To Everything There Is a Season

To Everything There Is a Season

The five puppies were born on our property five weeks ago to a stray dog with a black muzzle and ears like a dingo. She birthed them in a hollow of mud tucked between a dry creek bed and the base of the mountain. Because the mother used to be as wild as the dingo she resembles, I tried to respect her privacy and her decision to birth the puppies in such a remote setting. When the rains came, my husband brought down a stray bale, which we layered around the pups, and he built a wooden lean-to that would protect them from the elements. For four weeks the five puppies and their mother remained in the woods until I came down to check on them and discovered a sandwich baggie of leftover waffles in front of the puppies. I called my husband and my father to see if they had brought it down, and they both said they had not. The only conclusion we could make was that the mother knew it was time to wean her puppies and had foraged through our trash for anything that could bring them sustenance.

After my walk the next evening, I put the five wiggling puppies in my t-shirt and carried them up to our house. Amazingly enough, both they and their mother did not seem alarmed by this transport at all. Using straw bales, leftover carpet, and a few cinder blocks, my husband and I built a bed for the puppies beneath the carport, and by the time we shut off the porch light all five puppies and their mother were tucked in a corner of their new home, sleeping.

On Wednesday I took a break from writing to check on the puppies and found the off-white one with golden spots tattooed over its back, tail, and right eye hunkered against the straw bale, shivering. My best friend, her fiancé, and I had given them all baths the day before, and I feared that this one’s body temperature hadn’t risen enough to combat the cold. Wrapping him in a blanket, I brought the pup inside and set him on my lap while I typed. He remained there for the rest of the afternoon: yawning, stretching his back, pedaling his little feet while he dreamed. Rather than distracting me, I found it easier to write with that little warm body curled up against my stomach and a discouraging writing day turned out to be one of the best I had had in weeks.

The next evening when I pulled in the driveway, I saw my husband was bent over while digging through the tin underneath the carport. At first I didn’t think anything of it since the off-white puppy with the golden spot around his right eye seemed to think he was a parody of Houdini, wedging his plump body into corners he could not come out of and whimpering until we could find him. This time, though, my husband and I lifted up the tin and boards and searched the fence rows and the gullies around our home, but Houdini could not be found.

“Maybe we’ll find him tomorrow,” I said.

“No, Honey,” my husband sighed. “Something must’ve gotten him. He would’ve showed up by now.”

I wouldn’t allow myself to believe that, and the next morning I walked outside once again, searching for that lost puppy as thoroughly as the widow in the Bible searched for her lost coin.

It was of no avail.

When I returned from our store that evening, I saw the vultures circling overhead while I was still driving in the lane, but I reasoned that so many wouldn’t have gathered for an animal so small. I got a drink of water and some fruit in the kitchen and ate it while standing on the porch. With a handful of grapes still in my hand, I started walking toward the corner of the field where vultures were gliding on the wind. The mother dog followed until I walked down into the dry creek bed. She then stopped as if her body had struck a wall, huffed, stomped her forefeet, and turned back. Swallowing, I watched her go, then walked across the creek bed and climbed the fence into our neighbor’s field.

It was a beautiful afternoon. One of those days where fall is nipping at the heels of summer and the sun swirls across the horizon, creating colors as vibrant as the insides of a kaleidoscope. Even then, becoming more and more certain of what I would find in that neighboring field, I had to stop and stand there, bathing in the contrast of the purple flowers blooming up amid the tangle of grasses and weeds.

It didn’t take long to find the off-white puppy tattooed with a golden ring around his right eye; the vultures led me to him. It was a horrendous sight, and in response I screamed up at the sky, cursing the red-tailed hawk that had snatched him, and started to weep so loudly that I am sure the owner of the field must’ve overheard. But I didn’t care. I ran over to the fence row and ripped up the tall reeds that grew there. I draped them over the body of the puppy, futilely trying to keep the vultures away, and stumbled across the field with tears and mascara streaming down my face and walked back across the dry creek bed onto our land.

That night, to take my mind off the loss, we went to get some frozen yogurt and then to Sam’s Club. As my husband was checking out items for our store, I went over to look at the books and found one on pregnancy. I propped it up on the shelf and flipped through the pages, but soon I couldn’t see the pictures for the tears clouding my eyes. The reality of life’s vulnerability is often magnified to me even by the smallest death and looking at those images of that baby on the page the same size as the one inside my womb, I could’ve just leaned over that shelf and wept and wept.

How was I ever to raise a child in this world rife with sex trafficking and terrorism, with prostitution and pornography, with so many evils that — like that mother dog who didn’t know that danger was imminent until it came swooping down from the sky — can catch us off-guard and change our and our child’s lives forever?

On the way home, my husband asked what was wrong. Letting the tears flow that I had held back in the store, I told him that if I couldn’t keep a puppy alive, how was I — in five short months — to nurture a child in a way that not only let it thrive in society but also be a benefit to it?

In response he said, “Do you remember, when we moved, how you wanted to unpack everything in the house in a single day?”

I wiped my tears and nodded.

“Well,” he continued, “that’s how I think it will be raising this child: We can’t expect to know everything in five months that we’re going to use for the rest of his life. We’ll just learn to unpack wisdom as we go. One box at a time.”

Now, three days after the puppy’s death, I am sitting in a camping chair strategically placed next to the carport. Four five-week-old puppies are frolicking at my feet, and their mother is close by. An hour ago my lap was full of puppies when one of them rolled backward and fell onto the concrete carport. She squealed in fright more than in pain and immediately the red-tailed hawk that had killed her brother came swooping out of the woods and hovered over the sky.

Rather than being filled with such anger that I wanted to shoot that red-tailed hawk if it was legal to do so or not, I watched that majestic creature spread its wings and soar higher than seemed possible. I then realized that death is not the archenemy of life, but that it is the reinforcer of life. Without the threat of it constantly hovering over us, nothing in this world would be held precious: not our children, not our marriages, not even our pets.

And so, as Tuck in the children’s novel Tuck Everlasting learns after he inadvertently drinks from the fountain of youth and lives for ages and ages to tell about it: