On a Warm, Summer Night, We Lost Our Dog

On losing things that matter, and finding them again

On a warm, summer night, we lost our dog Winnie. I guess we should have realized she was missing when she wasn’t curled up under the dining room table as we ate supper, as the sun set, but it was sometime between the after-dinner cleaning up of the kitchen and the pre-bedtime routine for the Littles that someone finally realized she was missing.

“Where’s Winnie?” someone asked, and at first we were just calm shouts and whistles through the house but soon we realized she wasn’t there, and then someone else remembered letting her out before dinner but not bringing her back in. She won’t run off when someone is outside with her, but alone? She gets adventurous.

I can’t remember how many of the kids were at home but we all went outside, calling her name into the heavy darkness. The air was humid and the pavement was still warm under my bare feet. Sharp stones. Maile and a few of the kids walked out towards the main road, calling, “Winnie! Winnie!” so I went the opposite direction, back towards the woods and the waist-high weeds, the hill that leads all the way down to the river, and the deeper dark.

I stood there at the bottom of the yard, whistling loudly. Calling her name.

“Winnie! Wiiiiinnnieeeeeee!”

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It’s been three months since I’ve last written fiction. Most of the stories I was working on have retreated to a low hum, barely discernible under the chaos of summer and my paid writing projects and this tiny undertaking of opening a bookstore. Something feels missing.

One of those stories, though, it keeps prodding me, whispering what about this or what about that or here’s another idea. We have off-hand conversations when I’m driving or sitting on the toilet or lying in bed in the morning, not yet ready to get up. Don’t forget what I’m telling you, the story says. Maybe you should write that part down.

I’m not much for writing things down.

Then I come into the bookstore where it’s easy to feel like I’m drowning in stories, like there’s already too many of them in the world, too many good stories, so many, in fact, that I’ll never have time to read all of them. So why add one more?

I’m having trouble finding my way back to writing.

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I threw away an important piece of paperwork the other day. Or at least I thought I had. I got a fresh trash bag and then started going through the trash piece by piece—slimy napkins and old paper towels and food scraped off plates and balled up pieces of greasy paper—sometimes gagging (in PA Dutch we use the word “varxing”), methodically taking things out and moving them into the other bag, hoping the missing paper would show up.

All these missing things.

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We found the important piece of paper. It was in Maile’s backpack.

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On the night we lost our dog, Leo followed me down the driveway, small sniffles and sobs infiltrating his 10-year-old calls for Winnie.

“It’s going to be okay, buddy,” I said, though I was beginning to doubt my own words. “She’ll come back. She always does.”

“But what if she doesn’t?” he asked. Then, facing the deep dark of the woods, he shouted his loudest, “Winnie!”

Nothing. We turned to walk back up the driveway towards the house. Lightning bugs blinked. The air was a humid, summery soup. Dashes of light from inside the house escaped through the windows and painted oblong splotches on the grass.

“We found her!” Maile called from up the street, out towards the main road. “We found her!” Relief in everyone’s voice. A jumping, happy dog, oblivious to the concern she had caused. Leo, wiping tears from his eyes, laughing.

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Missing things, some lost, some found.

I’m still trying to discover what happened to my fiction writing. I’ll keep looking.