Long ago (15-ish years?) in a galaxy far, far away (my Hawaiian BBQ restaurant in Boise), my then-new neighbor (and regular customer) explained to my then-husband how to spell her name: “It’s not D-E-E, it’s just ‘D’.” Keoni wrote out, on the lid of her take-out container: JustD. And ever since, her name (in my phone, on posted letters, in conversation) has been ‘JustD’.
In the months after Keoni died, JustD kept me supplied with endless Tupperware containers of her made-from-scratch split-pea soup, which I frequently ate straight from the freezer like ice cream, in the middle of the grief-lengthened nights when I couldn’t sleep. She was one of the many people who made sure I stayed engaged with the human world around me, in the months when I didn’t feel human at all.
JustD doesn’t do social media, and I don’t do phone when I can avoid it, so I try to stay caught up with her via letter-writing, by way of apology for not always picking up when people call me. And when she hits the road in her custom-modified RV-van, she stops over in Pendleton to catch up and to share meals. (JustD and Jon share the talent of making a listener salivate just by describing food.)
A few years back, she bought a place in Oregon, just over the mountain from us in Baker City, and she has been pressing us to return the visit, to come land on her and her three Swiss Mountain Dogs.
These guys are at the opposite end of the spectrum from ‘teacup’-volume breeds of dog; we’re talking more like a fire-engine-volume of dog. Wilson and Bonnie and Rudy are, respectively, the approximate sizes of a pony, a cart horse, and a moose.
We spent the night with them yesterday—explored JustD’s garden and helped her harvest tomatoes and provided round after round of dog-petting and sat across the kitchen counter from her, enjoying the multi-course work of art that she cooked, all the while laughing at her impressions of dogs being people, and her impressions of people being dogs. (Bonnie attending doggie-technical-school to learn herding, or as Bonnie calls it, The Sheep Game: “Sheep… shiny thing, shiny thing… SHEEP-POOP!”)
I particularly relished her description of a new acquaintance as a golden retriever (“HI!!!” Wave-wave-wave-wave!). My next letter, I’ll have to ask what breed of dog describes me. Though actually, my breed is probably ‘cat.’
Kana's Chronicles 
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