The local goss

 

"Ever notice that almost all the memorials are on the straightaways," he said, after telling me he'd worked for the highways. Almost got in an accident once, but stopped as a bus turned left in front of traffic. A young woman was run off the road. She got out of her car and ran after the bus. "I don't have many regrets in life," he said. "But I wish I'd backed her up." He looked with interest at Lilith, but wouldn't touch her. No one can touch his dog, a heeler, not even the vet. He holds the dog around the neck with one arm, puts the other around the body so the vet can have look. He punctuated his comments with his red pruner, as we talked over the driveway gate. 

 

"It's like Peyton Place," he said laughing, our next interlocutor. His stories unfolded about a woman attacked by two geese, then by the geese's owner. A rooster that had cost $1500 that his dog had killed. "Got a receipt for that?" he asked. Of course not. The drug dealer whose wife left him, twice, though in-between times he begged and she came back. Left him and the kids the second time. The hoarders across the street seem to have disappeared. Someone described them as "giddy" to be leaving. But their stuff didn't move with them: the limp flag, the trucks covered with old containers of oil, the folded table, the picnic bench covered in stuff, the house with sad windows. Those are still there.

And then the dharma friend with his dog of the bad back, dressed in a rain coat that crinkled back and forth with her tail. She and Lilith sniffed; she lifted her leg to put it down on Lilith, who feigned a counter-attack. I don't think I'd ever met him except in a small square on zoom, so it felt good to attach face and voice to body and dog. We've been reduced to pieces for so long, portraits of ourselves projected out, oddly divorced from our lower bodies. 

 

At the farthest point of our long walk, as I talked to a woman whose dog was not friendly--her other dog is a German shepherd who's mean--Lilith developed a limp. She hobbled down the road, and I promised her we would turn back at the end of the street we were on. But then we met the man with the pruners; after I'd talked to him for a long while, Lilith set forth without a limp, clearly wanting to go home in the misty rain.