurations for beverages, smokes, or a sudden tickling frenzy.
Conversations splinter, mutate. Limbs unconsciously entwine for more intimate sharing, tales of journeys, wounds and gifts, offerings of comfort and wordless exchanges of humanity. Tears mark upwellings of profoundly tender emotion in one corner of blanket world, while brows furrow with philosophical musings in another, and seismic outbursts of laughter ripple joy in every direction under the night sky.
The puppy pile is a place of uncommon comfort with our divine animal nature, the instinctual seeking and sharing of warmth--physical and emotional--conveyed directly, viscerally, mammal to mammal, one lightly furred hide to another, an innocent and unapologetic fraternal burrowing deeper into the sacred heart of things that sustain earthbound souls. This, my daughter reverently points out, is “pack.”
How is it that something so essentially human is so rare? Why do we allow the pure, playful, inquisitive spirit of youth, the contact high of oxytocin, that hormonal elixir vital to animal and human bonding alike, to be usurped by hard backed chairs and isolating barcoloungers? Furniture presumes to elevate, separate us from the very earth of which we are made, cooly conspires to keep us upright, affectionless, apart from one another. Straitlaced socialites preach propriety and homophobes with the devil firmly fixed between their own eyes demonize the very touch that would bring divinity dancing into their cold, contracted hearts... but there are things more potent than decorum and ambiguous righteousness.
After 23 years of motherhood I am nearly undone by the tenderness of my grown daughters, playing with MY hair, petting MY head, snuggling a shoulder, curling into the crook of my neck . Madame Polka Dot turns and begins tickling me, making me yip and squeal like all the other young pups in the pile of moonbeams, magic and lost prayers answered, prayers that one day I would know how it feels to be utterly at ease in my own skin, safe, unconditionally loved.