high noon

it is saturday and it is noon and i am mowing. i shove the mower along the patchy grass in our small back yard, the only part of  our property that is consistently level for more than ten paces. i mow under the apple tree, a scraggly thing as old as the house, close to a hundred, with only one gnarled main branch left. every year the sweetie suggests cutting it down. every year our neighbor, a tree man, seconds this idea, offering to get a menacing spruce out of the way in the bargain. but the apple tree continues to hunch in the middle of the back yard, offering a little shade for a circle of flat rocks we dug out of the ground when we buried our old dog max and his wayward ear. the tree offers up misshapen, rusted apples each fall but right now it is flowering and it is beautiful. when i mow under it and brush against a branch, small white petals drop all around me. it is not a bad thing to mow a yard with an apple tree.  

i mow to the far end of the yard and am surprised when i turn to head back and see the middle of the yard scattered with brown-gray fur. it was not there when i mowed over that spot seconds ago and i know that means the small brown-gray animal flung all over my yard must be tiny. mole, i think. rat. because i will not feel as bad about accidentally mowing over an animal it is okay to hate. i would like to think possum, but there is not enough fur scattered all around for that.

i shut off the mower and walk toward what i think is the epicenter of this disaster, understanding a little more clearly now how my own dad felt way back when i was much younger, just before he brought his three small girls a pile of even smaller bunnies to feed and love and tend to because they had been orphaned. it is an awful thing to look around for evidence of what you think you have done in a situation like this. there is fur. fur everywhere like dandelion fuzz. but there are no tiny bones. no small bits of animal anywhere.  there is a hole in the ground, though, just about in the middle of this ten foot debris field. i stand over the hole and get my eyes as close as i can. there is brown-gray fur in there over a breathing body. there is wiggling and squirming. there is the smallest rabbit ear i’ve ever seen. there is an open eye, staring right up where the blade had been a minute ago.

i run in the house and tell the sweetie. i tell him about the fur scattered across half the yard, about how somewhere there’s the rabbit that must have been in that fur but i don’t know where it is or what to do about the ones crammed into the ground. i run back outside while he gets his shoes. it seems to take hours for him to put them on and while i wait, i stare into the ground and try to see how many animals are in there. the hole is probably not much larger than my fist but i can see at least six separate animals in there.

when the sweetie comes out he tells me to look away while he tips over the mower to check for rabbit pieces. nothing. he asks for a box in case we need to do something drastic like raise a family of orphaned baby rabbits on our own and while i go in to get one he continues looking for rabbit bits. when i come back out, he is standing off a bit from the nest, holding something. he tried to run off, the sweetie tells me. he is worried an animal so small will be scooped up right away by one of the eagles or hawks roaming around or, more likely, by one of the neighbor’s all but feral cats. he holds up the baby, sleepy, surprisingly comfortable in the giant hand. the animal is almost unbearable. his ears look like furry orchid petals. his tail is a tiny black point that quivers a little. the sweetie knows i will likely die if i do not know how soft this animal is and he stretches out his hand and says, he’s soft. touch him. i run one finger between those little ears and it is true. the animal is velvet. **

because he is not frantic from having run over an entire family of anything with a giant whirring blade, the sweetie is able to offer up that i probably scattered a little fur blanket that was lying over the top of the nest and have managed to keep my animal maiming to a minimum. the sweetie puts the baby rabbit back in the ground on top of all the others and we gather up as much of the fur as we can and pat it down on top of them. i put a rock nearby so we won’t accidentally step on them. i keep my eyes peeled for those worthless cats next door. the sweetie looks up some information and finds that the little fur blanket is a real thing and that the mother will come back tonight to hear wild stories from those babies about the monsters that attacked from above, then gently tucked them into bed.

look closely. you can see an extra set of ears.

we are content to know the mother will return but i would feel better if i could see her. the sweetie says the interwebs promise a return at night and we will just have to trust nature and the interwebs. this is not my strong suit. i am meddlesome. so when i look out the window well before dusk and see a fat rabbit hopping up the driveway toward the apple tree, i am relieved. i yell to the sweetie and we watch her hop heavily on up the drive and under the spruce, toward the apple tree. the sweetie runs up the stairs and pretty quickly has a chair set up at the window on the landing. from there, we watch the big rabbit settle in over her babies. all of them. there is some rustling around under her belly as the babies find her and eat. she flattens and widens her body over them and settles in, chewing down stalks of grass.

**now, you may recall that back in the day, any wild animal baby touched by humans was destined to die a horrible death alone, its parents watching the ugliness from a safe and smug distance. but then some time around the turn of this last century, well into my adulthood, the animals changed their minds. their current policy is that no matter what humans do to try to “help”, animals go on about their business, which, in spring, is caring for babies.

return of dog candy

our good dog guthrie has spent most of the last three years dogless.

he has not complained about this one bit.

still, we've wanted him to have a brother to love and play with.

instead, we ended up with scout, as willful and nosy as her namesake. 

she is part vampire, part crocodile and part pogo stick.

guthrie waits patiently for us to send her back.

but she follows him around.

she bites him when he ignores her.

and so he tries to teach her a little about how to be a good dog,

how to catch a ball in midair,

how to be a clown.

but when they wear themselves out she scoots up next to him.

guthrie is not at all sure this is acceptable.

but i think she is beginning to grow on him.

scout

the original nephew decides to come with us the second time we go to the shelter. he is a lover of dogs, surely, but there are also only so many days we are in the same town. he is excited to have us all to himself and so we take him with us to walk through the crates of dogs of all sizes. most are in cages alone but some are two or three to a cage, whole families of animals waiting. the place is suffocating and the nephew is uncomfortable, asking why the cages are so small, why the smell is so overwhelming. he knows his own great grandmother helped start this place along with a friend, two women in heels and fancy hats who were not above stealing a dog staked out in a yard without food or water. he knows very little about my own grandmother except that she stole dogs. and picked up wounded owls from the side of the road. that is enough for him. he knows where he comes from and why we are here right now.

the dogs whimper and bark and leap at the bars of the cages. i want them all. the sweetie points out several and the nephew points out most but when we go to a room of dogs off to the side, i see the dog i saw the first time we went to the shelter. she is small and white with black ears. she is alone and silent but her eyes are everywhere. the barking of all the other dogs spreads out into her cage and she sits. this is the one, i say. she is not the one i really wanted the first time we visited, but that dog, a black hound with a wing and claw where a front paw should be, is already spoken for. she is a second choice. but just like the sullen brown dog waiting at home, a runt and a leftover, i know she is mine before i even pick her up.

someone from the shelter hands me the dog and takes us all- me, the sweetie, the nephew and the dog, to a small room with a chair and a table and a tennis ball. the dog curls up into me and when i put her on the floor she is so unsteady on her legs she looks like a newborn cow. the sweetie is already worried. maybe she is sick. it looks like she is broken. there is something not quite right. she is just too small. but he can tell already there is nothing we can do but take her home so he goes to the front desk to put our names on papers and make her ours.

the nephew and i stay with the dog. she gets her bearings and begins to understand her legs. she picks up the tennis ball, nearly the same size as her head, and brings it right to me. she wants to be held. she wants to play. she goes so fast her back end legs go past her front end legs several times. she rolls over herself. she slides. the nephew says to me, several times, this is the right dog. he knows things like this. you made the right choice, he tells me and then, holding the dog close, he promises her that she's part of our family, that we're taking her home. he is reassuring all three of us. she believes him and so do i.

the sweetie is gone a long time and the nephew starts to get restless, to get worried. he heads out of the small room and to the front desk to find out what's holding things up. he wants to be out of this place. he wants this dog to start her new life right now. he comes back and holds the dog. he gets very quiet, scratches her ears, then asks me what will happen when we go to new york. i do not understand the question the way he means it and i say something about the car ride back or about house training, but that is not what he means. he knows these are her first moments as part of a family and he wants to know how she will feel when he stays where he is and we go home. i tell him she will miss him, but that it won't be like where she is now. i tell him we will all visit, that she will know who he is.

when the sweetie comes back and motions us to the front desk, the nephew is relieved. we sit on chairs by the window out front and a man takes the tiny dog to put a chip in her. in case she's without us ever again she can be scanned like a can of corn and people will know where she belongs.

it seems to take forever and the nephew wanders around the front of the shelter, looking at plaques and photos. he is still worried and cannot stop fidgeting until we walk through the door. but then she is ours, all ribs and sharpsharp teeth and shining eyes. we take her to the nephew's vet who scans her for us to see, then weighs all five pounds of her. and that is it. she will meet the small brown curmudgeonly dog. she will ride in a car all the way to brooklyn. she will listen to honky-tonk music like the rest of us.

you can lead a horse to water

you have to know two things here. first of all, when the hurricane ran itself inland last summer and pushed a river through the freshtown over in margaretville, i knew that store would come back. i say this because when it happened we were a month or so past a visit to the homeland, to tornado alley, to joplin. and what i know about that place is that the most important promise anyone made was to come back, to rebuild. no matter what. because people have enough to do without having to drive forty miles each way for food. so when i see that highwater bear welcoming cars into the parking lot again, i am not surprised. there is always something unexpected happening in that parking lot.

the second thing, maybe more important to this story but not more important to the larger world, is that horses and i regard each other with a healthy distrust. not the big old belgians, the draft horses bred for work and gentleness, but the horses bred for prettiness and cantering and riding fast. i am suspicious of their huge round eyes that always seem on the verge of rolling insanely back into their heads. i am uneasy around their hoof stomping and teeth gnashing and their constant nervous motion. they are equally suspicious of my timidity around them, my own nervous motion. they know i do not know what i am doing. this has led, several times in the past, to me clinging to a rearing, angry horse, to me tearfully clutching to the saddle of a runaway animal while someone else leaps onto the horse behind me, cowboy style, to steer the monster. this has led to my avoidance of mounted police, certain stalls at state fairs and some parades.

but donkeys are another thing altogether. donkeys, like draft horses, have been bred to work, to carry weight without tiring. they have sturdy legs and soft eyes and round bellies. and unlike horses, donkeys are eye level with me. which is why, when we pull into the freshtown parking lot, i see the donkey first. because of the grand re-opening of the store there is a stand selling locally made soap and another for a nearby produce farm and then, over at the corner by the water that looks so innocent and low these days, there's a pen with a donkey, two white chickens, something that looks like a baby yak and a horse. the animals are milling around in hay and a little girl stands with her father outside the bars of the pen, reaching through to touch the animals.

i am halfway there before the sweetie is even out of the car.  i reach out to the donkey and make a clicking noise i've heard people make around big animals. horses and donkeys do not ever make this sound as far as i can tell, but they seem to like it. i suspect they connect the sound to food. the donkey hears me and looks up a bit from the hay. i hold out my hand, steering clear of the horse that hears me, too. the donkey puts its stubby neck over the bars and i scratch its ears. if you've never been up close to a donkey i can tell you they've got the best attributes of a good dog in a size and shape you can ride. this particular donkey goes by beauregard, although his red halter is stitched in white with the word jack.

the chickens ignore me, ignore the little girl. we are of a similar mind, both of us unsure about animals so large but willing to risk losing a limb to touch the soft monsters. a man comes out of the grocery store with a large box full of produce. bruised peaches, scarred pears, a dropped apple, brown bananas. he hands me a green apple and tells me to hold my hand out flat. i put my hand over the bar and hold it flat, trying not to think about the slabs of teeth moving toward me. my hand stays steady and i look at the donkey but it is the horse that pushes its nose up to me and gobbles up the apple. the man hands a peach to the little girl and she cautiously feeds the donkey. the man hands me a pear. the horse leans over the bar and i offer the pear. he chews slowly and stays where he is so i scratch along the sharp bone of his jaw.

i know this animal is standing here because he is waiting for more food. i know this. but when the horse finishes the pear he stays where he is a moment, then leans toward me, resting his heavy jaw on my shoulder. his giant eye is right there next to mine and he stays there, the weight of his jaw holding me to the ground. no horse has ever been this still. no horse has ever chosen to do anything other than try to kill me. but this horse leans against me like the small brown dog tends to do, like he doesn't even care about food. and i am not afraid at all. not even a little bit.

the best thing

yet another entry about how everyone loves the socially awkward dog

the small brown dog stands very still and stares straight ahead. until the woman in front of him situates herself so that he is looking at her. and then he moves. away. when he is at home, he likes nothing better than to stare balefully into the eyes of his victims but when he is here, out of doors, leashed up and eel-toothed, he will not acknowledge the existence of anyone. the woman is patient and shifts her pink phone camera a bit but all she gets is a brown blur. later, she says. she is a crossing guard and sees us every day. she has time.

the dog already has his picture pasted up a block away in the corner pharmacy, staring blankly ahead, one eye brown, one blue, red lizard clamped in a mouth that looks smiley and is why people like to look at him. he is so happy, they say, so proud. and they love what they see as joy in his predatory little face.

i do not know whether it is because it is summer or whether people who live nearby simply feel comfortable after seeing the dog so many times, feel like some part of him belongs with them, but the last week or so, the shutterbugging has gone wild. we are walking down the street, maybe wednesday. probably thursday. a man is talking to a woman toward the street side of the sidewalk, facing us. he says to her wait a minute and then he runs down the street in front of us. he sits, waiting, across the intersection, snapping photos of the small brown dog with the long orange stripedy eel. he walks along with us a bit, the giant lens of his camera upstaging the camera itself. he asks what sort of dog and then he asks his name. guthrie, i tell him. he says he was going to go get a few photos of dogs at the dog pond in the park but now he doesn't have to.

we walk a few blocks more and turn a corner, up toward the park. a woman waves her phone quickly in front of the dog's face, snaps what must be a bigfoot-like photo of him, then giggles herself away. we head back toward home and see a woman from our building, maybe the one who gives music lessons in the afternoons. she is young and smiling and asks if it would be okay to take a picture of the dog. i say certainly. the dog glares. she takes the photo and we walk around the corner and up the street together. the dog never acknowledges her existence.

the next morning we are walking home past bakeries and grocery stores and laundromats when a man stops next to us at an intersection. he laughs, fumbles with his phone. when the light changes and the dog hurls himself out into the intersection, the man walks next to us, his phone making a tiny movie of the whipping tail and swaying belly and the steady orange stripedy eel. he chats some and laughs more and smiles as he turns up his street.

then yesterday afternoon just past the dog toy store and the little cafe a man yells to us, asks if he can take a picture. the small dog freezes, looks into the distance just a few feet past the man, lets himself be captured. and now, walking back again toward where the woman this morning tried for a picture, we stop again, the dog more tired now, willing to let her take a picture, maybe two. the crossing guard with her walks us back along the block home talking to me, talking to the dog. her family has them. low dogs. we are all of us part of a cult.

and there are the people in sidewalk cafes and the construction workers sitting on stoops for lunch and hospital workers in scrubs taking a smoke break who stop conversations and meals to look at him. there are shopkeepers and waitstaff at several restaurants who stand in doorways grinning like fools when he strolls by. there are old guys sitting on benches or standing in clusters on corners who lean in, arms outstretched, and say to him in my uncle dale's voice i'm gonna get that toy! there are the people who giggle and point and wave and gasp every single day. the ones who clutch at the arms of their companions and discuss the possibilities of what it is the dog is carrying. well, i don't know but it looks like an umbrella. there is the maybe homeless, probably schizophrenic old guy on the same corner most days who stops his ranting about the evils of the world each time he sees guthrie so he can say that is a good dog. good dog he says, loud and garbled, and every time the dog leaves his own focused eelworld and looks up. i want to explain to the man how rare this is, eye contact from this dog, but he is there most days so i suspect he knows.

there are those who promise that the small brown dog is the most precious or adorable or wonderful or simply the best thing they have seen all day. every day someone says that. the best thing. really. i mean it, they say, in case i might not know what i live with. it is strange that he is unaware of them all, completely unreachable strolling down the street, pouring out all that joy without knowing a thing about it. i stroll along beside him, like flannery o'connor with her backward chicken. i am just here to assist the dog.

possum of destruction

the word possum refers to a beady-eyed, thumb-footed, stink-flavored american marsupial with no clear redeeming value. for much of my childhood i did not know that an o existed in the beginning of the word and to this day i do not know a soul who pronounces it. that o is a waste of time, just like the animal it's stuck on.

and now, our drama unfolds:

pretty new fig leaves emerging above poop-smothered ones

i head to the kitchen window because beyond it is the farm. two feet square on a third floor fire escape. the tomato plants are grumbling so excessively about water that even though the sky is threatening golf ball sized rain, i fill up my grandma's iced tea glass and head over to give them a sip. they remain wilted, ungrateful. the basil sits below the two plants, giggling that good smell out onto everything. the feathery carrots are ready to thin. the beets are still unsure about being so high up. they slide out one leaf at a time, tentative and small. the cucumbers are reaching out to the fire escape rails, plotting to take over everything with those still not yet tendrils. and my fig tree, lovely thing given to me by a favorite waitress at our favorite diner, has been putting on serious, lush leaves after a near death experience involving pigeon poop. the fig tree is the fanciest thing on the farm, the thing i love most.

stump of sorrow

i lean out to check those new ruffly leaves. i scan the farm but cannot find the tree anywhere. it is not likely the tree moved by itself and there have been no winds to speak of, nothing that would take one tree in the middle of a whole farm. there is an uncomfortable rustling among the other plants. the sullen sky squeezes two more shades of dark into itself before my eyes finally fall on the pot. and the stump. a four inch fig tree stump sticking out of the pot, sheared off clean at the skyward end. there is a frantic moment where i look around for the top of the severed tree, thinking foolishly that if i find it i can put everything back together with duct tape. or gaffer's tape. it comes in many pretty colors including, i am sure, trunk and leaf.

i cannot at first imagine what sort of monster would assassinate a baby fig tree like this but then i recall that fourth floor fire escape raccoon last month and also the rabid raccoon i saw in the park a week later. i begin to think hateful things about raccoons. i also begin to worry if somehow my plants are contaminated with rabies and how rabies might manifest itself in plants (hint: it does not. they are plants). i am imagining all sorts of ways i might meet up with and destroy this frothy mouthed murderer with the support of what i expect will be my now sentient and justice-seeking garden, when the part of my brain that actually does the real thinking taps me on the shoulder and starts listing off reasons a rabid raccoon wouldn't do this. mostly, it tells me, raccoons don't eat trees. and a rabid raccoon wouldn't be able to get all the way up to the farm. rabies makes legs into the enemy.

so i call my mother to lament the loss of my fig tree and she suggests a possum because of its hideous gnawing skills. there is some evidence to suggest she may have had past negative experiences with possums. she is very careful to mention, more than twice, that i should not approach said creature if i see it. i think a bit of how terrifying my childhood must have been for her if, more than thirty years after the fact, she still feels compelled to warn me not to touch a gnaw-mouthed slab of stink and hatefulness. and although i am careful to reassure her that i will in no manner engage any possum i might find poaching plants on my fire escape, i am already envisioning myself, looking strikingly like teddy roosevelt, engaged in a battle to the death with this freakish trainwreck of nature, north america's only marsupial, who has no business living the way he does, walking around on sidewalks, gnawing off people's fig trees when it's pretty obvious to anyone around that those fig trees are the centerpieces of people's fire escape farms.

brave sweet potato, a friend to fig trees

i am pretty sure vengeance killing of possums is not yet legal in brooklyn and i am absolutely sure that if i attempt to stage the beast's death to look like i acted in self defense i would somehow end up knocking myself off the fire escape, securing my own hideous end. so i am forced to wait, steeping in my sorrow. the sweetie and i go away for two weeks. we visit both families. i water the farm plenty before we leave even though i know what i am doing will have amounted to very little when we return. i expect nothing.

valiant possum-defying fig tree

when we get back i see the indoor lavender is withered as are the pothos scattered around the apartment. i hesitate to look out the window. it is a scene of ugliness. the cucumbers have given up their fight entirely, tiny tendrils still clutching at scorching fire escape rails. tomatoes and basil are brittle sticks, brown and ugly, smelling like nothing but a dusty car heater. there is a lone beet plant, a late growing shoot, peering up at the afternoon sky. and a fat pot of carrots is wilty but still entirely alive. i reach out to grab one of the two leafing sweet potato plants i set into the dirt of my dead fig tree. this is when i see it. a tight cluster of ruffly, dark green leaves. and they look unbearably like those little clusters of leaves on the broken trees in my own homeland. i am glad now i was too heartsick to toss out that stump of fig tree before we left but the ugliness is not over. there will be more to face. pigeons. possums. boll weevils. fire breathing robots. there is work to do.

brooklyn back yard, a children's story

for the small folks i know who make me laugh with their own
wild tales and, on occasion, their stories of traveling dogs.

if you are the sort of person who keeps a dog lying around the house, sooner or later that dog will roll right over on the couch beside where you are sitting and he will look up at you. if he is a low, long dog, there will be a great deal of stretching and yawning and paw waving. but eventually he will get around to saying, while he looks up at you, "let's go out in the yard and play".

now, if you live in just about most of the united states, what you will do is saunter over to what you've always known to be the back door of your house. it's that one usually pretty near the kitchen and when you open it you will gesture out magnanimously into the yard beyond. you will say to the dog, "help yourself, pal". and you will head back toward the couch and your book or the t.v. or some chips and guacamole, maybe with a little limeade. but the dog will insist that you get out there, too, and you'll drag a tennis ball or a frisbee out there and you'll toss whatever it is in lackluster arcs across the grass your dad makes you mow with the push mower even though he's the one who mowed over your mom's rose bushes or peonies or blue flags or whatever it was this year, reckless and inattentive himself on his fancy riding mower. maybe one of those fat bees over visiting the peach tree will hum by you.

but this is not what happens at all if you live in brooklyn. first of all, if you live in brooklyn you probably don't even have a back door. maybe you have a fire escape off your kitchen and you can sit there summer evenings slurping the cool out of the sky while the guy a few buildings down sits in his back window or maybe on his fire escape trying to sound, with a second-hand trumpet, like miles davis. you might even have a tray of tomatoes growing out there but you can't just open up the window and tell the dog to help himself to the fire escape. not in brooklyn.

in brooklyn you have to get ready. you get the harness and the leash and you get the little baggies for carrying poop (the dog's, not your own) and the toy for the dog. maybe you put on a nice hat for yourself or some sun glasses. then you go sixteen steps down, around the landing, another sixteen steps, then out onto the stoop. you are not yet there, but you can smell the green of your back yard from where you are and you can see it if you look just left, up the hopscotched sidewalk. you walk eight, nine, ten small buildings with their stoops lolling like dog tongues and then one big corner building down. you cross the street. there are old ladies selling helados from freezers on wheels. there are men in straw hats selling cold drinks and warm pretzels.

there are horses on the horse path. there are ducks in the duck pond. actually, the ducks are everywhere, waddling and paddling and quacking, sometimes in a big hurry but mostly not. your back yard is so big, if you live in brooklyn, that you can stand in the middle and see just your yard. your back yard is so big it may be raining over on one side while sun shines down on folks barbecuing on the other side.

if you live in brooklyn your back yard has at least two waterfalls, although they will stop falling temporarily if you have a citywide blackout. you can get a pedal boat and swanpaddle your way across glassy water with fat fish all under your waves. you can stare at turtles loaded onto logs, piled up on top of each other like acrobatic hamburgers toasting in the sun.

if you live in brooklyn you can walk your dog over bridges and then back under them again, through arched tunnels made of ancient brick and weathered wood and oxidized metal. if you're walking under there with someone who likes to howl, maybe that person will howl over at your dog and your dog will howl right back, echoing all watery and blue under the arched roof. maybe not. there's no way to know in advance.

your back yard will have a little cottage or two in it if you live in brooklyn. depending on the time of year there will be tall blue irises standing around outside. there will be sweet williams, violets, lilacs, purple insinuating itself into everything. there will be at least one mansion in your back yard, a decent sized brick one, probably. it will be slathered in tulips during springtime and will be decorated with icicles in winter like the kind you see on buildings on dinner plates.

there is a carousel in your back yard, a famous one from 1912 that lived in coney island a while. there's a zoo with real live sea lions and kangaroos, but only if you live in brooklyn. how many other people do you know with sea lions and kangaroos in their own back yards? because i will tell you now most folks' back yards are nowhere near zoned for that. did i mention the peacocks and peahens? well, they're there, too, howling like mad cats, shimmering like mirages at noon.

if you live in brooklyn walking through your back yard means walking across a revolutionary war battlefield. there were hessians in your back yard once and george washington was there, but that was a long time ago. yes, i do mean that george washington. your back yard will be full of architecture that somebody was thinking about during the civil war. that far back. back when streetlamps had feet with claws at the bottom.

if you live in brooklyn there is no way to explain how lucky you are to have the kind of back yard you have, and if you have a certain kind of parents they will tell you it is unkind to gloat about your good fortune when there are so many out there who do not have what you have. but you probably already know you can't help it.

the best you can do is try to remember where you keep half the stuff you have in your yard so when the folks you love stop by, you can share a little of that good fortune with them.

egg

thanks to the middle sister for the eagles: http://www.raptorresource.org/falcon_cams/index.html

the egg looks like one of those grayish white river stones, smoothed by the water but not at all soft. it looks heavy, looks like it would hurt if you tossed it at someone. it is difficult to see this last egg because the two small eagles crowded up with it are that same dirty-snow color and they are not still even for a minute. everything about them is focused on food. they are open beaks and squirming fuzz. the nest is massive and is littered with carcasses- a rabbit, mice, indecipherable small furry things and just this afternoon, a slick speckled fish.

it is the egg, though, that draws the eye. there are two absolutely shocking adult eagles hovering around and the two howling babies but this tiny egg has everyone in the nest riled up. the egg splits like an earthquake. the halves tear and there is movement in the space behind the jagged edges. there is something absolutely living in there. but crawling out of an egg takes a great deal of work and a big eagle settles down on the two bits of fluff and the egg and glares out at the world, daring anything but food to come near.

there is the sound of the road behind the nest and the songs of small birds. there is a horse somewhere. but then the nest is riled up again and when the grown bird stands up, the halves of the egg are pulled apart. there is something that looks like a wad of gum inside. there is a black thorn sticking out of the wad. the whole thing pulses, thumps from inside. it is almost too ugly to see. the image is blurred by a wing and then there are five eagles there in that nest. five. that is the most eagles you can put in a nest at once. the big wing moves and there are the two white heads nodding.

one flies off and the other begins to root around, rearranging, fluffing, settling things in at the soft middle of the nest. the rest of the nest keeps the food. there is room to put a deer up there if the birds could carry it. the fish lies on its back, tail snuggled up against a rabbit or woodchuck maybe. most of the black bird is gone except a few long tailfeathers. more fish stacked like logs and something tawny are piled at the edge. there are mice on the other side of the nest, too small to see.

the newest bird, a small disaster of a thing, faces the back of the nest while the other birds open beaks under their mother, waiting for food. it squirms around, flops across the nest, manages, somehow, to land under the oldest baby, nothing but beak sticking out. it looks so tired. the older baby's belly rests on its neck and it squeezes itself like toothpaste out from under. it is not as likely to survive as the others. it is not so loud and not so forceful and there is a chance the firstborn may murder it. but it does not stop moving. when the grown bird leans down and carefully holds a bit of the inside of a fish over the tiny bird's beak the small bird misses the food twice. there is no way to help. the grown bird offers another bit of fish and the tiny beak below it opens. the fish falls in.

a dog and his eel

we head outside this first seriously springish day, the small dog, his lizard and i. guthrie focuses immediately on the task at hand and drops his lizard in front of him, close under his chest where he can keep a good eye on it. he cannot pee and carry his lizard at the same time. this is his rule and he does not consider, probably because he is a dog, that the lizard is lying helpless on a slope downhill from his chest and from the part of him that lies back of that. the stream of pee rolls down between his front paws and over the hind feet of the lizard before i can grab it away. because he is an animal who occasionally snacks on his own poo, i figure he will be the one to carry the lizard to the pet store.

we stroll down the street and he does not seem to mind the pee-soaked hindquarters clenched in his jaws. a woman comes up and asks about the lizard. she has folks with two low dogs and thinks they would love lizards of their own. they live in florida, these low dogs, and have been known to snack on real lizards. i tell her where to get them, say we're on our way there. we are a walking advertisement for the lizard making people.

we make our way to the dog toy store and there are no lizards on the lizard rack. the only toy from the lizard's family is is something named neelmo. this is a stupid name. neelmo is an eel. white and orange striped. legless. we are in a desperate place with no time to worry about legs or stupid names. i get the eel and we head out of the store, the low dog with is lizard, me with a ridiculous legless eel. now, guthrie is loyal to his lizard. he loves it like it is family. he is the dog with the lizard in our neighborhood which means if you say those words to anyone around here that person nods and smiles and knows you mean guthrie. but what i know about guthrie is that he will carry around any toy this company makes. he is brand loyal. seriously. i drop the eel on the sidewalk in front of him and take hold of the lizard tail. he relaxes his jaws and as i slide the lizard away, surely touching a peed on part of the thing, he is already clamped down on the eel. i toss the lizard in a plastic bag. without legs the fat-headed eel is a balance trainwreck but the small dog shifts around and quickly finds that gripping the neck allows him to keep the thing level. he looks like a pirate with a sword in his mouth. he looks like my grandpa george with a cigar.

and it starts all over. a cluster of teenagers sitting in a doorway with trumpets and some unidentifiable brass instruments are playing- high school band style playing- and they squeal between notes about guthrie's unbearable cuteness. we wait at an intersection and a woman asks to take a picture, asks his name. she manages (a miracle, really) to get him to look right at her while she snaps the photo and then congratulates him again on catching such an amazing toy. we walk along and a group of teens behind us chatters about how he's always carrying some great toy. people point and wave.

and like when he first carried the lizard, parents nearly rip their children's heads right off their fragile necks trying to get them to look at this eel and dog spectacle. they point and say, "look! that doggy has a.... a..... well, it's a thing!" all the articulateness of these well-educated, thousand-dollar-stroller-pushing grown folks crumbles into nothing. words fail. because nobody is going to tell a kid from brooklyn that a dachshund is prancing around with a striped eel. nobody who wants to keep any credibility as a parent.

telephone

the original supernatural nephew is on the phone and he is none too pleased with us. it is the newer nephew's birthday and the whole family is together, halfway across the country, eating cake and being wild. but the original supernatural nephew detaches himself from the wildness and talks to the sweetie in a soft but accusing tone. i know it was you, he says, a fourth grade teacher trying to get a child to confess to scribbling on a bathroom wall. i know it was you pretending to be guthrie when i was little. the sweetie feigns confusion, says he doesn't know where the child would get such a ridiculous idea, doesn't know why he thinks we would be dishonest with him. parents dread eventual discussions about santa and the easter bunny. grandparents worry about the time a child feels too old to cuddle up on a lap. aunts and uncles, generally speaking, fear nothing. we have nothing, laughs the uncle, to hide.

but the child is not deterred. he has overheard his grandmother, my own treacherous mother, telling someone about the newer nephew's most recent conversation with guthrie, about how guthrie told the kid we were planning to get him a robot. the child's grandmother, in a rare but spectacular lapse of judgment, discusses how she thinks these conversations go, how she thinks the child and dog understand each other. and the child overhears. it is one thing to overhear the ugly truth and suffer. it is entirely another to overhear wicked speculation. the child thinks the sweetie and i pretended to be guthrie all those times when he'd call to visit. how could we? we barely speak the dog's language.

this story his grandmother has concocted, i tell him when it is my turn to suffer his calm but persistent accusations, is completely untrue. he tells me i better stop being coy about the whole thing, says he knows, says his grandmother told him everything. i tell him exactly what the sweetie told him, that his grandmother is a lunatic and clearly a lying one at that. i point out that she has never once talked to guthrie on any sort of phone and she wouldn't understand a thing he said even if she did. i end, like the sweetie, with the thing that always gets a scientific mind like the one driving this child. your grandmother, i tell him, has absolutely no evidence to support her claim. she has no proof.

he wants to know why she would say such things if they're not true. i come closer than i expect to accusing my own mother of being a drunk or possibly a meth head. it is her own fault and i am unapologetic about it. i consider a variety of scenarios and dismiss "pure evil" and "monstrously cruel", finally settling for "uninformed and confused". i do not tell the child that all grandmothers, especially in his family, are prone to telling the sort of tall tales that would make twain tip his hat in deference. i do not tell him his grandmother is lucky i cannot reach through the phone and shake her. i do consider explaining that not everyone really understands his supernatural abilities and sometimes folks are jealous or scared or just plain confused when they hear how a boy is talking to a dog on the phone and how the dog talks back and the two can understand each other just fine because that's simply how they are. but he is ten and this is an awkward enough time for a child that age without pointing out another thing that sets him apart.

i can hear in his voice that he's unsure, that he wants to believe what i'm telling him but he also wants to believe in the flawlessness of his grandmother. i decide to be honest with him, to come clean so he can have both. he knows it wasn't always guthrie on the other end of the line when he called. he knows. what hurts him is thinking we lied to him for meanness, thinking that we pretended to be someone we were not. i explain that sometimes, when guthrie was small and max was still around, guthrie would get too excited on the phone, too distracted and overwhelmed. those times, i explain to him, max would get on the phone and pretend to be guthrie because max was always a talker.

guthrie is curled up on my lap, eyes mostly closed, pretending to sleep. he hears everything, even what is on the other end of the line so far away. he is a dog and this is how dogs are. i do not know how he told the smaller child about the robot. i doubt dogs even have a word for robot. why would they? but he said something and the child understood it and now there is a robot. and the original nephew knows enough about superpowers, his own and those of the small child, to know sometimes there's no explaining something with just words.

ducks

"ducks!" yells the sweetie as we pull into a parking space at the local grocery store. i would like to say my brain and body work together well enough that i hit the floor of the car as soon as i hear his voice. but no. the lack of brain/body coordination, coupled with a knowledge that the sweetie doesn't fumble his words, means i look up, expecting to see a flock of birds overhead.

i should explain that i'm no stranger to wildlife, especially large bird wildlife. i can no more explain why the thought of a duck nearby thrills me than i can explain why i like old buttons or horseradish. they are common enough but somehow worth having. we get out of the car and there on the pavement between us and the store are twenty or so fat ducks, some green headed, all orange footed. a wonderful waddling mass. and more fall from the sky all around us like those huge wet clumps of snow, landing on hidden feet then rolling forward like they're slamming on their brakes too hard. crash landings. not like when they land on water at all. or maybe exactly like that, which is why it looks so clownish on pavement.

we walk toward the front door of the store and forty ducks close in on us the way cowboys do in showdowns, wide of stance and unafraid. the sweetie holds out a hand, pretends to have food. they swarm. i worry what they will do when they find him foodless. i think of the phrase pecked to death by ducks. i'm sure it is a very slow process and i figure i can step in and rescue him if it comes to that. but there are these forty little feather covered animals here, wild things coming right out of the sky and wanting our attention. we wade through the ducks to do our little bit of shopping and i head next door to another store and then meet the sweetie outside.

i think the ducks will be waiting for me in the parking lot and am more than a little surprised they are not. they were, the sweetie tells me, but a little girl chased them all off. for a minute i think she is awful. then i think about what it must have been like to run screaming and flapping into that mess of forty ducks, how it felt when all that wind whipped up, all those bodies lifted and flew. i would have done exactly the same thing.

noon

we have ourselves a very nice noon siren here in arkville. as far as we can tell, it wails for a minute right at noon on saturdays and weekdays, resting on sundays. there are plenty of forms of speculation as to why small towns have noon whistles or sirens but because ours sits right on top of the volunteer fire station i can see from the living room window, i'm going to toss out the idea that it's the same siren that calls the firemen to a fire and that its noon howling is some sort of practice, keeping the town sure always that the siren is working and keeping folks aware of what it sounds like when there's something wrong.

we also have a small dachshund who, much to the chagrin of the sweetie, has never paid much attention to the noon siren. you see, when the sweetie was a child he had a longsuffering dachshund named sammy, a dog who survived falls downstairs, a rattlesnake bite and the dangerous childhoods of two boys some might have called a bit wild. and this dog sammy was a howler. hounds in general are howlers, bayers, animals with keen ears and a strong desire to communicate over great lonely distances, to say, "i can hear you and i am here." so the sweetie and the small brown dog have been practicing because evidently this dog's interest in communication has lately been limited to barking. barking is not the same as howling at all. it is short, sharp, not so sustained. the sound doesn't carry as far as a howl because there's no need. it is more "i can bite you because i am right here." not the same at all.

the sweetie has faith that all hounds howl and so when the noon siren begins the sweetie begins. howling. pitched high to match the siren and the likely sound of a low dog with a small chest cavity. and the small dog begins. he is unsure at first, barks a bit, then flings his head back and lets loose the most pitiful, most plaintive cry in the world. the siren howls. the sweetie howls. the dog howls. for a full minute those three voices declare the most important thing. i am here. i am here. i am here.

low dog in the big snow

we didn't get the blizzard. we waited. we watched. i stood by the window glaring out at the mountain. sometimes weather gets stuck on that thing, snagged up a while, wearing itself out, finally dragging itself over the tops of the pines and spruce weak and disappointingly light in snow. glaring at the mountain does nothing to undo this problem but it makes me feel better, smug and warm by the fire in my wool sweater and soft socks with a pile of logs on one side and a pile of knitting on the other. it is quite a thing to feel superior to a weather system, especially one the magnitude of blizzard.

eventually, though, no matter the depth of the snow a body must get out of the house. even a low body whose belly might make a trail through even the littlest bit of snow. so the sweetie and i put on big boots and wool hats and mittens and sweaters. the low dog put on nothing but a fierce determination to leap after and catch anything flying across his field of vision. and so he did. this dog who will pee on his own feet rather than go outside in the rain will throw himself face first into a snowdrift he can't see over. like those bundled up children you see standing in the snow, so excited they don't know what to do but shiver, he will stay out in snow as deep as he is until he's carried inside. he will protest the entire trip into the house. then, with a body steaming hot from all his wildness, he will sit in front of the fire and shiver piteously until the snow between his toes melts. then he will curl himself up with the flames flickering over his fur. he will tuck his nose under his back foot and will wrap his tail across his eyes. from time to time his back leg will twitch over his nose, rabbity quick. the snow, the ball, the frigid air- they are no match for him. only his little body has come indoors. the rest of him is still out there running.

museum

i am explaining the finer points of the monkfish to the original supernatural nephew, how it lurks along the bottom of the ocean using a small bit of itself, maybe the end of a dorsal fin, as a fishing rod to lure in tasty prey. he is pleased with this, i can tell, even from half a country away. some of them grow to be five feet long, i tell him. and though the monkfish is a hideous beast capable, i am sure, of producing a shudder even in its own kind, the sweetie and i have been aware of the child's lack of monkfish for quite some time and have finally decided to remedy that situation.

the child agrees that this is good. ugliness isn't a thing to him. his whole world is a science project, and exploration. we will hear later from family how with each gift from us he unpeeled the wrapping and exclaimed, “they sure do have my number!” now, i will certainly have a talk with him at some point down the road, outlining the dangers of spending free afternoons at the senior center playing cards and smoking cigars with near fossils, learning to say things like 23 skidoo. i am only slightly worried that his words, when he says them, tend to spin more toward what i heard my own grandpas say than toward what you’d expect from a ten year old boy. i suppose being able to converse with centenarians may come in handy some day. those were some of our best explorers, some of our wildest scientists, after all.

it is true, though, that he needs a monkfish. not a fishtank monkfish swimming around the bottom of a glass bowl, trying to get flake fish food to snap at its lure. that's the sort of gift you give a child when you want to piss off his parents, the sort of gift you give a child when you're trying to teach him about the circle of life with the flush of a toilet. it's an awful idea and it is not what has happened here. but here’s how what happened with the non-living monkfish came about. the sweetie and i stroll on over to a holiday market in our neighborhood. we are looking at old microscope slides. you know, antenna of moth, bark of tree, petal of violet, each with a loop at the end to make it a pendant necklace. we have just chosen a slide with a bit of fern on it for the child’s aunt (a microscope hound from back in the day) and i am chatting with the woman who made it when the sweetie’s eyes fall on the monkfish, lying quietly on a green velvet cushion inside a small glass box every bit as elegant as the one sleeping beauty spent her hundred years in. all that beauty encased in glass, waiting for just the right moment. you know how it is. the stuff of fairytales. we know right then exactly where it belongs. few choices in life are so clearly marked for us and we are grateful for this one.

so the child is pleased and tells me his plan. last week he found two crystals and now that he has a monkfish as well, a grandpa who knows him suggests he start a museum. something about the way he says it and something in how it crawls down the phone line brings the word into my head written in quill pen, flourishes all around the m at either end of the word. there is dust caked on the word and calliope music playing all around it. there is a bit of a singe mark near where the vowels cluster together. it is as old as a word can get, full of all the things the child intends to put in it. i cannot wait to see his museum and i tell him so, tell him i promise to keep my eyes peeled for specimens. i can hear him nod through the phone. i’ll do it, he says with conviction. i really am going to start a museum.

visit

he has been talking about visiting for a while, telling anyone who will listen that he will be traveling to brooklyn. he has been whispering it into phones, giggling about it with other children, telling strangers when the opportunity arises. i am foolish enough to think he wants to see me, to see the giant uncle. he tells us on the phone he can't wait and i believe him.

but when i open the door and he steps inside he does not see me standing right there in front of him. he does not see the uncle who is, to him, as tall as any tree. he sees only the low brown dog and the dog sees him. they run down the long hall toward each other and swirl into a cloud of barking and childshriek and scrunched up rugs. the newer supernatural nephew says the dog's name about seven hundred times and the dog, absolutely beside himself with so much attention at such a completely reachable level, leaps and barks and is beyond overjoyed.

now, i know the child has been trying out sidekicks. this has been going on a while. i know he is looking for the sort of things all supernatural folk look for- bravery, loyalty, cuddliness. and surely it is not difficult to find two of those characteristics in the same person. good folks tend to be good all around. but it is near to impossible to find all three anywhere at all unless you're looking at a dog.

over the course of the week the dog follows the child around and the child follows the dog. they are close enough in size and similar enough in squirminess and energy that they do not seem to tire of each other. they like the same soft, fluffy toys, the same throwable things. their tiny bodies make the same unimaginably heavy clomping sounds on the wide wood stairs up to the bedrooms. they stand at the railing on the second floor and stare down onto the tops of the people who usually loom over them. they like the second floor heat register, flat and heavy iron, lifting their hair and tickling their bellies with warm air from time to time. and if the child could curl up with his tail over his nose at bedtime, he would.

i am not sure the supernatural nephew has chosen a new sidekick. there is the great distance between where he is and where the small dog is. there is the planning and the meetings and potential costumes and all that. but after his second full day back at home the supernatural child calls and asks to speak to the dog. his older cousin used to call and talk to both dogs when there were two and he was younger. whispers and barks and giggles and growls. i have never been able to understand the conversations, two wobbly languages, the same with each child. but i hear the same tone, the quiet closeness between small child and small animal, all that distance between their real selves gone.

brown dog conversation

the brown dog is snuffling around on the corner. he's a small lab, old enough he's beginning to thicken in the middle and walk a little stiffly. he sees us, sees guthrie at least, as we walk toward him. he eyes the lizard in guthrie's teeth and his eyes brighten. his ears slide up and back.

guthrie prances past without a glance but the brown dog watches intently. we cross the street and guthrie is nosing through a pile of leaves when we hear what sounds like a herd of children running up behind us. we turn and see the brown dog coming up at a fairly impressive gallop, ears and tongue flopping, tail wagging. he gets up next to us and guthrie turns his lizarded head away, lowers his body some. the dog leaps around, puppyish, trying to play. guthrie gets smaller and smaller until he is a speckled brown ball of hostility with a big red lizard sticking out either side. the dog's owner gives up and walks on ahead but the brown dog looks back over his shoulder at guthrie and his lizard a few times, waits, then walks on down the street at the urging of the woman on the other end of the leash.

but the dog is undaunted. he stares into piles of leaves, sniffs an iron railing, considers nearby steps. pretty soon we are walking right up next to him. he turns his nose toward guthrie and they both keep walking. the brown dog is taller than guthrie but he is walking with his head low, so his nose is inches away from the tail of the giant red lizard sticking out of guthrie's mouth. he leans toward guthrie just a bit, touches his nose to the very tip of the lizard tail. his mouth opens so slowly guthrie doesn't even see it. they keep walking. the brown dog scoots himself just an inch closer to guthrie, mouth open, so he's walking with his teeth hovering all above and below that red lizard tail.

the brown dog's jaws close just enough that guthrie knows he's there and then guthrie does what is completely unexpected to most folks, to those who don't know him, don't know that his ancestral job involved catching something and bringing it back to someone. he does something that so entirely baffles the brown dog that the poor dog doesn't know what to do. as the brown dog's teeth sink gently into the tip of the lizard's tail guthrie's jaws relax and the lizard slides out of his mouth. the brown dog is waiting for guthrie to pull, for them to play, to struggle over the magnificent red lizard. the dog's owner apologizes for her dog but i know he is trying to play. guthrie stands there, looking away from the dog and his lizard, then back again, confused as to why the dog is not tossing the lizard in the air. the dog makes an attempt to get guthrie's attention, leaps around a little, dragging the lizard across the sidewalk. guthrie waits.

the brown dog drops the lizard, still bewildered, and i pick it up. when i toss is up in the air a bit guthrie leaps like a shark and his jaws snap down on the soft middle of the lizard. the brown dog trots on home with a laughing woman on the other end of his leash.

rush hour

this morning is one of those good, cool mornings full of jackets and sweaters and small girls in new wool tights. we are walking, the low dog and i, in the morning rush to work and school. people step out of little cafes with steaming coffees and their shoes clatter on the iron treads of the steps down into the subway. some of them still have real live folded paper copies of the times wedged under their arms.

the low dog strolls through the brightness with his lizard, charming the distracted and the sleepy and the grumpy, all. people shake off their subway personalities to coo and squeal and giggle. small children wave at him. adults wave at him. even at this hour people want to say how much they think he is too much. he ignores them, does not care.

we stop at an intersection a few blocks from home and stand next to a man and his little girl. the light is long and the girl is singing in her littlegirl voice. bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens. now, if you know me you know i've considered scraping together all the couch change i can find to buy the rights to that song and then lock the thing away somewhere so i'll never have to hear its smarmy, pollyannaish carousel of treacle again. but her voice is so soft and so clear the song sheds most of its ugliness there for a second. she stares straight ahead, into the wide intersection. she is very serious about this song. she does not even see the low dog inches away from her left hand, staring, just like her, straight ahead.

i look up at her dad and am surprised to see him running his thumb across the face of his phone, checking a message, reading the news, ignoring his child. it seems to me if i can manage to find this moment charming then that man, her very own father, ought to be able to put his stupid phone away for now and focus his stupid self on his softly singing child. she falters with a word or two and he stares hard at the phone, then sings quietly cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudel. he asks if this is right and when she nods they sing it together. because i have been sick i hear three-color ponies. he trails off and she continues with bells and schnitzel and then pauses. he is squinting against the glare on his phone to read the next line of the song and then he sings, low but loud enough for her to hear, wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings. and now i feel bad for considering punching him earlier. his voice is like hers, quiet but clear and the few words drag all the geese i have ever seen up into the sky.

the light changes and we cross. the man, the little girl, the low dog and me. two boys climbing on a coin operated dinosaur call to the girl. guthrie turns his lizard-stuffed face to a man who begins to laugh and nudges a friend. maybe there are some geese flying overhead.