Rosebud

A Farm Girl’s Journal Entry for June 19th, 2008

Barnhouse livin’…

Summertime…and the flowers are a bloomin! Love this time of year… I have tomatoes and peppers, onions, squash, cucumbers, maybe green beans and herbs of all kinds and pecans just now forming in their little nutlets… gonna be a nice harvest.

I’m so glad that I decided to have a garden because now I’ll have my own tomatoes. Big tomato scare out there… but I’ll be steppin’ out to my kitchen garden each day with my big straw hat on and a basket. Oh, yeh… I’ll have my slicing knife, a plate, and my salt & pepper shakers with me, too. I never can make it back to the house without having a few bites. (smile)

This year though, I’ll be steppin’ out to the garden by myself.

Rosebud~ the very best friend I’ve ever had~ passed away two weeks ago.

Last Dollar Road and Mt. Sneffles…

I found her in a dog pound up in Montrose, CO about 14 years ago.

I walked into the room with about 30 cages. I began talking to each dog in the entire room. I had planned that if I adopted a dog I wanted to find the one that had the least time left… and an older dog that might not get adopted. But it had to be ‘the’ dog for ‘me’. Bonds are important…

I walked the entire u-shaped kennel room and with a heavy heart, I was grabbing the exit door to pull it behind me, when I saw the last stall… hidden behind the big, metal door.

There she sat… sitting straight and tall, very polite and trying to be brave.

“Lab and sheperd mix, 9 weeks old.”

She was all alone in the cage. The index cards on her wire gate had other names that had black marks through them. Rosebud was the last of her brothers and sisters to be adopted. The lady at the desk told me later that they were found under a trailer with the metal skirting nailed shut, snow and no means of survival… what a cruel thing to do to a mama and her pups.

There was my travelling partner.

I saw her sitting with me in the snow outside my cabin up on Hastings Mesa- near Telluride. In my mind I could see her running in the big snow-shoe footprints that I was leaving behind as we hiked across the pasture. This is exactly the kind of life she lived with me so far up from any close neighbors.

Getting home…

I knew when we got to Last Dollar Road on the other side of the Mt. Sneffles range, she’d have to walk the 3 miles from the small clearing of trucks and jeeps.

That was the closest spot that those of us who lived far up the mountain could park. The rest of the way was snow shoe, cross country skiing, or snow mobile- if you were lucky to have one that would work on a regular basis.

SO-o-o I also had groceries to ski-in to the cabin (‘shack’ is a more precise description… snow got in easily) and water, and my clean clothes… how would I get her in? Oh, well… figure it out when I get there.

Pack-dog…

The solution was to pack everything in my backpack with the vegetables and meat at the top, so the veggies wouldn’t get so smashed. The pup would stand on the frozen chicken with a couple of dirty socks on top for grip, and then I would pull the string on the backpack just enough to hold her upright… my puppy rode in my full size backpack looking over my left ear- and licking it occassionally.

My water jug was bunchee-corded around my front, and I was cross-country skiing a little over three miles up and down hills. Got the picture? Oh, yeh… I remember this scenario very well because it happened for the next month or two.

My roommates loved her and when they asked me what her name was, I told them the name on the card: ‘Rose.’

We had just been outside all morning with snowboards and a little sled that I’d jump on at the top of our pasture and go flying down the hillside into a big, fluffy pile of snow. That puppy I had just brought in the day before couldn’t ‘hep herself;

she had to follow her new ‘girl’ where EVER she went.

The way she sat on her bum and leaned backwards for the rides down, I thought: well, she doesn’t need a sled, she’s got that sliding deal figured out! Rosebud. Rosebud.

The name of Citizen Kane’s favorite toy when he was growing up was that little sled~ he called it “Rosebud.” The guys loved the name and then they all started giving her their own nicknames… Rosie, Rosarita, Squirt.

Rosebud and I lived on that mountain for two years… I worked as a nanny by day and had a really good acoustic band and a solo gig at night in Telluride, so she went with me everywhere- even onstage.

Oklahoma…

When I brought her home in ’96, I took her out to The Farm, west of Stillwater, OK to introduce her to my red dirt ‘family.’ Bob Childers was livin’ out there as was Brad James and Scott Evans… our fearless leader was Danny Pierce, a teacher in wilderness survival training.

Mike McClure was a regular ‘farm hand’… he’d bring out these wonderful new songs he’d just written. Mike would play ’em for Bob and the rest of us. That kind of thing happened on a regular basis with most of the red dirt artists who were begining at that time, as a matter of fact.

I moved into a tent out there, a huge tarp tied up behind a shed under an old, old tree for just about 7 months… and then into a little trailer like Bob’s for the winter.

Rosebud became one of The Farm Dogs.

What a life’s she’s lived… she will always be my true and constant companion.

~ I love you Rosebud… your girl, Monica