Last week, I finally took the opportunity to take my half-basset hound / half-German Shepherd dog : Willow , out while the hour was still 2 sometime p.m.

It is around 2 o'clock p.m. when the sunlight here in Polk County, central Florida is usually best . The afternoon is in it's prime --it does NOT have the often cloying sense of early evening .

So we finally did it : Willow and I . We walked while the clock ---whatever minute hand it was on ---had the hour of 2 p.m. She and I walked together by the pond that is called a lake here in Bartow , Florida ---on the west side of the pond--walking through the dull strip of St.Augustine grass--at the perimeter of the pond that is thankfully intermittently peppered with some passable sycamore trees ---here and there with spaces between them . The sky was a shade of blue somewhere between a cerulean and a denim blue . The light was rather good ---there was a hint of the sort of milder warmth of what passes almost for autumn in central , Florida . There were some white cumulous clouds . As I crouched ---and at times laid on the ground-- to hug and kiss Willow and gaze at the landscape and skyscape over Willow' s head and ear in diaganol profile (she has ears like a pit bull) I noticed that a swath of sun rays were starting to make some of the sharp edges of a cummulous cloud silvery-white , with that platinum tint that reminds one of those cloudscapes shown in posters (from decades ago) that would show similar clouds and patches of sky in sillhouette, along with silver-white sunbursts and verses printed across them from the Psalms ---and homiletic books with the similar sort of photographic fare . Yet if I try to describe the landscape and skyscape with its almost cyan colored sunlight (that wasn't the most spectacular I've seen , yet which brought a quiet joy), I'd no doubt be angry at myself for not conveying the most accurate of images. Like so many days, you'd have to see it---a moving picture of the sunlight , skyscape, (and at best) passable landscape .

If they're is one of the few cliches that holds much verity , it is that a picture is worth a thousand words . Make that a million ---if not more in some cases. Wishing has got me to say that I wish I had the wherewithal to upload a photo of my dog . She is a rust (or auburn) colored brown --a little less bright colored than a red fox . Her conical snout is a black, yet fringed with an off white the color of aged salt .

A British couple who lived further down on Clearview Avenue last year (2006)-- or the year prior-- when Grandfather , Aunt Amanda, and Willow and I lived there told me she looked like a Welsh Corgi .

On that day , in the grass by the pond and next to the half paved side road with fenced houses and a mossy magnolia that juts out of Lamar's side yard on the other side , I hugged Willow , kissed her , rubbed her ears , and smelled the warm scent of her fur in the sun . She grinned-- whether from panting or sheer good spirits I cannot presently tell .

It was good to share the slightly dry, warm air in the sun with Willow . To share the solitude in the warm sun and look at the sky with her ears as a kind of backdrop . I wish I could convey what it is like to nurture a particular precious creature like her .

I'm reminded again of how in one of the gospels : Matthew (if memory serves rightly ) Jesus exhorts the disciples to 'preach the gospel to every creature under heaven . '

Every creature .? One ought to marvel ---if one is given to marvelling at theological matters --or if even if one is a "non-religious" person with any penchant for curiousity ---at the phrase 'every creature under heaven' .

I'm reminded of St.Francis-- of the middle ages--- presenting the addentum , 'Preach the gospel to every creature under heaven . If necessary use words . '

What is it that my dog's eyes say ?

Walt Whitman, in observing the eyes of cattle, once wrote that what he saw in the expression of the cows ' eyes seemed more than all the print he had read in his life .

I remember other dogs . Sam : my aunt's black and white Shih-Tzu-- who looked like a little seal when he lost most of his hair. I remember my late Grandmother Mary-Ellen telling me-- sometime around 1993 or perhaps early 1994 --to put a blanket around Sam-- that he looked cold ---when he shivered . I remember my female Pit Bull: Amber , that lived in the backyard of the house in Lake Wales , Florida from the autumn of 1982 to the late spring of 1983 . She was a good dog also .

I still remember ---and hopefully will--a precious little Daschund in a pet store of a mini mall in South Lakeland--that I stopped into in 1989 , during one of the tedious shopping-for-new- clothes-or -shoes expeditions that my mother used to take me along to . Often I humored her in such expeditions . His face was almost like something out of a cartoonist's drawing, with big sad eyes that , when I touched him in his open cage , pleaded with me to take him ---to take him home . The sight of him looking at me, like an orphan looking for someone to give him a nice home, the sight of him jumping into my hands and looking up at me then with an almost immobile fixity ---has etched itself into memory . I must never forget that dog. If only I had the money at the time to have taken him home !

How very unusual it is that that day in 1989 has become 17 or 18 years ago now . What happened to that precious little, forgotten dog . I hope he found a home with kind people .



'You have recovered in sleep the transparent quarter where you were born
with its lanes paved by a rainbow
with its square of bitter crystal . ' -----Edmond Jabes