Bronco

The pots and pans soak in the warm soapy water and I lean on the sink staring out the window at my neighbor as he puts his garden to bed.

I can drift into a sweet fog working the scouring pad on a cast iron skillet. I fall so easily into meditation rinsing that white foam from the black, scarred iron, listening to the water pour.

Tonight, however, I'm interrupted by movement out the window. My neighbor is working one final evening in his garden. The vegetables and herbs have been harvested and last night's frost took care of the rest. November sidles up, and as always, there is the warm sadness. I stare at the man with the shovel longer than I would ordinarily. He's worked out there for six straight months, but  this will be his last visit of the season.

I assume it's the lingering at the window that allows me to notice there's something different about him tonight. I can't say what it is other than his pace has changed. He's a wiry, rapid motion type guy most days. He talks fast, and moves in tight turns with abrupt gestures. But tonight everything is slow and methodical.

Then again, maybe it's just that I won't see him in his back yard anymore this season, maybe that's why I decide to leave the sink and wander out to say hi.

Later I'll question that decision. Perhaps I should have minded my own business.

As I get up to my old worn white picket fence I stop talking and see that he isn't in his garden after all. He's digging a hole quite a ways from it. There, next to him, beneath a clean white sheet on the leaf strewn lawn, is his German Shepherd, Bronco.

I think a man should be given his privacy when burying a dog. I don't think it helps to have much of anyone around. But later he will say he was glad I talked with him.

He tells me Bronco was diagnosed with advanced cancer, that he had been in a lot of pain and a vet had  put him down only two hours earlier.

He tells me he never gets used to this, that this is the fourth dog he's buried since his days growing up on the farm in Morrison County, and no death has taught him how to better handle the next one.

Then he says, and this will stick in my head for a while, "There's no wisdom I've come across, or read about, that helps me see the nobility in loss. Loss is just pain, and you tire of it."

He had lost four dogs, but what was in that mournful questioning was also the death of his wife two years earlier.

Perhaps he thought the years would make the questions go away, or make them less vexing. He wanted the beginnings of a serenity that he assumed old age would bring, and he was frustrated, because what came was little more than compounded loss and its accompanying fatigue.

I felt out of place. I didn't belong there. I had no helpful philosophy to dispense. I couldn't even reach him from my side of the fence to pat his shoulder. I offered the well-worn "I'm sorry, Dan" and told him I wished there were something I could do.

Back at my sink, the water had grown cold and the filthy pans looked daunting. The sun had gone down so the kitchen didn't have the inviting golden glow any longer. The white overhead light washed everything in a bland hue so I shut in off, and went upstairs, telling myself I'd clean up in the morning.

At the top of the stairs I passed the hallway window and saw my neighbor in the distance lowering the dog into the hole. Then, rather than push the dirt over the hound, he wandered off. Not to his house, but away from the yard, down the block, slowly disappearing into the park across the street.