This unique vase belonged to my paternal grandmother, who was my age, 47, when she died suddenly from a heart attack in the wee hours of the morning. Unable to sleep, she'd gotten up to do some crocheting, and Grandpa found her in an armchair when he got up in the morning.

I have a number of dainty crocheted doilies she made, and her china cabinet (behind the vase you can see it) and dropleaf wooden table and four chairs, and what's left of a set of dishes she won in a curling bonspiel, and I have the heavy tapestry bag she used to keep her needles in, and apparently I look just like her. In pictures of her, I don't see this. But those who knew her do.

I love that! That we look like those who have gone before us. It only makes sense, but ... we think we are so unique, so individual ... and we are ... but physically we are carbon copies of our ancestors.

***

I have been trying for two days to sneak out without the dog so I can ogle the Canada geese goslings at the creek without fearing for their lives when the dog goes swimming after them. I escaped her for a while last night when we were out walking and she went running after a gopher far enough that I could sneak off in another direction. Usually she tracks me down by sniffing out my footprints but this time she didn't and I was rewarded by the sight of a pair of blue-winged teals that didn't fly off when I came near, and a muskrat that plopped itself off a log in the water and paddled slowly away.

I have binoculars and my bird-identification book in a shoulder bag in the porch, ready to grab and take along if the dog isn't out there waiting for me when I step onto the deck—as quietly as possible so as not to tip her off if I am so lucky that she is in the other yard.

It's tempting to tie her up so I can go alone but that would break her little doggie heart.

Yesterday I startled a mother duck off her eggs at the north end of the raspberry patch in our garden, which is as yet unworked and unsown due to the neverending rain. Now I must make sure not to go there with the dog.