Here on the pond

Cleaning out the Lilly beds too soon, it really was too cold, still damp, wet, the ground frozen beneath mud. She should have raked out the dead leaves in the fall, but November had been dark and cold, and already they were cocooning indoors. Winter had come too quickly just as it was leaving too slowly, (too soon, too slow, what was not too soon? Too slow?) So now, on this raw afternoon, she stood with a rake thinking it over. The sky was leaden, quilted by gray clouds, dripping rain, but not really rain, not yet, that wouldn’t happen until dark. It was almost dark. Coming quickly, this dark, a feeling of sky tightening air around her. 

She bent down, looking through the lily leaves, pushing them aside with the rake first, but the leaves were stuck in the rake, she couldn’t tell what wanted to release and what leaves didn’t. Some were clearly dead, packed in around others with green at the edges, maybe attached to something, to another part of this thing, a lily, a clump of lilies still hidden in shawls of protective dead growth. This thing winter did. Freezing the juice from living leaves, so they would blanket what was to be saved beneath the frozen mud. Some came away. She put down the rake, bent, began using her hands. Could feel between her fingers what was coming apart easily, and what was still attached, still delicately bonded to the real life below but for what purpose? She didn’t care. Every day it had been first snowing then hailing then raining, every day bone chilling and too soon, but right now, there was a break. Expose the bulbs, for the sun was coming. Too soon, maybe. Something down there, not a bulb. She reached in, yanked. A bone. A big dog bone, gnawed at either end, The dog, in the winter, had come here with this bone in his mouth and carefully put it end first down among the leaves. It was yellow, brown with mud, no longer bone white, hidden away for a particular passage of time. 

The dog came down the steps. It was a large white dog with a big head and a brown spot behind each ear. It sat behind her, nuzzled her neck and gently lifted from her grasp its bone. My bone, his eyes said in that animal language of looks, grunts, and tails, but did not thank her. Instead lay down beside her with the bone in its mouth, folding his long white legs. The paws then held the bone for licking.  Hello, the dog said, now turning its muzzle to show his tongue. He rose again and laid the bone in her lap. This bone is mine, but I’m putting it here. And then he got up and went off to the pond where two geese were patrolling along the edge, the one goose pecking up and down the shoreline, the second goose standing still facing away from the pond, as if on patrol. Watchful. The dog watched the goose, the goose watched the dog and the woman looked at the bone. It was filthy, in her mind, but not so to the dog, for the dog was beholden to it, and the bone to him.

Pain down her leg, a stiffness in her back. It was not the best idea squatting here under heavy skys in a too thin jacket, torn pants, wet sneakers. Pain reminding her, to breathe, stretch, stand, to look out at the pond where now the heron had arrived. Having seen the dog, the bird changed its mind, flew past, its wings stiff and legs drawn back to its gray body, and landed now on the last bit of ice floating at the far shore. Three blackbirds backed away. They were ravens or crows (the difference has to do with their tail feathers. You had to wait until they were airborne to tell which was a crow and which a raven, for when they spread out, one perfectly straight, the other pointed in the middle, but which was a raven and which a crow, she could not remember.) She stood watching he heron find its footing on the slippery ground, its claws like fingers tapping out words. The patrolling goose moved away, followed by his spouse, the female she presumed. The protective male watching over the female eating. They looked alike, it was hard to tell if the female was doing the eating because maybe it was her mate, and she was doing the protecting. They could be doing both, or else the male never ate, or else they changed places. Last year at some point there was only one of them. The standing male who never seemed to eat, just patrolling the edge of the pond by himself. She presumed it was the female then deep somewhere in the bushes sitting on an egg, on two eggs, and sure enough, one day there appeared the other goose and with her two tiny geese and the next day they were all gone.

Now the dog too was watching, and she wondered what were his thoughts? Were they anything like hers? No, he was walking back towards her now. She watched him coming, his focused eyes, ears hanging like what, like….mushrooms, she thought, like big…oh, she couldn’t think of their names, soft things with fuzzy skins that would fold if you picked it up by one edge, fold like these ears no, this was silly. Big as donkey ears, was what. Only hanging down like soft flayed mice. Moving closer, steadily, focused on his intention and thoughtless, without contradictions or reprehensions or ulterior motivations or hidden agendas or any other metaphor or rhetorical ideations, just a dog coming back for his bone. Dog. Bone. No understanding of how it had arrived in her lap. No clue, no memory of the moments before when he had left it there, or when he had first discovered it, and certain nothing so far back as deep in the winter when he’d carried it out of the house, sat in the snow for a few moments under a weak sun, then lying under that sun, spread out on his back, feet in the air and the bone underneath. Perhaps the dog remembered the feel of the bone against its spine, My bone. Mine.

And how had it gotten into the lily bed? The dog was bad at this. He would bring those objects that meant most to him at this one instant, a moment he would never remember, which was neither too soon or not soon enough, carrying it carefully in his mouth because it was a long bone and would fall out if he didn’t manage the exact center, the point of gravity (she was trying to remember what that was called but instead remembered the name of the mushrooms. Portabellos. And that they were round, nothing at all like the ear of a dog, except maybe in the way it felt, soft and plush when held). In the winter, the dog had stopped in front of the lily bed, dropped the bone on the ground and began digging with its front paws. Very intently, it had dug, flinging the hard soil to one side. Then it deposited the bone in the lily bed behind the hole. It pushed some of the dirt back over the empty hole and gone away.  She remembered laughing. How she and her husband had stood watching at the window, laughing. Not at the dog, but in concert at what the dog had in its mind about burying a bone.

Then the clouds overran the sky and the rain began, and she and the dog went inside. Her husband sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee. It’s the end of everything, he said, showing her his laptop screen where Notre Dame was in flames.