I’d had all these ideas about the kind of parent I would be, but in the heat of the moment, I’d mostly just winged it. I thought I had plenty of time to teach them all the things I wanted them to know and do, but the finish line snuck up on me. It was apparent on a daily basis that my control over them, if I ever had any, was tenuous at best.
I wondered what happened to the thousands of moments that passed by unnoticed in the last eighteen years. Many older parents tried to warn me that it would go by fast. I would nod and agree, but I didn’t get it. I truly didn’t. I sometimes find myself uttering the same words to young parents in the throes of potty training or homework slips, and know with complete certainty they won’t believe me.
I rounded up all the shoes and returned them to their places. I wiped down the counter and cleaned the jelly off the floor. I loaded the dishwasher and listened to its faithful hum. I restored the kitchen to order in preparation for their return, promising myself that when they did, I would try to pay better attention to these moments we still had.
The next Saturday, I left Carla on the deck to do her daily singing and took Stitch with me to plant potatoes. We have just under six acres on our hillside farm. We’ve installed terraced gardens everywhere possible and I try to grow most of our produce, canning and freezing to make them last through the winter. Stitch sat beside me as I planted the potato hills until she spied the barn cat creeping across the grass. When the cat slipped under the shed nearby, Stitch raced to the shed and circled it, whining. Then she began digging. Instead of stopping what I was doing and dealing with her, I tried to finish the last row. In those few minutes she went from a black and white dog to a black and brown dog. She and Carla were due at an adoption event in another hour, so I recruited Ian to help me bathe Stitch with the hose. This turned out to be a serious wrestling match that left all three of us soaked. When I toweled off Stitch, though—wow! She was a knockout. Her white spots were blindingly white and she was even prettier. I fitted her with a bright red harness for the event and she looked like a million bucks.
The event was about forty-five minutes away at a pet store in a large shopping center. It was a gorgeous day and OPH was set up on the sidewalk. Stitch was perfectly mannered at the event—happy to lick anyone who approached. Another volunteer held her so I could stay with Carla, who was anxious. She paced the sidewalk watching the cars come and go, barking. Loudly. This was good and bad. It certainly drew attention to OPH. People did a double take when they heard the distinctive hound bay, but at the same time I imagined anyone who was considering adopting her thought, “Oh my God, can you imagine that noise in our house?”
Carla finally wore herself out with the barking and then ate herself sick with the treats offered by friendly kids who asked her to sit and shake, or just fed the treats to her because they could and she was so grateful. Finally, she collapsed and in very un-Carla-like fashion, laid out on the hard cement for a nap.
Driving home, I thought, maybe two foster dogs isn’t too many. Carla and Stitch made it look easy, but I knew we wouldn’t be a three-dog family for long. Stitch was popular at the event and clearly someone would want this wonderful dog.
The end of April was nearing and Brady would have to make his college decision. Or, more rightly, we would have to make a decision. Whenever we brought it up, he put in his earbuds or fled the room. Finally, I trapped him in his room one afternoon and asked him what he wanted to do.
“You have to decide,” I told him. “The deadline is this week.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I wish I’d done more. I tried so hard to do all the right things.” The heartbreak in his voice brought tears to my eyes.
“You did do all the right things. You did everything,” I assured him.
“I’ll just go to Texas.”
“I don’t want you to go to Texas,” I told him. The University of Texas in Dallas had offered him a full ride and a stipend. Obviously, they were in need of some academic talent. They’d made the same offer to all National Merit Scholars. But their programs didn’t include creative writing. Brady could only study English.
“I don’t know what else to do. It’s too much money to go anywhere else.”
In that moment, I felt like I had failed him as a parent, when in fact, our system had failed him more. He was right. He had done everything he was supposed to do. He’d gotten good grades, blew away the SATs, even getting the National Merit finalist status. He took AP courses and scored 5’s. He traveled to Central America to do service work, and volunteered with us at a community lunch for the homeless. He was on the Quiz Bowl team at school and president of the Creative Writing Club. He played tennis for the high school and soccer in a recreational league. He’d even written a novel and self-published it for an independent study class. He wrote for the local paper and had entered and won literary contests. When I was a kid, if I’d done half of that, I would have gone to any school I wanted to and not gone into debt to do it. Instead, Kenyon, his first-choice school, had wait-listed him. Three other schools had accepted him and made scholarship offers that amounted to about one third of their hefty price tags. Only one school, Susquehanna University, had offered more than half, but it still left a big chunk of expense on the table for someone to pick up. Brady or us. I felt like someone changed the rules mid-game. I was angry and there was nowhere to direct that anger. It wasn’t Brady’s fault. We made too much money to qualify for aid, but too little to afford most colleges.
I sat down on his bed next to him. “Where do you really want to go?” I asked.
He looked at me for a moment and then said, “Susquehanna.”
“Okay, then, we’ll make it work.”
The relief on his face was worth every last dollar that we would have to come up with for the next four years. Later, Nick and I talked and agreed. We’d find a way.
As the days passed with Stitch, her real personality blossomed. I was her chosen person, but she kept careful note of the whereabouts of everyone in the house. Rarely did she lie down unless we were all in the same room. Nick and I had offices on opposite ends of the first floor, so when he worked from home a few days the next week, she spent her time in the room between us, keeping herself busy checking in on us while simultaneously accumulating a new cache of belongings in her crate. I’d cleaned it out one morning in search of Ian’s calculator and discovered not only the calculator, but Addie’s band gloves, everyone’s shoes, and my Kindle.¶¶
Maybe the hoarding habit was picked up after living on the streets. Shoes were her favorite items, but she didn’t chew them like Galina, she simply gathered them. In general, I applauded this activity because it saved me from nagging the kids to put their shoes away. At lunch time, I noticed that on top of the shoes, she had placed all the dog toys—not just hers and Carla’s, but Gracie’s too. Gracie must have slept through the entire theft. She wasn’t one to let her flattened fox go without a fight. After lunch, Stitch added a few abandoned socks, a set of magic markers, Ian’s graphing notebook, and a pair of earbuds.
Later in the afternoon, I went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. The writing was sticking and I hoped caffeine might help. I noticed Stitch’s crate had been cleaned out. There were only the blankets, none of her loot. Nick and I were the only ones home, so I knew it wasn’t a child with a sudden case of I’ve-got-to-clean.## I looked in the living room and found Carla’s bed piled high with Stitch’s stash. She’d even added two pairs of snow pants she’d pulled out of the Goodwill box in the hallway. Carla lay next to the bed, snoring, completely oblivious to the squatter who had taken over her space.
Stitch watched as I put everything away, her head following my movements like a ping-pong match. She waited until I’d gone back to work and then began loading up her crate again. A short time later, I heard a strange dragging sound. I emerged from my office to catch her toting an entire bag of dogfood to her crate. Stitch was nothing if not entertaining.
On a rare evening home without any kids
that week, Nick and I hung out on our screened-in porch with the dogs. Carla sat with me on the love seat as I sipped my wine, and Stitch was stretched out on the chaise lounge, while Gracie chewed on a stuffed animal nearby. “I love hanging out with my girls,” I told Nick.
“I know,” he said, and I braced myself for a lecture about animals on the furniture, but instead he pulled out his phone and took a picture of me and the dogs. Maybe everybody was changing.
The next day on the way to soccer practice, with dogs seated on either side of him, Ian said, “I think we should keep fostering dogs, but just keep them all.”
I smiled. “Not a bad plan,” I told him.
Late that night, I got the email telling me Stitch had an approved adopter. Her potential adopter wondered if she could come meet her the next day, as she was only twenty minutes away. I knew she’d take her home if it seemed like a good match, so I told everyone to say goodbye before they left that morning.
“But what if they don’t like her?” asked Ian.
“What’s not to like?” I said.
“True that,” said Brady.
As predicted her adopter thought she was perfect for her family. I was happy for Stitch. Maybe it was because it happened so quickly, or maybe it was because Stitch was one dog I wouldn’t worry about, but the lump in my throat was a little easier to swallow this time around. Stitch was a great dog who had found a great family. Her new mom emailed me that night and said they loved her and had decided to keep the nickname we gave her, Stitch.
Meanwhile, it seemed Carla would be here indefinitely. No one was applying to adopt her. I took her for a walk around the pasture, watching her sniffing her way from fence post to fence post and decided that it was fine if she stayed here as long as it took. I wanted her to find her perfect home like Stitch had. She would be harder to place, but no matter what, this next move needed to be her last. A dog can only have her heart broken so many times.
*Maybe somewhere in the recesses of her heart, she sensed her granddaddy roamed the countryside riding shotgun in a car like that.
†Green in the City celebrates all the earth-friendly efforts being made in York (our closest “city”—about fifteen miles north of us) and the surrounding county. It attracts all manner of hippies and soft-souled people so I never miss it.
‡The ASPCA put the figure at 1.2 million in 2015, while a study from the University of Mississippi State College of Veterinary Medicine put the number closer to 780,000 in 2016. Either number is a shame on our nation.
§Foster lingo for a foster who adopts her foster dog.
¶I use the term “run” loosely; it was more like a “jog.”
#It should be noted that a free horse is never a free horse.
**That was the rug being pulled out from under my carefully laid plans.
††It was also possible she had a urinary tract infection from the long time spent in a crate for travel from South Carolina.
‡‡I figured the police would have called by eight if they were killed in a fiery wreck on their way to school.
§§But not the dog. No, Gracie can sit in the center of the floor and scratch incessantly, causing her collar tags to jingle much louder than my sweet voice saying, “Honey, it’s time to get up.” If there was some way to send Gracie in instead of me, I would, but she prefers to ride as my backup.
¶¶Which still sports a tooth mark and a spiderweb crack thanks to Stitch—but it works!
##Not that my kids EVER had this little-known condition.
FOUR
Babysitting
Nick and I went away for a weekend in Virginia wine country. My parents stayed with the kids while we were gone. The kids didn’t truly need babysitters, but they did need referees, cooks, and occasional chauffeurs. The kids had been warned—Grammy and Pop Pop are NOT allowed to walk Carla. I explained to them that they would have to put down the earbuds, close the laptop, and get their butts out of bed and walk Carla while we were gone because even though Carla was well mannered and sweet, she was also a seventy-five-pound coonhound and not always conscious that there was someone else on the other end of the leash if a squirrel or a cat happened by. Her bigness could be dangerous.
I was reasonably certain my kids would step up. They loved Carla and they loved their grandparents. But I still worried. Not about my coonhound—but about my parents’ affection for that coonhound. I worried my mom would have her usual attitude—I can take care of this, and rather than asking the kids to walk Carla, she’d just do it herself.
Despite my concerns, everyone survived the weekend with no injuries to report, and we came home to begin the most chaotic month of our year. Brady was graduating, Ian was playing two sports which were headed into playoff season, Addie had just finished one show and had auditioned for a new show that began rehearsing that week, and it was the time of year when the garden tended to go from neat little rows of baby plants to out-of-control weed-infested jungle in less than an hour. Nick had been preoccupied as of late, too, spending hours online lusting after used tractors and scheming about all the things he could do with that new tractor once he had it. Throw on top of all that three horses in need of a spring tune-up, the graduation party yet to be planned, and the beach camping trip to follow. The deadline for my next novel was a week or so away, the house was a wreck, and the relatives would arrive momentarily.
While we’d been gone, Carla had more than a few accidents in the house, barked incessantly, and was simply underfoot. My mother wasn’t happy. “When are you going to get rid of that dog?” she asked. I defended Carla—her schedule was disrupted, she wasn’t getting exercise, no one was paying attention to her needs, but secretly I was frustrated! This dog was housebroken. She’d been so good up until now! What happened?
Knowing this situation could happen again (when we were gone for the beach camping trip in a few weeks), we needed a better solution. Carla couldn’t come with us; I’d have enough to do keeping track of my own and other people’s teenagers. Carla was not a house dog. Or at least she wasn’t a house dog if someone didn’t take her for a four-mile run every morning. I didn’t know our house sitter well, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t a runner.
Carla had been here almost two months and there were no applications for her. It was time to start treating her as our dog even if she wasn’t our dog. We would train Carla to stay within the invisible fence. I made it clear to the lobbying interests that it didn’t mean that we would foster fail. It simply meant we were preparing for a summer of Carla—just in case!
For some reason that has never been that clear to me, invisible fence is a dirty word among some dog lovers. In fact, one of the reasons we ended up fostering was because the shelter that had the one dog I was prepared to adopt had denied us based on my confession that we owned an invisible fence.*
I have no problem with an invisible fence. Our property is too hilly, rocky, and weird-shaped for a traditional dog fence. Never mind that we don’t have the thousands of dollars to install one. If we put up the one we could afford instead of the invisible fence we have, it would have been a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot cage. Instead we installed an invisible fence that has an ice-cream-cone-shaped ¾ acre+ space for the dogs to roam. It runs under the enormous pine branches, avoids the driveway, and includes the raspberry and asparagus patches.
Lucy spent seventeen years within the bounds of an invisible fence—happily. She loved to run. And I loved to watch her run. She happily patrolled our yard, safely raced the UPS truck up the driveway, and shooed off any rabbits that threatened our garden. And if the detractors of the invincible fence were worried about it hurting a dog—well, they should come witness Gracie bound right through it without even flinching.
Our weekend away had made it obvious that Carla was not the kind of dog who should spend her days inside. She was a coonhound, after all. Letting her roam freely in the invisible fence space made sense. She and Gracie could finally play the way two big dogs should, instead of the abbreviat
ed bouts they had inside that always ended with furniture upturned and someone yelling, “Settle down!”
We put up the little white flags, tested the extra collar and started training Carla. Now she sat on the porch cowering, terrified of the beeping sound the collar emitted when she wandered too close to the flags. We turned the fence down as low as it went and she’d never felt anything worse than a static shock, but she was not leaving the porch, no way, no how.
My guilt ate at me, but I told myself she was smart and would figure it out. I just had to be patient and remember that Lucy did the exact same thing each time we moved and installed a fence (three times in her lifetime). She would venture out and embrace her newfound freedom, eventually.
Feeling overly confident in my ability to manage my world, I agreed to babysit two other foster dogs over the long Memorial Day weekend. I had the garden mostly under control, Carla was figuring out the invisible fence, the manuscript was right on schedule, the graduation party was more or less planned,† and I’d decided that cleaning the house wouldn’t be a solo effort.
After surviving ten days of three dogs, I was confident we could handle four, especially on a gorgeous weekend with no actual plans, just lots of ideas. Kylie and Hitch‡ came to stay for the holiday weekend while their foster parents went camping.
Another Good Dog Page 6
