Of Pyr and paws

Note from Doug:  This first appeared in Pickledish.com, the quilt-business blog that we host at The Kansas City Star.  It’s reproduced here with some minor adjustments. For you returning readers, some of this about Nellie will be familiar to you. But "bear" with me.

There’s a barn quilt affixed to the rear end of my house.

Like a cattle brand, or a bumper sticker, or that tattoo you know about but rarely share, this one’s on the backside, for those behind you to see.

How it got there is a tale worth telling.  It involves a 100-pound puppy, for starters.

If you don’t know barn quilts, they’re the giant, usually plywood, quilt-block squares that dot the apexes of barns.  You’ll find them scattered along this nation’s back roads, from Pennsylvania to California.  We don’t have many in Kansas City Star Quilts’ two native states, Missouri and Kansas, though Iowa to our north seems to have one for every man, woman, child and cow. Perhaps they’d be willing to share.

I latched on to the subject of barn quilts during some road trips through Illinois and Michigan. In fact, I took some pictures for a book we published, “From the Bedroom to the Barnyard.”  (The title is less suggestive than it seems, which is a shame.)

So I’m proud that I built my own.  But how it got there starts with Nellie, our 1-year-old pup.

Nel is a Great Pyrenees.  That’s a dog breed that hails from the Pyrenees Mountains in Spain and France.  Bred as a guard dog, a Great Pyrenees – or “Pyr,” as they’re called – is the favorite of shepherds for its ability to protect the flock. (Pyr sounds like "peer.")

Nellie, on guard.

When we lost our Golden Retriever about a year ago, we knew we’d get a new pup. And eventually we found our way to the kind folks at the Milk & Honey Farm, a Pyr breeder west of Minneapolis.  How and why we chose a Pyr to follow our Golden is a very long, separate story.

Now, we weren’t quite ready for the sheer size of Nellie.  Check out the photo below … that’s Nel at just six weeks old.  I’m holding her as best I can.  Pyrs can grow to be huge – 130 pounds or more.  Nel’s now at 100 and counting.

Nor were we prepared for the long trip home when we finally took possession.  (Here’s the story on my personal blog, slobber and all.)

Six weeks and it seemed 60 pounds.

Nellie quickly made herself comfortable in our back yard.   I can go through the litany of digging and destruction she’s caused – enough 3-foot holes in the ground, for example, to accommodate Paul Bunyan’s personal Putt-Putt course.

In fact, the backyard is her domain.  Soon after we got her, she managed to collect the following in the middle of the yard: various sticks, limbs and logs, which you’d expect; two pieces of siding from the house; two Diet Coke cans, crunched to an inch long; a couple of putrid potatoes from the mulch pile; two heavy stones that we’d brought home from Michigan; three pieces of charcoal, Kingsford's finest; two big Nerf balls reduced to golf-ball size; two clay pots; one large brick; a landscape light ripped from the ground with assorted wiring; and half of a giant sea shell.

Oh, and my barbecue brush.

She has other weird qualities. For example, she has the loosest lips and jowls that I’ve ever seen … er, heard.  When she shakes her head awake, her jowls sound like two punching bags made of Flubber, whacking each other senseless.

It was her penchant for digging, though, that inspired the barn quilt.

Standing where the barn quilt is now, there used to be a very large flower box with a trellis that I’d built.  Nellie, in search of cool places to sleep this spring, decided to dig out the dirt in the box and plant herself there.

Nel's comfy flower box.

Sure, it was comfy.  But bringing her in at night was like opening the door to a herd of dust bunnies.

We tried to work with her. (And no, let’s not debate dog discipline here. We acknowledge we were pushovers then.) We figured that because there were no flowers in this box’s future – she’d just dig them up – I’d clean out the dirt and install cushions in its place. Then she’d settle back in, per usual, with no dirt and dust.  

But Nellie missed the cool Mother Earth. The cushions must have felt like a sun-baked Barco Lounger.

So with the planter now empty and useless, I decided to yank it from the wall and haul it to the trash.

What to put in its place?

“A barn quilt!” I announced.  “It’d look perfect, between the two windows.”

Use Frog Tape!

And so I started. I bought a 4 x 4-square-foot piece of quarter-inch plywood, some primer and paint. (Most barn quilts for barns are much bigger – 8 x 8 at least.) The remaining steps were pretty easy:

• I selected a quilt-block design.  I decided to play it safe with a pieced block vs. appliqué
• I grabbed a tape measure to plot dimensions and a long straight edge to draw the pattern
• Before plotting the block, I primed both sides of the plywood twice, then gave it two coats of base color.  I chose yellow for that.
• I drew the pattern.
• I filled in the colors – again, two coats.  (Be sure to use Frog Tape to ensure sharp, clean lines between colors. Amazing stuff.)

I think I need a new saw horse.

 And I was done!  I then used simple wood screws to fasten it to our shake-shingle wall.  And I covered the screw heads with paint to avoid rust and make them pretty much disappear.

So now it hangs, proclaiming my affinity for quilts. I’m sure the neighbors behind don't quite know what to make of it.  Unless you’re a quilter, you might think it some kind of modern public art.

But as you and I know, all quilt blocks have personalities – have names.  And I picked this one carefully.

Kansas Troubles

You see, I was going to put up that famous quilt block from these parts, “Kansas Troubles.”  And full disclosure here:  I tend to vote Democrat, so naturally as a Kansan I’m a bit troubled about where our Kansas Republican governor is taking this state’s fiscal situation.

But my neighbor behind is a staunch Republican, and I didn’t think it nice to broadcast my politics into his kitchen as he sipped coffee each morning. Not neighborly.

So I decided on “Bear Paw” instead.  It’s a long-time favorite of quilters.  But more to the point, that barn quilt is anchored on the wall because of Nellie.  And if you examine that photo of her as a pup, you know those paws are like a bear’s.

In fact, I just measured them – each is about 9 inches round and still growing. If she didn’t hate water so much, I’d call them canoe paddles.

I’m proud of our Bear Paw.  And I’d encourage all to scout your house or outbuilding and see where you might fasten something similar.  They don’t have to be huge.  Context is everything.

Oh, and like quilts themselves, you can pack ‘em up and take them with you should you happen to move on. 

Kind of like the blessing of that tattoo … it’ll follow you everywhere. 

No coincidences

SUTTON’S BAY, Mich. – On Tuesday, we headed North … again to Michigan.

It’s a natural path for us now; instinct takes over.  We point the car, and roughly two days later, without much thought, we’ve arrived.

The Boardman River

We found a place to stay near Sutton’s Bay, which is just north of Traverse City on M-22.  It’s on the west side of Traverse Bay.  Much like my visit earlier this year to Pine Knot on the west side of Lake Superior, we haven’t been privy to sunsets. 

But that’s okay.  My sister Mary Ann in Green Bay reported that there was still color in the trees at her latitude. And it was true.  Upon arrival, the reds and yellows were their own brilliant sunset, gradually dimming ahead of winter’s sleep.

But even we were surprised at the depths of the reds and yellows, the way they shouted from the hills.  Not a sleepy goodnight, but a barn dance of celebration … a final, loud salute to the goodness of the harvest.

The fun part was that we stopped to see the Slacks on the way up.  We’re all still remembering the antics around the Bellingham wedding.  We reminisced about that, though not too much.  Day-to-day events quickly overtake all of us, and so we mainly shared the latest in our lives.

The latest for me has been both unpleasant and telling.  I won’t share much.  Just know that the vagaries of business sometimes require managers to do things against their very nature – to accept the reality that a bigger cause requires painful and difficult decisions.

I remember when I was in junior high school, and Mom, Dad, Barb and I sat down to dinner in the kitchen.  Looking back now, it was during the recession of 1969 – mild compared to what we’ve all been through lately, but it had a significant effect then.  Housing starts were in descent. Dad’s business – making thermostats for homes, among other things – was upended.  Demand was down, but profits were still required.  The solution?  Cut expenses.  Cut personnel.

I remember then Dad easing into his chair, tense, and Mom asking him what was wrong. And Dad physically shuddering a bit, his hands shaking – I’d never seen him do that – then saying he would have to “let go” of someone the next day … someone who had worked with him for years. That she didn’t deserve this, he said, but corporate had its targets, and targets had to be made or the whole enterprise could be in jeopardy.

I don’t remember when in 1969 this occurred.  Spring?  Fall?  It was a season, though, full of "letting go."

I do know that Dad would count on Michigan to put some emotional distance between these kinds of struggles and his hope for a life better.

And so we find ourselves here.  The timing is a coincidence, I tell myself.  Then again, I believe such coincidences happen for a reason … and so they are not coincidences at all.  We needed this time away, especially now. 

Cindy, me, on Traverse Bay.

We came to explore.  It’s never too early to think about “what’s next,” especially as you approach retirement. Planning is paramount these days.  It takes years to put together an adequate strategy for that kind of “what’s next.”

It’s too soon, of course, to declare that Michigan is what’s next. And we hardly envision us as traditional retirees.  But I think we’ve made a decision that Michigan will be our last stop in our travels.  And not because we’ll be ready to sit on our duffs and admire the reds and yellows and other incredible sights. 

No, instead, it’s because Michigan has always represented for us youth and energy and freshness and a renewed sense of purpose.  I’ve been coming to Michigan for just those reasons since I was 7. It's where dreams are made.

Since 1974, that renewal had occurred at a small red cottage my mother had dubbed Wind Song on Glen Lake.  As readers of this blog know, I and my siblings sold the cottage for a variety of reasons to the National Park Service.  The service in turn knocked down the cottage and let Nature take hold.

Where the cottage once stood.

We visited the cottage site today … the first time we’d seen it since the bulldozer had done its duty.  The view of Glen was as beautiful as ever.  The winds were crisp, the waters blue, the waves dutifully marching down the shore, crashing their hellos.

I braced for more sadness this visit.  But interestingly, it didn’t happen.  We speculated as to why … that perhaps it was past the time for grieving.  That time does heal most wounds.

It also had to do with the promise exhibited by the wild grass and other new growth where the cottage’s foundation had been. After all, during our last visit – when the cottage was still standing but abandoned, dirty, disheveled – the cottage’s state seemed both sad and an abomination … a mockery of all of the joy, laughter and love that had existed within its walls.

Now, at least, the cottage’s spirit had been set free.  And Nature’s might was busting through where there had once been foundation and shadow.

But more than all that, I think it was our mindset about “what’s next.”   We ambled throughout the countryside this visit, looking at other lakes, other cottages.  Imagining moving here or there, and what that would be like. 

Point Betsie.

Sure, we visited the old haunts.  Art’s Tavern for lunch, Esch Beach to marvel at the historic low levels of Lake Michigan, the Point Betsie lighthouse where it still towers, after 154 years, over a shoreline of pesky, hard-to-find Petoskey stones.

But that wasn’t the heart of our visit.  That’s the past.  At some point, we’ve realized, we’ll be hungry for the future. And coming here is natural … has been for almost four decades.

And so we wandered like we used to before children and house payments and other deep responsibilities.  We breathed in the smells, savored the fresh-water breezes, and let our eyes dance with the sun along the shore. And we saw a familiar land, yet one teeming with new opportunities.

There’s a reason instinct pulls us North.

Up here, there are no coincidences. 

Esch Beach ... Lake Michigan.