Mo Daley of Illinois is our host for the third and final day of the December Open Write. She inspires us to write Kennings today. Here is a part of what she shares, but you can read her full prompt here.
November is a month of gratitude. It’s a great time to reflect on the people, places, and things that mean so much to us. The Kenning comes from Norse myths or legends. A Kenning is a poem that uses two-word phrases as metaphors to describe something. For example, you might use tree-hugger instead of environmentalist.
Think of a person, place, animal, or thing for which you are grateful. Develop a list of attributes and actions for your subject. Think of fun and creative ways to describe your topic without saying who or what it is. Your poem can have as many or as few kennings as you’d like. Think of your poem as if it were a riddle. The hardest part for me was giving the poem a title without giving away my subject.
I’m continuing to write 6-7 poems this week, so today’s poem is 6-7-6. Fitz is one of three Schnoodles we have rescued over the past decade, and he is the star of the show today. He naps in a brown velvet chair and often throws his arm up over the arm rest as if he is a person. Sometimes I think he would look best in a a tophat with a gold chain eyepiece, smoking an old-fashioned pipe. He came to us as Henry, but we renamed him Fitz, after F. Scott Fitzgerald. The name Fitz fits, but we realize that he was aptly named Henry after Thoreau himself. He’s far more of a thinker than he ever will be a party animal.
Alexis Ennis is a 6th grade technology teacher who calls herself a “bookdragon” because of her voracious appetite to read and hoard all the books. She is our host for the 27th day of VerseLove2025, inspiring us to write odes today. You can read her full prompt here.
On Saturday, we picked up the dogs from the kennel. They’d been there for over a week, and we don’t think they sleep very well there with all the barking and the stress of the other dogs who are strangers to them. We believe this because every time we pick them up, they sleep the rest of the day and straight through the night once we bring them back to the comfort of their home.
It’s a lot like how we feel when we come home from a trip. We can let down and truly relax. All our stuff is back where it goes, and we are no longer living out of a carry-on suitcase.
Our dogs are spoiled, and used to a quiet space where they lounge in our bed all day and eat kibble soaked in bone broth. They pile up in our laps or on the back of our chairs, stretching their front legs around one side of our neck and their back legs around the other, functioning essentially as a living fur scarf and warming us from the inside out.
One of them, Ollie, has no upbringing whatsoever – – he will walk right across the end table to get from one of us to the other as we sit in our family room chairs. He is often seeking his place, because he arrived in our family as a “guest dog” after my grandson visited and wanted to know which of our two dogs was going to sleep with him in his bed. Fitz is invisibly tethered to me, and Boo Radley does not stray far from my husband. Ollie, a young stray schnoodle offered to us by the rescue when two other families walked away, joined our family after being found as a young stray on the streets of Gainesville, Georgia. He is the perfect “guest dog,” simply wandering between us, happiest when someone is throwing his ball to him.
The quiet comfort and peace of home is the best part of the Johnson Funny Farm, but it would not be this blissful without the dogs here with us. They add such character, such love, such personality, such humor – and such predictability – to our lives. They know their routine.
When I rise, earlier most days than my husband, they wait in bed for me to use the restroom and wash my hands. Once I come out, they are on their way down the bed steps, heading to the door for their turn.
Out we go for the first quick outing, into the dark of the morning no matter what time of year it is, and they handle their business quickly before coming back inside – back to bed on work days, to wait for me to finish my shower. Once I head to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee and begin writing, though, two will saunter in and reposition themselves – Boo and Ollie – while Fitz finds his toy turtle and burrows under the bed covers until time for the second outing of the morning.
I think what I love best is the weekends, where they know we are going nowhere and that the day will be spent at home with them, belonging to each other in the way that dogs and their people do when they’ve bonded.
There is no other peace felt as deeply, at least for me, as the complete and total togetherness of being home with our boys.
We have three schnoodles, all rescues, who came to us bruised and battered, scarred and scared.
We understood.
Going from abandonment, abuse, neglect, and betrayal to a shelter or foster home, to a forever home must be filled with all sorts of emotions and confusion – and I am a firm believer that dogs have emotions.
That’s why we forgave Boo for biting a couple of times at the start. Here was a dog who was shivering with fear in the back of a van in a wire kennel. He was matted and thin, dirty and smelly.
He almost wasn’t ours. We’d found dogs online twice that we’d come to adopt, and both times we’d completed paperwork only to find that when we arrived, our dog had “just been adopted” by someone else. Right out from under us.
Boo Radley a/k/a Einstein at the rescue - picture sent to us by the organization on his intake day
A dog they dubbed Einstein for his wild hair had just arrived in the parking lot on one such occasion, and was being held in a van until he could be processed. They could not put him out for adoption with the other dogs yet. I think the lady who’d promised us the cute female Maltipoo with some sweet little Hawaiian name truly felt bad that we’d driven an hour to adopt her only to find she had just left with another family, so she’d added, “But there is one other possibility. I can’t let him go today, but he’s just arrived. Want to take a look?”
We did.
We followed her to the parking lot, where she’d opened the van doors to reveal the most frightened dog we’d ever seen, visibly shaking and unsure of what was happening to him.
I stuck my head in and spoke softly to him, and he calmed down. I asked to hold him, and the woman reluctantly allowed it after explaining that the landlord of a nearby apartment complex had brought him by and begged her to take him. She told the woman that the dog’s owners had left two weeks earlier, that this dog had been abandoned in a duplex, and someone must have thought he would be found immediately. He wasn’t. They’d left food and water down, but it was all gone by the time the cleaning crew showed up to find a huge mess teeming with flies and one terrified dog.
Boo Radley the day we picked him up from the rescue
We adopted Einstein and named him Boo Radley. He had no reason to trust anyone anymore – if he ever had – and we had a lot of ground to gain with him. He snapped and bit at first, but with love and time, he has come to be a loving companion, despite his many lingering issues.
Boo Radley watching the driveway for his people to arrive home (he’s a full time inside dog who wants to wait outside for his family following his afternoon walk)
This is the dog who will cower to the laundry room and shake when anyone’s cell phone dings. Let it ring with music and he will howl at the moon.. He becomes agitated and obsessed with killing flies if he sees one buzzing around. If he smells the heat of a toaster, he will shake with fear and seek a lap. If the smoke alarm (or any timer or noise such as a clock) goes off, he goes into a tizzy. We think that somewhere along the way, he experienced a fire.
Boo Radley – ready to play keep away with his ball. Where other dogs fetch, Boo has trouble sharing his toys.
But this is the same dog who sits awake all night at our heads, guarding us as we sleep, then sleeps all day. This is the dog who sits at the head of the driveway and doesn’t want to come inside until both of us are home from work. He knows he has a family, and he knows his role is to protect and love us – as ours is to protect and love him. This is the same dog who knows he will never again be abandoned or abused or neglected. The same dog who now rests assured of his place in his forever family.
This is what rescue will do.
Boo Radley – sleeping like an owl in the early morning after guarding his people all night (don’t let him fool you: he’s a fierce working dog, not a mere lap dog).
We’ve recently switched veterinarians to lessen the stress and half-day production of traveling over to the next county and waiting and waiting and waiting our turn. Where we live in rural Georgia, there isn’t much of anything. Our county has a public school, a private school, maybe a dozen churches, a small private airport, 10 or 15 restaurants, a couple of medical facilities, a courthouse, some small businesses along the square and some larger ones farther out, a regional library and a town library, a coffee shop and bookstore, several little free libraries, a small grocery store, a couple of hardware stores, and a handful of convenience stores with gas stations. Oh yeah – – and about a half dozen Dollar Generals. Five small town limits are nestled within the county, and we are spread out in larger land tracts with rolling hills, meadows, dirt roads, and crooked wooden fences.
We drive out of our county to buy clothes, shoes, office supplies, and groceries. And we love Amazon, even for aspirin and shampoo.
That’s why we switched veterinarians. It wasn’t because we suddenly didn’t like the former vet or had some kind of falling out with the other practice. It was because this office has a hometown staff and we see them out together in the county eating at our local barbecue restaurant for lunch sometimes. We wanted to lessen our drive and not have to take a half day off work just to get a heartworm injection.
Also, about six years ago, Dr. Kelly allowed me to bring an adventure book club who’d just finished reading Finding Gobi to his office to go behind the scenes and see what veterinarians do. His office started as a house, then became a restaurant, and now welcomes pets for their healthcare.
Which was Ollie’s outing yesterday. He needed his 6-month heartworm test and ProHeart injection. We walked in to the office and were greeted by Hunter the minute we entered the room: Hey, Ollie, we have you all checked in, buddy!
We walked past the fireplace and the burning candle and took a seat in the room where the large mixed breed dog was not wallowing on his back all over the floor, kicking his feet up in pure joy like he didn’t know what was coming.
And we waited a few minutes, listening to the thunder and rain, looking out the windows, and breathing. Where else could there possibly be a more relaxing veterinary office?
Ollie
Ollie gets momsick
when they take him back for shots
(like a preschooler)
He started to go
all tail-waggy, excited
then turned in his tracks
We love our new vet
right in our own small hometown
We love low windows!
Common Threads 