Love Me, Love My Dog!

I can say this in French but I can't spell it in French and it needs to be in French. Five Little words, preferably in a thick French accent, that mean I can't be divided up into segments. I am the whole person, not so much the sum of my experiences, but the total of how I reacted to these.

We have all seen bright summer days and on any given one I may have reacted differently, from thought of going fishing to planting my tomatoes, to just lazy around under an old oak tree.

We are far more complex than a set of chemical reactions,

we are not Pavlov's dogs, the very same experience can solicit totally different reactions. Maybe a part of this is in preparedness. I often kick myself that I didn't discover the art world until I was fifty years old. Perhaps I just wasn't ready for it?

I don't like to get dirty but to see me you might think that I do. I always begin my day with a great bath in my six foot

cast iron bathtub and always start with clean clothes. By 10 am they are dirty, that just seems to be the way it is. When I get a mind to doing something I never stop and think if I do this I will get dirty. I would be the first one to change your flat tire,

never thinking I should change my clothes first or wear gloves or I'll be there in an hour. I would do it right now. I remember we once raised chickens on this little third acre I call home.

At 2 am a raccoon had chased a chicken into the little pool and it was near death from drowning.

It is winter and the pool is full of algae, dirty and black. I didn't give it a thought. I jumped in this mess and saved my chicken. No changing clothes. No, can I find a net? Just jumped in.

Cancer is a great way to prioritize your life, to separate the important from the trivial and a lot more gets put into the trivial pile. They are both my piles, I am the sum of all of the parts and then greater yet. It is all complex math and doesn't work by subtraction.