Summer weather: I wake up early, whatever I did the night before. And the 5th of July was a Saturday. I could do what I want! Skies were clear, air was cool with a promise of heat. Perfect.
I lassoed the younger dog, Bailee, the retriever born last winter, and took her for a walk. We went out into the neighborhoods to watch the community do morning. People were walking or starting their yard work or just having breakfast tea in the shade, all of us together watching a perfect day come to life. We went a couple three miles, looking at houses (all of them different, this being an area of small old ranches converting slowly to small developments and custom homes), went along the boulevard looking at closed businesses, came up to the working orchard looking at trees. We walked between the trees to the fruit shed. That family’s been farming there since 1911, house looks like it was built about that time, a stone Lincoln Highway marker decorates the front yard. I tied the dog up in the shade and looked around and bought some Regina peaches and some Babcock peaches to take home for breakfast. They were the most perfect peaches I’ve ever seen.
Home, I put her in the yard and looked for the older dog. I had been careful that he not see us leave or he would follow. He’s very slow and if I didn’t know he was following, he might end up in the street, us not knowing where we went. I wanted to make sure he was home, say good morning, all that. He wasn’t in his place in the garage or in his dog house. I took a flashlight and inspected under the front porch where he likes to lie on the cool hard earth – not there either. I took a walk around the house to look in his place in the rear courtyard, where it’s also nice and shady.
Surprised to find him lying in the early sun, out in the dry grass next to my big mound of earth where I’m dumping unneeded piles of hillside. Just lying there. Not moving. No discernible breathing.
I touched his head.
He was not at home.
I sat in the dirt and petted him again a few times, and tears started to squeeze out of me and I said, “Goodbye, Stormy. Goodbye, old boy.”
Nothing. Not even that reaction when you touch someone and they don’t notice, a tiny flinch you yourself don’t notice unless it’s not there. Just gone.
I went to his dog house and retrieved the nasty old blanket he kicks around in there, and put it over him. Wife as it happens had started giving the younger dog her bath, in the shower. So they were in there and I went in too and sat down on one of the benches – it’s a large shower – and said, “Stormy’s gone. He’s home, but he’s gone.”
She started to cry and we held each other in the warm rain and cried awhile, Bailee in there with us too, wet, patiently waiting.
Later I lifted him in his blanket onto the garden cart, and put him in the shade under the tree in the lawn, where so often he would writhe around on his back to scratch it and bark. He always had itchies and they made him bark.
Later that morning, everyone else out of bed, the four of us sat around him and silently said our goodbyes, each in our own way; then lifted him into the bed of the pickup and took him, all four of us together, down to the vet hospital. They came out with a cart and took him away. They were very sympathetic, because of course they are animal people, and our loss was on all our faces.
And that was it, except for waves of remembrance, especially when passing one of his lie-around places, or encountering a wad of brown dog hair, or just sort of looking for him as usual and then, oh yeah. More tears.
I suppose people cry when their cats die, but dogs are truly part of the family. They have eyes that other loving mammals such as humans can read, and eyebrows that express, and mouths that smile. Most of all they have a presence, or at least the smart and loving ones do; and when they go on it isn’t tragic, of course, but it is sad. They are missed. I very much miss Stormy – just as I miss Max, who was Stormy’s elder – and someday, maybe in about a dozen years, Bailee too will be the old dog being harassed by a younger dog, and she too will go her way as we all must. So.
So. Being philosophical is just a way of avoiding the hurt. I miss Stormy very much. End of story.
Stormy gets a shearing about two weeks ago.
