Thursday March 18, 2021 The smallest things

The day gets swallowed by small detail. We stood and watched the fishing holes, as the two women fished. One standing over her hole in the ice holding her broken fishing pole with an imitation reel carved by her husband that she you used to wind the fishing line around. Baited with meat, she jigged it up and down. She talked in a calm soothing voice to her dog friend who has come down for years to hang out and investigate the holes. A nice sized Grayling tugged on her line as we talked and she yanked it through the hole. The dog, too, remained patient and calm even when she sensed a ghost.

The other woman, who is feisty and doesn’t know how to slow her metabolism, which is making her remain thin, tells us about a woman coming home from the bar, who flipped her snow machine over onto herself. No one knew about it until morning. A couple in their house heard something but didn’t check and the woman was found dead.

A dog knows when the dead woman is close. Someone saw her beckoning them to join her.

After spending a night in the haunted house in St. Louis MO, I can attest to the fact that people see ghosts. I literally saw them seeing ghosts.

The skinny woman was telling the story of doing house keeping for Davis-Bacon wages, $40.00 per hour. Maybe she was making the high wages because she saw a ghost there. The dog alerted her. I must confess I love stories about dogs hearing and seeing ghosts.

Mukluk used to growl and back up when we ran in the dark. He’d see something. It usually looked like a garbage can to me. But how can we assume we know more than a dog? Their sense of smell acuity is between 10,000 to 100,000 times greater than humans. How do they even manage it? The dogs here have their own Morse code. It travels all night alerting. The two women know the woman in Grayling who gave us Mukluk. Small world.

We learned a lot in two hours out on the ice with one elder and a near elder. The elder gave me her DOB as 4/1/1959. She said she wasn’t sure of her age, so she was telling everyone she was 65. Sometimes we are so uptight about those numbers. Where does that get us?