More catching up
A lot has taken place over the past 11 years. I had the most beautiful dog, Mona, who was like a roommate, sister, mother, daughter and friend all rolled into one. She was rescued from a breeder in Georgia and brought up to New York State by a pet adoption agency called Hubbard's Hounds. I got her on New Year's Day, 2011. She experienced very robust good health throughout most of her life but finally declined and succumbed to gallstone-related illnesses in June 2021. We think she was around 13-15 years old when she died. We buried her at my brother-in-law's orchard, beside a little pond on the acreage.
Some rather folkloric things happened at her burial and shortly afterward at the burial site. I brought her to the site, where I placed her in the grass and sewed her into a little linen burial shroud. My sister's puppy had known Mona and he was there. He sniffed at her before I sewed her shroud, and seemed very distressed. My sister led him away while I finished placing all of the things into her grave - her name and some poetry on a piece of paper, plus a little white lace butterfly. All of these things I'd brought with me in my backpack, but even after I emptied everything onto the grass, I couldn't find the white lace butterfly I'd brought. I remember thinking to myself, maybe Mona wants me to have that. We finished the burial. My brother-in-law placed a large flat stone over her grave so it wouldn't be disturbed.
Then two things happened:
On our way back to the car, a little "cabbage white" (Pieris rapae) butterfly flew up to my sister's puppy and kept trying to land on his nose. It was very persistent and wouldn't stop circling him. He started jumping up and playing around with it, and it stayed with him all the way back to the car. My sister & I both immediately imagined it was Mona trying to comfort him.
Then, I opened the rear passenger door to get back into the car, and saw the white lace butterfly I'd brought (which had been in the bottom of my zipped backpack & which I couldn't find at the graveside) neatly positioned and aligned on the center rear console, as if it had been placed there carefully. This actually freaked me out quite a bit, because I can't think of any way it could have fallen out of the bag at all, and landed precisely there, as if placed.
About two weeks later, we returned to the site for a visit & saw two more odd things. Not only did we see a beautiful large garter snake slithering away from Mona's grave when we approached, but a fish was also lying on the ground near her stone. The snake being on the grave was mildly remarkable, but it makes sense (there are always snakes in orchards), but how likely is it that a dead fish would be lying there? Both snakes and fish are symbols of regeneration in folklore. My sister's husband thought maybe a bird had caught the fish from the pond and then dropped it. This is true, but again, a very strange thing to see on a grave.
To conclude, I've since given some of Mona's toys to my sister's puppy. Whenever he plays with them, he does so gently (unlike the way he mangles everything else!), and always ends by looking upward in the air above the toy, and resting his head on the toy in a contented way.
So there's a bit of true folklore for solstice, as we turn back into the light of yet another year. The loss of a deeply loved person or pet is disorienting, and it seems our senses are dulled in some ways, and heightened in others, when we're in mourning. I do believe the ones we love never leave us, though we can't detect them with our usual senses. Perhaps dogs can detect them, and other natural things rush in, in the wake of a loved one's passing.