Candles in the Wind

I should probably buy stock in Yankeee Candle company. So many beguiling scents to choose among! Will it be Storm Watch, or Sage and Citrus, or Beach Walk or...?? The choices seem endless, and each one evokes memories of things experienced or of places that exist only in my mind which are no less "real"... a meadow I'd love to walk in (if I weren't allergic to bees!), a full moonrise in early October cutting & burning brush with the neighbors... simply put, places I've been and wish I could be again.

Lately, though, I've lit far too many candles. You see, I'm a dog lover and a dogmom who's getting close to the point of being able to say that I've loved and lost more dogs than I can remember in my over 60 years. (Yeah, the memory starts failing just a little at my age, and the roll call takes a bit more effort to recite.) Over the last decade-and-a-half, thanks to the wonders of technology, I've come to know many others like myself, along with their dogs. I've vicariously shared the joys of puppyhood, the exhilaration of seeing a dog succeed in the show ring or in field exercises and agility events, or just in watching them grow into cherished family pets with personalities and quirks as unique as their owners'. After years of sharing stories, you come to feel almost as though each dog is (or could be) one of your own.

And then the end comes. Too often, it's cancer, or sometimes it's a sudden and unpreventable accident. Sometimes it's simply time taking its toll. Yet each of these losses is somehow a tiny bit mine, despite the fact that I've never met the dog or its family. I grieve the losses almost as if they were my own.

But how do you begin to express sympathy with words in an e-mail? They've all been written so often that whatever you write seems scripted, and echoes of empathy bounce off the corridors of cyberspace. Simply put... words fail.

And so, I light a candle... for Cruiser, for Edgar, and for so many others taken too soon from the ones who love them. I try to find peace in offering up a tiny spark to light the heavens as these wonderful souls find their way to the Place where they will Wait, watching over those they loved and waiting to be reunited, young and free, forever.

I only wish I didn't have to visit Yankee Candle quite so often....