Betty Goes Swimming
This is our third day in Ithaca and it has been wonderfully cool and a little bit rainy to boot. There has been no desire to test the waters of the pool, even though it is heated to a comfortable 85 degrees. Today was sunny and warmer and the thought did occur to me that a dip in the pool might be pleasant in the afternoon. The forecast said it would be up from a high of 68 yesterday to a high of 73 today. It is trending warmer as the week goes by but like all Upstate New York summers, rain is never far away or completely off the forecast. Our temperature outlook is in the low 80’s just like in San Diego, except here the probability of rain is 30-60% where it is 3-6% in San Diego.
My day began with a light breakfast, a farewell to Gary and Oswaldo, who are heading down to D.C., and then a call with a law firm looking for an expert witness to help them with a class action lawsuit they have underway against someone with several billion dollars of money they do not believe should be all theirs. After that, I was off to a lawyer’s office downtown to sign some papers having to do with my mother’s estate, for which I act as successor trustee. Once that was done, my mission was to go to Lowe’s for heavy duty pruning equipment. I chose a portable battery-operated chain saw and a 14-foot extension pruning saw and leveraged clipper. These have become my weapons of choice in the pruning wars in San Diego on my hilltop and they feel very familiar to me.
After Kim and I had a nice lunch on the deck in the shade of the patio umbrella, cousin Pete and I set about our pruning duties. The property was completely landscaped initially twenty-five years ago by an award-winning member of the Landscape Architecture Department of Cornell. We wanted the property to be presentable right away for a function (specifically, my mother’s 60th Cornell reunion gathering), so we put in reasonably mature plantings and trees. It surprised many locals who were used to planting young and inexpensive plants and to let several years of growth mature the plantings. Putting in sod rather than grass seed almost blew their minds irreparably. And then about ten or so years ago we needed to rework and replace some of the trees along the property line with our neighbor. They had become strangled with weed vines. We also lost a big black walnut in the front to a lightning strike and an elm in the center of the garden which had gotten diseased, as elms tend to do. All the replacement trees from ten years ago have grown very quickly.
We had replaced the walnut with several stands of wispy birch trees. With the passage of time and due to the flow of runoff water through that spot, those trees have risen to heights of forty or fifty feet and are actually now taller than the old walnut. The same has happened to the border pines, and the trees within the pool enclosure like the honey locust and American hornbeam. They all needed pruning so Pete and I went after it. The extension pruner was particularly helpful. It is an awesome tool that makes short work of tree pruning. We attacked the trees with gusto with me on the pruner and Pete mostly hauling away the branches. Then we shifted to the chain saw and made even quicker work of cleaning up the lower branches of several more of the trees. Pete even went up the big ladder into the honey locust to chain saw a few thicker and thorny branches that weren’t yielding easily to the pruning saw. It is gratifying to see the thinning process take shape so quickly. The disposal was also relatively easy since the southern side of our property bounds undeveloped wooded property and it is relatively easy to toss the cut up branches there. This wouldn’t happen in the land of the raging wildfire on our hilltop, but here it is no problem since wildfire risk is minimal due to constant moisture in the air.
While we were finishing up our pruning and feeling pretty warm and ready for an afternoon dip in the inviting pool, Kim and Nancy (Pete’s wife) were sitting with me while Pete was working the gas-powered blower to tidy up our pruning detritus. During all this commotion, Betty was wandering around and suddenly stepped right into the deep end of the pool. Kim and I have watched Betty freak out over polished marble floors, but stepping into a blue swimming pool was apparently less troublesome to her than that nasty marble tile. We were in a state of shock for a moment because she seemed to almost walk right into the water without a care. There was a moment of breathlessness when we waited to see if her head would surface. I distinctly remember wondering which of us would likely jump into the pool first if her head did not surface. But surface it did.
There was no yelping of barking, no whining or apparent fear. In fact, Betty seemed to instinctively know what to do. She immediately went into a dog paddle and floated her way towards the center of the pool and away from the edge. Now the deep end of our pool is not so deep at six feet, but that is deep enough by four feet to be over Betty’s head. Other dogs I have seen in similar situations instinctively turn back to the edge of the pool and scramble their way out as quickly as they jumped in. In Betty’s case, she just decided to take a lap and despite all of us running around the various sides of the pool calling to her she seemed to know exactly what to do. She calmly but decidedly paddled her way directly towards the shallow end of the pool and the waiting fiberglass steps out of the shallow end. There she heard and saw Kim and promptly stepped out and shook off, much to all of our relief.
You see, even though we have given Betty her sight back, she has no corneas and therefore can only see the broadest of brushes and not much close up. Her casual stepping into the void and then the pool was a simple cause of her vision or lack thereof. She had no intention of taking a swim, but she was also not really scared of the water. Since we have no knowledge of her upbringing, who knows, maybe she was used to swimming or maybe she just instinctively knew how to handle herself in the water. Even the low-slung bikini of her diaper did not seem to get in her way too much. Either way, it was clear that she was far less concerned about it all than we on the edges of the pool were.
The rest of our day consisted of a swim followed by a dinner with Pete and Nancy on the deck. For Betty it was just another day at the beach as she dozed off for her early evening nap. Who knows if Betty will ever want to go swimming again, but its good to know she can, just like it’s good to know that I can prune trees when I need to do so.