Aspen Sniffing

Soaking in the experience of living is the only "have to" that matters

In preparing for my last-minute breakup move this summer—my third move in just over a year, and one I was therefore determined to get right—I Zillowed for rentals with a succinct but serious list of requirements. After a collection of communal-living nightmare scenarios a few years ago (sickly-sweet cigarette smoke pouring directly into my studio apartment bedroom; then, a bottom-floor duplex in which I could hear my upstairs neighbors’ every footfall, every sneeze), I wanted to share as few walls as possible. Ideally zero.

In a trendy, expensive city like Portland, this is already a tall ask.

I’d also spent a year toting my laundry to a laundromat—a capitulation to the tiny, grimy, overpriced walk-out basement garage apartment I’d chosen precisely for its non-wall-sharing status after fleeing the duplex. It mostly did the trick, except for when the owners cranked up the garage door and drove their car out and my space was subject to its own private earthquake, which, for a tenant who is already really afraid of The Earthquake, was actually a pretty serious drawback.

Anyway, I wanted on-site laundry, as well.

Since I have a big, silly dog, I also wanted a yard—my garage basement’d had a small paved run where Aspen could, in a pinch, pee. Over the intermittent year since I’d lived there, I’d gotten used to the bigger houses I’d shared with my partner, where I could just open the back door and let the dogs rush out into a grassy wonderland and do their thing while I returned to my desk.

But I was under a time crunch, too; we were breaking a lease and I was desperate for some kind of stability. So when I found my little house—technically an ADU, as they call them here in Portland—it was an instant yes: a gorgeous, modern loft space, entirely standalone, lovingly built by the man who lives in the main house next door, who had lived in it himself for several years and had also crafted for it a gorgeous custom bookshelf. The space has two separate lofts, the smaller of which I immediately identified as my future meditation corner during the tour. Vaulted ceilings, lots of light, enough room for the upright piano I’d scored free on Craigslist—there was really only one downside.

No yard.

I wanted to think of the daily walks I’d now have to (have to, no matter what) take not as a-la-laundromat capitulation. I tried to tell myself it would be good for me, being forced to get out of the house at least three or four times a day; good for me to put down my phone and look at the sky and say hello to other human beings.

And indeed, in the beginning, I felt it—especially since it was high summer and all the fruit trees were in full bloom, figs and apples and pears I surreptitiously snatched along the way. Each walk was a drive-by smorgasbord.

But high summer grew late, then later. Then came fall. Unpicked figs—even I, in my gleeful hunger-burglary, could not keep up with them—smashed all over the sidewalk, their entrails smeared on the bottom of my shoes. The days grew wet, then cold. My neighborhood is beautiful, the corners all covered over with greenery, the houses all bedecked with windchimes and fairy lights and windows full of thriving houseplants that make me want to befriend the people inside. Still, sometimes—like right now, at 7:14 a.m. on a 40-something degree morning—walking Aspen is the very last thing I want to do.

Plus, as anyone who has ever accompanied us knows, my beloved dog walks like, sorry, a drunk. She trots along, then weaves wildly across the way to stick her nose in an errant weed or craggy rock, a constituent of the wall upholding a neighbor’s garden. Or she applies, urgently, her nose to a piece of sidewalk-smeared fruit, clotheslining me or my companion in the bargain. Sometimes we’ll walk past some beckoning smell and she’ll turn on a dime, and pull me—bodily—back in the direction we’ve come from. Instant, insistent.

It’s easy to be annoyed by. Especially when it’s rainy, or early, or cold, or in the handful of minutes before a meeting or a meal.

We have a job to do! Go potty! Please for the love of God, go potty, Aspen. And at least keep moving. Come on, mama, I say. Okay. That’s enough. We don’t live there, when she pokes her way up someone else’s stoop stairs.

Let’s go.

Always let’s go. Always come on. Always, at the base of it all, have to.

But once in a while it hits me just so, her sniffing; her doubling back for the flower or the fern. Every once in a while she reminds me how wonderful it all is: the knobbly base of a tree that’s stood in that spot for longer than I’ve been living. The spread of cedar needles on the sidewalk, browned, making way for more, for new.

Her pure focus, her joy—which I just mistakenly typed as her job, which maybe it is. Her own kind of have to. Her deep inhale of Queen Anne’s lace or salal or asphalt. She is a walking, sniffing reminder of that overplayed but accurate Ram Dass directive: Be Here Now.

Which, yes, I’ve become someone who seeks out directives from Ram Dass, as hesitant as I am to reveal or identify with that fact. As the kind of post-Catholic-school atheist who regularly reduced all human emotion and experience to neurochemical accident, I’ve had to field the what’s with the sudden spirituality stuff? question several times over the last few years.

And the reason really is: I need it. Or: I have to.

Losing my father, then losing this man I’d found so soon after having lost him; a man who, with his guitar and his curly dark hair and his sweet-but-guarded softness, reminded me of my father so much—all that loss created need. It didn’t make any sense to me, the reality of death, of what Kathryn Schulz in Lost & Found calls “a whole universe flashing out of existence.” Or the reality of finding a love so sweet and pungent and raw, undeniable, alongside the undeniable fact that it was absolutely not working—a truth that, despite our fervent joint attempts to deny and recast it, had made itself known extremely early on.

The experience scattered my senses and my sense of what anything meant—made me have to think in terms of meaning.

In short, it fucked me up.

Massive loss showed me I had to let go of my concept of control—which is an illusion, always. No matter the guardrails we try to lay in place, life moves in its strange and inscrutable ways. Planes crash, but some birds migrate from the North Pole to the South Pole and back each year, born knowing the way by heart. Children die of cancer under ancient starlight that’s traveled for millions of years to get to us. Everything is completely fucking unknowable, really. And everything, everything, is temporary—even our bodies, these solidified forms of starlight we’re lucky enough to borrow for a short stretch of years.

Best as I can tell so far, it's our task to wake up to the wonder of it all, then not to forget it—not to let the day-to-day grind, somnambulant as it is, put us back to sleep. Remember: Be Here Now. Remember: It’s a fucking miracle, all of it. Even the painful parts.

Soaking in the experience of living is the only have to that matters.

And sometimes, when I walk with Aspen, it hits me all at once—the sunlight through cloud cover, the pinecones. The beauty that’s available to us in every single moment, if only we slow down long enough to put our face in it. To look.

And sometimes I tell her—like I did this morning when we finally went out and she walked us haltingly down the street, my toes frozen in my convenient-but-poorly-insulated Birkenstocks, the pre-dawn frost casting a patina on the clover and sparkling the world—not really thinking about my words, I told her: thank you, mama, meaning probably more than I know yet how to say.

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