Seeing Eye Day 0: the Storm and the Scramble

Let me set the scene:

It is early afternoon on Saturday. I am in the middle of my biweekly writing group. We are getting into deep discussion of the metaphors in one of our author’s pieces. I’m at my writing desk in my space library, and my Neutron Star is snoring on his bed beside me. Tomorrow, one of my writing group friends is going to come pick him up to take care of him for the next two and a half weeks while I’m at Seeing Eye. Once he’s out of the house, I’m going to pack—I don’t want him to see the suitcase and get nervous. But in the meantime, I need to clean up my whole house so I’m leaving it in a reasonable state. I have just the right amount of food left in the fridge for two days, though I do have a pile of dishes to do because it was one of those weeks. And laundry. Oh, the laundry! But I have plenty of time, and I have a plan. And yes I’m sad that Neutron isn’t going to be with me constantly for the next couple weeks, but it’s okay, I’ve planned for this, and he’s going to have a great time and be well-taken care of at my friend’s place. For right now, I’m in the middle of writing group, and it’s my turn to comment and I need to say something coherent about this excellent short story that I don’t think I understood in the least.

I get a phone call.

I don’t recognize the number, so I send it to voicemail.

About half an hour later, we take a quick break from writing group to use the bathroom, get more tea, and so on.

I’m in the bathroom when I get another call. This one says its from The Seeing Eye.

What? On a Saturday?

Uh oh.

I answer.

My train on Monday morning has been canceled because of the coming snowstorm. They are going to get me on a train tomorrow, Sunday, so I can get to New Jersey ahead of the storm. I’ll spend Sunday night in a hotel, and they’ll pick me up on Monday morning to go to the Seeing Eye’s campus.

They needed to talk to the other students coming from the D.C.-Baltimore area—there are three of us, apparently—and they would get back to me with the exact time of my train.

So here I am, standing in the bathroom feeling a bit like I’ve been hit by a snowball from behind. All my carefully laid plans are in ruins around me. I now have to get Neutron to my friend’s place, pack, do my dishes, do my laundry, and clean up my house all tonight, because I don’t know what time train I’m taking tomorrow. It could be really early (my original train was 7:00 AM on Monday morning, after all). It feels like so much I don’t know where to get started, but I need to get back to writing group anyway.

You’d think, after two years of life being uncertain and full of big changes, that I’d be able to cope with this very small change in plans, leaving just one day earlier to avoid a big snowstorm. But the thing about such a long period of uncertainty, and all the major life changes that have come with it, is that it actually depletes your reserves and your ability to cope. So on Saturday, this small change seemed like an insurmountable obstacle. I didn’t know how I could possibly do it all. And I was not prepared to say goodbye to Neutron today.

I returned to writing group. My friend who is taking Neutron was on the call, so I took a couple minutes to let her know the change and ask if she could take Neutron this evening. She could.

I finished up writing group in a swirl of emotions (very sorry to the two people who got comments from me in this state). Then I started my laundry, put my clean dishes away so I could load the dishwasher, and frantically started gathering up Neutron’s things to send with him to my friend. All the while still calculating everything I had to do and trying to figure out what I could cross off the list.

I heard from Seeing Eye that I would be on a noon train on Sunday, which was not as bad as I’d feared. I could push a few things to the morning.

My friend arrived. We packed up her car, and then I hugged my Neutron boy and got him settled in her car, and she took him home. And I cried like a baby about it for a bit.

I know I know, I’m getting him back in a couple weeks! But this dog has been with me through so much: law school, my move to D.C. and my first real job, the pandemic, my knee surgery, my mom’s illness and death. The idea that he wasn’t in my house with me right now, wagging his tail whenever I looked his way or else filling the room with his big snores and big dreams, was pretty awful.

And to be clear, I know I don’t have it as bad as the people on my train who had to say goodbye to their retired dogs a day early and who aren’t going to be keeping their dogs for whatever reason. I can’t imagine how hard that was.

So once I felt my feelings for a bit, I wrangled myself into getting everything done. Transferred the laundry, did the dishes, gathered up my toiletries and chargers and everything, got the suitcase down, started packing the suitcase, got the clothes out of the dryer and put some of them in the pile to be packed and the rest up in my room to deal with later, put everything into my suitcase, realized I wouldn’t have enough room for all the extra dog stuff I was sure to accumulate, got a bigger suitcase, put everything into that suitcase, ran up and down the stairs a million times in search of those last few things I needed, laid out my clothes for the morning, and fianllly went to bed.

I woke up early Sunday morning and used the time to stop my mail (which I forgot to do on Saturday) and order a new toothbrush and retainer cleaner from Instacart, because I could have sworn I already got those but couldn’t find them anywhere. I was still grabbing random stuff and shoving it into my suitcase. I scrubbed down the kitchen and cleaned the bathrooms and even had a minute to vacuum. Finally, I took out my trash, watered my one and only plant, which will probably thrive in my absence, and off I went.

I chose to brave the metro on a Sunday morning with my heavy suitcase and white cane. A choice to be sure, but I got to Union Station with plenty of time. I even met up with the other student from D.C. so we were able to sit together on the train.

And we were off!

A couple Seeing Eye instructors met us at the train and brought us to our hotel. I’ve been relaxing and catching up on blogging since, with a break to order dinner and talk to my college friends in our weekly Sunday night call. I hear D.C. is basically shut down already. But I haven’t checked to see what the weather is doing here. In about an hour, someone will be back from Seeing Eye to take us to the actual campus, and our training will begin! It still hasn’t really sunk in that I’m here and that I’m going to have a new guide dog in two days.