Travels With Gracie: Nighttime and Daffodils

Welcome to the second part of our “Travels with Gracie” series—a collection of reflective moments and small adventures shared between Lorna and her beloved companion. This time, late-night outings reveal a quieter world filled with wonder and the promise of spring.

Nocturnal expeditions with Gracie have ignited a new circadian rhythm in me. It frequently strikes around 3 am in concert with Gracie’s explosive head shaking, tags clicking and clacking in noisy metronomic arcs. I wait motionless in my bed. If I don’t make a sound… too late, my breathing pattern has changed, sending a text to my bladder. Upsey daisy to the loo - the watery grave of all hope of sleeping through the night. We are up and the ritual is afoot. 

“Please let it not be raining,” I pray as I close my eyes. Gracie is racing for the stairs, running in circles. “Yup, here we go, my little nightmare in a dog suit, here we go!” I shove my already freezing feet into the first pair of boots I touch in the downstairs closet. UGGs, once worn by my college roommate’s mother. UGGs never die and at 3 am with nothing but a mini flashlight and a cocker spaniel with a persistent ear infection, these UGGs offer warmth, steadfastness and security.

I love the clarity of winter nights. I always look up when we are out at this hour (thanks to the well-worn earthbound UGGs!) It was “bliss” I felt the first time I identified the big skyward swoosh as the Milky Way. There’s the North Star and the Dippers. All astral memories I retrieve from a childhood trove of treasured outings with my dad at the Cape.

Memories augmented with so many years of sailing, not sleeping, but gazing at the azimuth of our course and wondering about everything in the spaces in between. It’s bliss I feel again and again with Gracie in the star-sprinkled blackness by a tidal river that commutes daily to and from the Atlantic. 

Suddenly, something has changed. I find myself looking down, not up. Gracie is alert. Ears cocked, she surveys the night, then nose down, she cruises the land. She is in communion with novel orchestras of earthy sounds, smells and spring delights taking over the frosty stillness of our wintry nights.

Gracie experiences the present and the future through her nostrils. She moves with deliberate purpose. A change in the indent or smell of a footprint signals new nocturnal visitors passing. The chill of the frozen ground gives way to old grasses numbing the touch of her paw pads and muffling sounds stirring in the ground below. She sniffs along, sensing the bustle of critters stirring and shoots stretching.

I study her closely to imagine what she is learning. I am developing an imaginary scientific method for canine sniffing data gathering, collection, and analysis of living things. I see it as multi-dimensional with infinite points and vertices constantly reacting and changing. Sniffing is a sentient activity. It reveals an enormous amount of data - all around us all at once. That is evident from the way Gracie approaches her work. In these weeks, we are enveloped in the arcs and angles of change.

We are witnesses to things we cannot see but sense in the spaces in between winter and spring. In this bliss of all things past and passing we ramble in an enormous cloud cover of possibility. The stirrings underground, the undaunted annual poking and prodding of the crocus and daffodil bulbs --- it’s all happening right under our noses!