Some things here feel normal. I’m teaching just a little bit. I left behind so many students for this exodus, here I have the tiniest trickle of people testing the waters of the new agility lady in town. Do they know that? The tears and the parties and the trauma of parting with my old students, are there future students out there waiting to learn how to train a contact and get their dogs to chase them round the bend? I hope so. Because I feel normal when I’m teaching, and I like to be at the arena. As do my dogs.

There are things like, too much snow, your lesson cancels. It snowed again last night. The two lessons worth of money both cancelled. There’s worries about how much it’s costing to heat the house and whether I can shovel out the driveway enough to drive. Is the woodstove burning hot enough, and when can we get more wood? Because, duh. You order your wood in July here. Not the night before it snows. And yes. You do need to get up half an hour early to start the shoveling if you want the snow off the deck. And there are temperatures in life here that go down to the 20’s. Twenty two. Another thing I didn’t understand, what’s twenty two feel like on your skin?

A white pant suit wearing lady with fluffy hair who wants to ban abortion ran for governor here, as of now she isn’t winning, but it’s close. Sometime today we see if the new state I live in stays blue or went red. Red bad, blue good, and the white I see outside today, everywhere through the window, not ready to call it. My friends all embrace the snow, take the dogs out and get photos, they say. It’s beautiful. I still can’t see it as a friend. It rained back home. We had a love and hate with the rain, we needed it for the drought, but man, getting those horses out and the things done, not so fun. I liked to sit in the house if possible and watch it fall out the window, but it didn’t scare me like the snow does. It didn’t have an element of survival, like how do you survive this?

The dogwalk is set out in the yard, set out on the property, nestled into the sage brush where it’s flat and no rocks. We spent some time down there yesterday, working on that verbal threadle exit. A luxury, to have a dogwalk in the yard. An impossibility back home. A possibility here, where it’s red white and blue. Where I’m learning the survival skill of shoveling off the snow and don’t brake the car and try to drive over the ice, and find enough students to pay the heating bills. It still feels like an exodus.