Our Walk
Ready with a grey jacket on and blue plastic bags in the back pocket of my jeans, I stand near the door with leash in hand, as she stands still for me and wags. I lean down, hold her collar to steady the metal ring, and clip on the leash. Still wagging, she trots up to the front door, and sticks her nose where it will part open for her.
I open the door.
She slips through out into the crisp night. A cold gust of wind brings me the smell of a neighbor's fire pit smoking. To her, I'm sure, the cold wind has brought smells of smoke, squirrels, the waste of other neighborhood dogs who have passed by, what kind of gasoline the idling truck down the street is burning, and a hundred other things that I wouldn't even think to give name to.
I step out after her and close the door behind us, and we are in it: out in the night, out on our walk, excited for some running and sniffing and exploring.
She starts pulling me, and I follow after her up the sidewalk. Eager, she can't pull us along fast enough, until we get to where the neighbor had set their garbage out for the last pickup day, the spot now three days vacant, but evidently still fragrant. There she pauses, again, and I stand there with her as she sniffs. The streetlight shows that two figures, a jacketed biped and a leashed quadruped, are standing there, though all of the lights here are dim, and I doubt a passer-by could make out either of our faces, really. We are two figures standing in the night. We are a part of the night as much as anything else is: so the houses stand dim and sleepy, so the fences stand rigid and vigilant, so the trees stand whispering and swaying, so the street signs stand with slanted posture, so we stand dark and curious. The two of us belong here so much as everything else belongs here as she sniffs.
One of her paws is lifted in the air as her whiskers are lowered among the tickle of the grass, quickly bringing air in and out of her black nostrils, going from blade to blade, centimeter by centimeter picking apart the scents of this space where I remember that the garbage was. Then she takes half a step forward, pees, and starts walking along again. I follow her.
This is the way that we go through the neighborhood. Eagerly walking, then stopping and thoroughly sniffing, and then often leaving a quick mark behind for the next creatures who pass along to smell us by. There are no cars driving around at this hour, or at least, hardly, and easily heard from blocks away by their engines rumbling, and easily spotted when approaching by their headlights reaching into surrounding lawns: clad in dark, we cross from one sidewalk to the other freely, when she decides that the other side is more compelling, as we're making our way to the next fork in the road, the next path we're going to go down tonight. We snake around cars that are parked on the sidewalk where driveways adjoin our path. Unseen dogs behind wooden fences bark, and she continues along wagging at the knowledge that she could so effortlessly raise a disturbance in the quiet night.
Dogs don't bark when I'm walking by myself. Not often, at any rate. They hear claws scraping along pavement specifically, or the cadence of four legs instead of two, whatever it is they pick up on, and now it's not just another boring human going by, it's another dog. Exciting.
We pass by humans who are chatting with each other in their open garages, my ears as deaf as hers to the specifics of their conversations. I don't care. I'm watching a dog as her nose zigzags along the strip of grass between sidewalk and road, following along a scent path that would be invisible and unknown to me if not for her. We walk by a driveway with especially bright lights illuminating hopscotch squares drawn in chalk on the concrete, and we cast walking shadows on the truck parked across the asphalt road. I say to her when we are entering the dark again, "Good girl. Good walk."
Eventually, midway down a street more populated by field than by house, she stops, sniffs for a while at some grass beside the path up to someone's front porch, and then she turns around and begins taking us home again. I follow. We sometimes walk on the same side of the roads we just came this way on, and other times we walk on the opposite side.
Three houses before our door, I stop us, lean down, and unclip her leash.
She trots ahead of me to where the neighbor's garbage had been set out, the grass there now three days vacant. She sniffs there as I walk along the sidewalk approaching her, at her, and then passing beyond her.
She continues to sniff for a bit, and then comes and runs ahead of me to our door, and looks back at me, wagging.
As I rest a hand on the door, ready to open it, I say to her, "Good girl. Good job."
Article written by an anonymous author (November 2024)
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