Living Large In Our Little House

Susan, you are the win­ner of the one-year sub­scrip­tion to Mother Earth News! Please email me at fivecoat@​ozarkmountains.​com with your full name and snail mail address by 5 p.m. CST on Monday, August 30! Congratulations and thank you, every­one, for a great first year at Living Large! 

One of the first things I noticed when we moved to Our Little House was how many stars there are in the night sky here.

There’s just as many in the city of course, you just can’t see them.

I’m the type of star geek who, when I saw the movie, “Titanic,” didn’t think about how cold and ter­ri­fy­ing it must be for the char­ac­ter, Rose, float­ing on a piece of wreck­age in the mid­dle of the Atlantic.

I was think­ing about how many stars she must have been able to see in that kind of dark­ness in 1912 while she was lying on her back singing, “Come Josephine in my Flying Machine.”

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The win­ner of the book, "Green Interior Design," is Frugal Kiwi! Congratulations, Frugal. You have until 5 p.m. on Thursday, August 26 to email me your full name and snail mail address. fivecoat@​ozarkmountains.​com The pub­lisher will ship the book when it is released in mid-October. 

In some ways I can­not believe it has been exactly one year since I launched Living Large in Our Little House!

In other ways, it seems like a life­time ago. Life is like that, I guess.

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Emma

I'm tak­ing the day off from post­ing, as I am dev­as­tated over los­ing one of the finest dogs I've ever known.

Emma went miss­ing some­time early Thursday morn­ing, hav­ing gone out to roam with Sade and Chloe before the hot sun came back out.

Emma hates the heat and there was a 100+ heat index yes­ter­day. I knew some­thing was wrong as soon as the sun appeared and Emma did not. We've searched by boat on the shore and tromped through the woods and have only turned up a lot of chig­ger and mos­quito bites.

In our search, we dis­cov­ered that my aunt's elderly dog col­lapsed on Sunday and they had to help him make his tran­si­tion to the next life later that day. Another neighbor's — more than 2 miles away — elderly dog dis­ap­peared two days ago, the sec­ond time he has tried to wan­der off to pass from this life (the first time this spring, he was found and nursed back).

It's been a long, hot and hard sum­mer. Emma rarely wanted out until after the sun went down. Last week­end, our friend Mike, pointed out how hard it was  for Emma to get around. It was true, at 11, she moved slower and her coat was no longer the shiny, healthy coat as evi­denced in this pic­ture taken nearly three years ago dur­ing our first full win­ter here. We were advised by our vet just on Tuesday to have two sus­pi­cious lumps removed from Emma's chest and leg.

I wrote on my K9 Cuisine blog how Emma once saved my life. I only wish I could have kept her with me forever.

Emma was my mother's favorite "Granddog" and if she is gone from our lives, she is now back with her Grammy, giv­ing her a lot of nudges and in return, she is get­ting a lot of pets.

When we recently vis­ited some of our friends in Kansas City, they proudly showed off their newly remod­eled kitchen. One of the first things she pointed out was her cookie sheet cabinet.

I took a new appre­ci­a­tion for the fact that I was at least smart enough to install one of these in Our Little House.

I don’t care how you plan, there’s always some­thing you for­get in a con­struc­tion project. Our friends down the road even for­got to design a linen closet into their home although he is a builder and they’ve flipped sev­eral houses in their lives.

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