Maybe we can’t control our thoughts.  But we can watch and learn from them. 

Ula heaves her bag onto the bench next to the door, wipes a strand of wayward hair from her glasses and gives a big sigh.  It is Saturday night.  She and Saoirse were with friends all day, while Bob went to the farmers’ market and I covered the farm booth at a local harvest festival.  I picked them up late on my way home.  We are tired and hungry for supper.  I’ve come in just ahead of Ula to buffer her eight-year-old body from the onslaught of happy dogs rejoicing at our homecoming.  We are taking care of Luke this week, a border collie-blue tick cross who belongs to Emma, one of Ula’s vision therapists who has gone on vacation.  He adds to the merriment and chaos when we come home, and I am hard-pressed to find enough hands to greet all three dogs properly.  Hearing Ula’s sigh, I turn to look at her.

“What’s the matter, sweetie?”

“Oh, you know,” she shrugs in dismissal and gives a disdainful toss of her head.  “Pink elephants.”

“Yup.  I get it.  Don’t forget to breathe,” I remind her.

Ula has been having a lot of pink elephants lately.  Other folks might call them unwelcome or distracting thoughts.  Sometimes they’re a result of a great imagination: What if Mommy and Daddy are actually spies?  Sometimes they’re existential:  What if I’m not actually here?  What if I’m dreaming myself? Sometimes they’re self-destructive: What if everybody in my family hates me?   Or, I am a bad person because I can’t do school work.  Sometimes they’re jolts of fear and dread:  Everything is so nice right now.  But what if Daddy dies?  What if Mommy dies?  What if she doesn’t come home from her next trip?  What if I have a brain infection?

It seems that the more she grows into understanding how her mind works as a result of our vision therapy and cognitive exercises, the more conscious she becomes of the bits of flotsam and jetsam that float across her brain that she doesn’t think ought to be there.  For a while, these random, and often sad or frightening bits have given her loads of anxiety.

“Mommy,” she’d say, tears backing up behind her eyes as her voice cracked, “I’m thinking things, and I don’t want to think them, and I know I shouldn’t be thinking them, and because I know I shouldn’t be thinking them, then I can’t stop thinking them.”

“Can you tell me what the thoughts are?” I asked her.

“No!  I can’t tell you!  Because then I’d say them, and that’s even worse than thinking them!”  I’ve gotten her to talk about some of them.  But lots stay locked in her little chest, squirreled away out of dread that speaking them may make them true.

“Say Ula,” I said to her one late afternoon while we were out walking the dogs this summer as she was lamenting her runaway brain.  “Do me a favor, would you?”

“What?”  Her hand was in mine as we passed the fields.  I noticed that the field neighboring ours had been cut close.  It has transmogrified into an extended lawn this summer.  New neighbors moved in back in June.  Nice folks.   From Westchester County.  They’re weekenders.  And they seem to like lawns.  I didn’t want to create bad feelings with them, so I called the dogs off the mowed grass.  When it was a field, they loved to shit there.  Ula waited for me to resume my request.

“What’s the favor, Mama?”

The dogs dashed around our legs, then scurried off in the opposite direction.  “Don’t think of a pink elephant,” I told her.  I kept walking, but she stopped, yanking her hand away from mine.

“Oh, NO!”  She exclaimed.

I turned back and smiled.  “Got a picture of a pink elephant in your head?”

“How’d you know?”

So I explained to her that she can’t tell her brain not to think of something.  It’s impossible.  If I tell my brain not to think of a pink elephant, well, by golly, there along comes this fat rosy elephant, dancing merrily across the theater of my conscious.

“It’s okay to have thoughts you don’t want,” I said.  “But try to just watch them.  They don’t have to make you frightened.”

Naming the dark thoughts pink elephants seems to have helped.  Ula shoos them off easily tonight as the rain pelts outside and Luke wiggles his way around me to find her.  He is ready to play, to whisk her away from any loitering Loxodontas Roseas.  I am thankful to Emma for letting us care for him for the week.  He offers Ula a vacation from her travails.

And I quickly forget about all of it the minute they’ve run off to amuse each other.  The kids need supper.  I need to pack my gear for another day at the harvest festival tomorrow.  Bob needs to pack for a Sunday workshop.  On Saturday night, we put the pink elephants to sleep.

***

We get home just after six on Sunday night.  Nikki and Dusky are waiting for us.  I call for Luke.  He doesn’t come..  I assume he is sleeping upstairs, and run up, calling his name.  He doesn’t come.  Then I notice the back door is wide open.  My heart is suddenly in my throat.  Saoirse and I take off looking for him.  We drive down the road with the plan of stopping at every house to see if he’s been seen.  Bob and Ula take the other two dogs and head out on foot, calling for him.  Saoirse’s and my first stop is the Westchesters next door.  They are having a party.  They would keep an eye out, they assure me.  We head on down the road.

It is dark by the time we all gather around the table again.  Luke is still gone, and I am worried for him.  I am equally worried for Ula, who had begged for the chance to take care of him.  We are putting down bowls of soup when a loud BANG reverberates through the house.  We all jump.  The Westchesters are firing guns, a habit that they seem to relish as much as lawn mowing.  And one of the shots is a seriously loud one. My guess from the noise is that it’s a black powder rifle.  Bob and I look at each other, and suddenly we begin to piece together what may have happened.

Luke had pink elephants, too.  If the Westchesters were firing guns after dark, they must have been firing guns throughout the day in our absence.  They usually do when they’re up here.  Our own dogs are used to it.  But Luke must have panicked and taken flight, letting himself out and bee-lining for the woods.  And there are a lot of woods out there – a few thousand acres..

There were plenty of tears that night.  Ula’s pink elephants were stampeding.  “Mama, is he dead?  Did someone shoot him?  Is he in a trap?  Was he stolen?  Is he starving?”

I didn’t ask her to not think of the pink elephants.  “I need you to do one thing for me,” I told her, trying to swallow my own fears.  “I need you to be comfortable with not knowing.”  She nodded.

We went to bed, leaving the doors open, hoping Luke would find his way back.  He didn’t.  By morning, we’d printed up signs, and Bob and I were making plans on where to look for him.  Ula came down early.  “Mama,” her voice cracked as she wiped sleep from her eyes.  “I had a dream about Luke.  He was in front of a house that had bricks on it.  He was with a friend.”

For once, it was a pink elephant that was welcome.  Because with that dream, she became completely calm.  And with that, we began our search.  Her farmers’ sensibilities kicked in.

Things go wrong with animals all the time in our line of work.  But a farmer’s sensibility is to refuse to surrender to any fear, anger or anxieties surrounding the moment.  Those things prevent us from solving the problems.  They prevent us from seeing the cerulean blue skies behind the asters and the goldenrods, or the flaxen glow of the sunlight as it dapples the forest floor, or from pausing to take a bite from a fallen wild apple.  Things might be going wrong, but all of these beautiful moments, that are there whether things are all right or all wrong,  are reasons we chose this way of life to begin with.  And if the tragedies of the day or week stop us from taking in these moments of beauty, then we’ve lost our way.    Yes.  We were looking for a lost dog.  But while we were out there, looking for this dog, it was those beautiful moments that freshened our minds, that gave us new ideas about where to look, how to track.  They make moving forward easier.

I thought I would have to write this week’s essay without resolution.  I thought it would be about recognizing that sometimes we have to keep moving, keep trying, keep searching, even when all the pink elephants are stampeding through our minds, suggesting that everything is wrong, everything is tragic, and there will be no happy ending to the story that unfolds.  The only happy parts are those moments we stop and notice along the way, regardless of how things end.

But no sooner did I finish the first draft of this story than I got a phone call.  Luke had made it through over two thousand acres of state forest and out the other side to a family who saw our sign when they picked the mail up at the post office.  We left immediately to retrieve him.  They had fallen in love with him.  Since his name wasn’t on his collar, they’d already named him Lucky.  He took to it just fine.  They cried as we loaded him into the car to head home.  But before we backed down the driveway, I turned around and took a good look at the house, noticing for the first time the brick veneer across the front. Those darn pink elephants.  Sometimes they’re worth paying attention to.