It’s raining today, and the dog’s asleep on her bed. She was up here on the couch an hour ago, but when I took away the plastic bone—rather, when she took away the plastic bone, taking advantage of a momentary distraction to steal it off to a corner where she could have swallowed pieces in peace—the couch’s allure vanished. She’ll be up here again later, when it’s the only way I can calm her down. I’m going to need every trick I know. It’s raining today.
We’d lived here for almost a year when we got the puppy, which means we’d lived here for almost a year before we realized how immediately and severely the backyard, and specifically the corner of the backyard leading to our backdoor, floods. Water atop slop atop mud, all so thick and soupy and soaked that once, when the dog’s reentry through the backdoor coincided with my wife coming home through the front door, the ensuing scramble to greet the female left a big brown dripping hunk clinging halfway up a hallway wall, with other, both smaller and larger, pieces splattered underneath and the floor two moppings and two vacuumings away from tolerability (it was further from cleanliness).
Muddy parietal canine art and its complimentary crumbly layer of dead leaves have been hallmarks of this home since we added the dog to it. They’re part of the reason we’re leaving. They aren’t the only reason—we’ve written elsewhere on this site about our battles with the air conditioning and the heat, and the frequent lack of both—but they play a role. The rainy season’s coming up, and it’d be nice to cheer for the creeks again without the daunting knowledge that any downpour will necessitate a gameplan, beach towels, and those little rags I bought at HEB with some corny phrase about Texas on them because we needed towels and they were the only towels that HEB had (I think I also bought the cheese grater that night). The dog will no longer use the backyard as her loo, since there will be no backyard, with her new potty instead a patch of Hydroponic™ grass on the balcony shipped every other week from California (the dog has expensive taste). We haven’t told her this yet, and it’s possible she won’t agree, but our guess is she’ll acquiesce when we bring kibble to the negotiating table.
Nostalgia is tempting when moves come around, and this move—coming up this weekend—is no exception. So perhaps this rain is a kindness. This duplex, at least during its canine-inhabited era, was at its worst when it rained. We’re getting a big week of that this week. The floor will be muddy. The walls might be muddy. All in contact with the dog will likely, at some point, be muddy. But Sunday night, we’ll go to sleep in a new place, one where the mud won’t get us. Rain will, once again, just be rain.
