Dog's Plot

My wife Georgia Warren ;Georgia Elizabeth, Cuningham Warren died unexpectedly here at our Dog’s Plot home, of an apparent heart attack Wednesday morni...ng, August 5, 2020. She told me and showed me dozens of times a day for years that she loved me, and there was no doubt of that, but I never managed to tell her how wonderful she was, so now I’ll try to tell you. Georgia had no heart problems that we were aware of, but she had been suffering from a series of leg injuries which made walking difficult and good health hard to maintain. She was very happy here during the last seven or so years of her life and neither of us had much of a desire to go far from these four acres, so the pandemic lockdown did not affect us directly very much, except that like everybody else, the news and the revelations made us anxious, afraid, and sad. Working here for these last years, we gardened obsessively, cooked as if company were coming every night, fussed over several generations of chickens herded cats, and published many issues of the Metaphysical Times Magazine. Honoring Georgia’s extraordinay life up to and including her years with me deserves more than just a gathering, an obituary, or this very long announcement; and so I will be telling Georgia’s story for as long as I live, including the story of a recent event which she did not want to make known during her lifetime because she did not want people asking her to summon ghosts, but with her death, the ban has passed away. Georgia was not able to summon ghosts or induce visitations, but occasionally she would be visited by vivid, walking, talking visions of people who did not appear to be vaporous or spooky looking, most often people she didn’t know or didn’t know well, but usually with a friend connection of some sort. These persons looked so like ordinary living persons, in one case she didn’t even know the person represented was dead until she learnd so later.which didn’t prevent that person from appearing again, once at the Agway TruValue store one day when we were there for chicken feed and paint. There was no contact other than the signt of the woman that day, but one day around the same time, she appeared here on our deck with a message for a mutual acquaintance who was immune to such visitations. In every case of these visitations, Georgia knew that, despite appearances, the vision was simply a vision and not a real personI don’t know how, especially as to her they didn’t just look like people, they talked and presumably smelled like people. All her senses were involved, and something more, but she always said that she did not believe in ghosts. Shadows, she would say. Occasionally she had been drafted to make contact with spirits that be, including the time shortly before the Covoid Pandemic when a friend called and asked her to come down the hill within the next half hour to the old Main building on the Wells College campus where someone had gotten permission to bring around one of those ghost-detection services that use some kind of technical lookoing equipment.. Georgia went and I stayed home, so I only know what she told me about what followed, and others who were there can fill it in or correct me if they care to. I know that, part way through the tour, or at the bottom of it anyway, they came down to a room in the basement full of stored furniture. I suppose that a few people there did know that the storage room was where Aurora area victims of the 1918 pandemic came to be treated, and mostly to die.. Maybe not particularly because of the crowd of furnitre, noone cared to enter the room, including the ghost busters with their detection equipment. No one but Georgia, and I I dont know why, but I believe her Frends who had called her about the event, then invited her to step inor maybe she just stood in the doorway, and I don’t recall her saying to me that she SAW anything in this instance, but she spoke with a man who said that he had been the attending doctor there and that he was himself weighed down with guilt from having not been able to save those hundreds of people in his care. Georgia reported this to the group there at the door, as I don’t suppose anybody else heard the doctor, and then I think it was that one of the friends who had invited her down there, suggested that she tell the doctor that he should let go of that guilt because it was now a hundred years later so that all those people would be dead now anyway. This seems a llittle tricky, but Georgia passed that on and, according to her, it seemed to work. But the last time Georgia experienced such a thing, it was much more personal. She and I and I had both been very distressed lately, as a series of raids by unknown creatures had been killing our beloved chickens two or three at a time, in mid-day right in the driveway and often carrying them off, all unseen and unheard by either of us. At last, we were down to one chicken. Pinhead, we called her. She was one of the older hens since she and a sister were the only chickens to survie a weasel invasion in the little immederate pullet house beween the chick pen in our living space, and the main chicken house down the path. The two survived by hiding, or being burried under a pile of their dead others. By the time we were down to three chickens, we no longer opened the chicken house up until two or three in the afternoon. Ordinarily then Georgia spent those afternoons out under the Chestnut tree next to the house while our Pinhead grazed around her and under the deck. Georgia didn’t try to read while chicken-sitting, because she could fall right into books and be way too deeply involved to keep watch, or even remember where she was. But she could keep watch while cleaning up some of my old tools crusted with grime and rust,, many of them having belonged to my mother’s father Herbert Augustus (Bert) Failingincluding the old twelve-inch Stanley wood plane she was cleaning up, in the shade of the Horse Chestnutt tree a few days before she died On that very hot day when I let Pinhead out of the chicken house, she ate some oats I had scattered for her, dashed the few feet down to the pond for a drink and then decided to back into the chicken house, which stays quite cool. Georgia had stayed out in the usual chair to work on the plane anyway. She asked me for a screw driver to take the thing apart, so I brought her a couple from my handy indoor supply jumble: one philips-head and one flat blade, then I retired to the house for my nap or whatever. It was the flat blade screw driver that she needed in order to remove the plane blade and the blade clamp. It was more grungy than rusty. I had probabaly used it mostly for opening paint cans. As she was dismanteling the plane, a man appeared comning up the driveway. She was alarmed, because he had no mask. He wore tan pants belted over a short-sleeved, knit shirt with a buttoned-up collar. He looked to Georgia be about forty years old, and he somewhat resembled meaccording to what Georgia told me later that day. He was vividly present, but she was aware right away that he was not a real person. I don’t know how that is or can be, and she has often insisted on her disbelief in ghosts ,but disbelief did not prevent her from humoring them. This man who was not there did not introduce himself, but first off as he approached asked her to be careful with that Stanley screw-driver of his that she was using. Don’t let anybody stir paint with it, he said. Georgia asked him who he was, but he said that he was not there to answer questions. He was there, he said, to ask her to tell Davey that he is proud of himand especially to tell Davey’s daughter that he is proud of HER . Davey would be me and my daughter Mnetha has taken on an old hardware store and the building it is in, added an aparment and turned the downstairs store space in to the Trader Rose Vintage shop. My Grandaddy, told Georgia then, that had Mnetha not bought and saved the building, it would have passed to yet another owner who whould have it demolished. And, Grandaddy added, it makes no difference that she is not exactly running it as the hardware store it was.. According to family telling, my grandather H.A. Failing quit high school to help his Civil War-disabled father run the family store in Redwood, New York.. Beforore walking away from Georgia, Grandaddy asked her to pass on the information that his back no longer hurt him, and also asked it to be known that he was NOT five foot ten. A strange thing to say, I suppose, partly because all the family knew he was just about six feet tall, as are some of our family now. . Right away then, Georgia went to work on the screwdriver with sandpaper WD40 and rags, after a half an hour, discovering on the ferule by the handle the Stanley trademark, which had not seen the light since before I had approptiated it.. I didn’t know that Stanley company ever made screwdrivers. After Pinhead went to roost, Georgia told me about the encounter and the his words about the screw driver, about his back and his height, and of his pride in me and Mnetha. I told Georgia then that my grandfther had died with cancer of the spine. Maybe I had told her that sometime before. I speak of him often here, and we have his wallet containing a plastic catalog of identification cards, fishing licenses, and such, which Georgia then went through, reading everything., the insurance card listed him as being five foot ten. I can’t imagine why he would have filled it out incorrectly.or why that should so concern him over all this time and distance. Georgia had finished cleaning up Grandaddys draw knives days before he appeared. She began on his wood chisels the day after. Georgia’s work here was not done. Together we still have more projects underway than projects we have finished, but in recent months as the world turned, she took on more projects more urgently and even as she obsessed over our last lonely chicken, she obsessed over the front garden, her fairy garden as she called it, where I had recently built a stone seat which she liked so much that she declaired that when the time came, I should throw her ashes under it. We had used to joke that when either of us died, we want the other to put our ashes down a woodchuck hole, of which we have plenty. But she was dead-set determined to keep me alive, insisting that I stay in the car while she did the grocery shopping. She worried more about me than she did about Pinhead or the whole rest of the world. We arrived at August fourth, around which day of the year, several members of her family had died, making that time very difficult for Georgia every year, and more so this one. On the fifth of August I climbed down from our loft earlier than her, as was usual. When she came down a half hour or so after I did, complainig that she felt woozy Half way through a cup of coffe she began breathing heavily, hyperventilating. She tried to rise from her chair and couldn’t, she asked me to help her. I helped her to the bathroom. She asked me for a paper bag. I brought her a big one, because I thought she wanted to vomit. A small one she said. I got a small one, realizing then that rebreathng with a paper bag is something one does to counter hyperventilation. It had already slowed some before she used the bag, and afterwards I helped her to her chair. I turned some Motzart on for her, and tired to stay quiet so that she could sleep for a bit. It occured to me then that she might have sunk deeper than sleep, but I didn’t want to jar her awake just to see if she was alive. Let her sleep. Also, being afraid that she might be dead, I really did not want to know. I imagined saying to her later on, Wow I nearly thought you had died! Rather than shake and awake her, I drove down the hill to Aurora, walked Mnetha’s dog, and came back in under an hour. She had not moved. I felt her face and her hand; cold and stiff. I sat on the arm of her chair, holding on telling her I loved her and appologized for never saying it or showing it enough; then I called 911. Soon enough a firetruck, an ambulance, half a dozen volunteer members of the Aurora and Poplar Ridge fire department arrived, plus two state police, a coroner,and the medical examiner, telling the story of that morning three times After several hours, a livery truck came and six men carried her out of the house, to be taken to Syracuse for an autopsy, as is the policy in the case of deaths which occur wihout a doctor present. The Syracue facility called and interviewed me, asking if I cared to submit Georgia to the organ donation program Connect Life, to which I agreed, as I knew Georgia would. Connect Life then called and interviewed me about Georgia’s medical history that was after eight P.M. I had let Pinhead out to range before going in the house when I came back from Aurora. She had stayed around and I had rembered to close her in when she went to roost around seven. I finished cooking the chowder I had started the day before. It was going to be a clam chowder, and I started it with clam bulion, but we had no actual clams, so Georgia had suggested that I use the frozen salmon, and I had agreed that was an excellent idea. And I went ahead with it as I knew Georgia would have me do, as she was always encouraging me to eat because it seemed to her that my own life was so strenuous, though I don’t see it that way. The chowder was real good and there was so much that I froze most of it for the coming days, along with the roasting pan of chicken, the most ever, that Georgia, who had taken over most of the cooking, had prepared several days before, as if she were going to be leaving for a while. I am not sure what day it is now, or when you are readig this, but the day after she died I met with a family friend who works for the Perkins funeral home in Dryden and very soon he will be bringing Georgia’s ashes and I wil work them into the gravel under her special seat, as directed. Now I have to tell her world of friends, then keep the chicken alive if reasonablly possible, maybe get another flock if I dare, and fiinish up some of our writing and publishing projects, maybe never to put out another issue of the Metapysical Times Magazine (because Georgia who spent many years publishing local and syndicated newspapers was our I.T. expert) but most importantly, I am getting to work on what I used to tell her would be the Autobiography of Georgia, because she would never finish it and had told it all to me anyway. And so, this is a start. And for now, this is her obituary. I am posting it on her Facebook page where you are very welcome to comment with your memories of her. You may magine that she will be reading it all.

What a beautiful sultry morning! Both Fargo Bar and Grill and 1833 Kitchen & Bar are serving outdoors!!! Fargo from 11-8 and 1833 is Wednesday thru Sunday’s from 5-8. Jane Morgan's Little House is open as well as Trader Rose Vintage! So happy to see folks around!

Trader Rose Vintage requests you wear a mask and social distance while in our shop. Space Suits are not required.

Deerdra the dog was called that because she was near the size of a deer and looked like one when she bounded in high loops through tall meadows, as here in the... Cayuga Inlet lowlands, but neither she nor any deer could bound over this downed tree: larger than any tree I can remember, and host too various mushrooms, especially the morels Deerdra and I found there most years, but that was a while back....I doubt that I would find much left of the tree there now; Deerdra is gone, it has been a lousy year for morel mushrooms, the world is rioting and burning and this world is not without end. See more