The Rescue
It must be hard to be a dog and die in the spring.
It must be hard to die with the scent of so much newness filling the cool wet of your nostrils.
New rabbits to chase, new squirrels to charge, new dandelions to roll in, new meat on the spring picnic tables to quickly gulp down while eyes are diverted to fly balls.
It must be hard to be a dog and to die with the scent of new moss emerging in the pores of old forgotten tennis balls lining the muddy banks of nearby rivers.
It must be hard.
But Gina did. Gina died in the spring. And yet I know it was Gina’s way to do things hard.
She went at life hard, which I guess is a nature that pound puppies, like Gina was, receive the moment their sharp little puppy teeth clash at the cold steel grid of their pound cage.
She went at the ball hard, climbed the granites hard, rushed the waves hard, licked our faces hard, barked at strange smells in the night hard, and shepherded her human family through desert hikes hard.
The leash was never slack with Gina. She pulled it so hard and so tight it hummed like a spring cicada.
Yes, it was Gina’s nature to do things hard. And the thing she did the hardest was love us. And the one she loved the hardest was her human mother, Patricia, who first opened that cage and looked in her eyes and took her out into the world. Having witnessed that moment I can tell you that there was a knowing of each other that was born well before that moment in a sacred agreement before earth time.
Humans like to call dogs like Gina, “rescues”. While the name is appropriate, I have learned that the human understanding is the inverted truth. What Gina taught me in how hard she loved and cared for our family was that it isn’t the dog that is being rescued in such arrangements.
It must be hard to be a dog and die in the spring.
Unless you are a dog named Gina who does things hard. And then it is simply how you came in, how you lived, how you loved, and how you kept going.
