There was smoke in the air this morning — not the full Cascade summer haze that turns the ridge amber and closes the sky down to something smaller, but a suggestion of it. A vague editorial comment on the day. 26°C before nine, the kind of warmth that arrives already decided. Dad looked out the glass door at the deck and the junipers and made a calculation. Then came the words.
The words came and Gus and I were off the sofa before they finished.
We sorted ourselves to the back of the house, the mud room, the garage door — car ride, unmistakable — and Dad opened the car and we climbed in and that was that. Hollinshead. Across town, which is part of the value. The ride itself is not nothing.
It was somewhere between the car and the park entrance that I understood something was different. The morning air came through the window and I catalogued it as I always do — smoke, dry grass, someone’s irrigation running — and I felt the difference before I could name it. Light at the neck. Nothing there. No weight, no familiar pressure of the clasp. Dad had forgotten our collars.
Gus was also bare. We were, both of us, unadorned.
I considered this briefly and then moved on. There was ground to cover.
The park was thin at that hour — a few dogs working the far end, one person throwing something that her dog ignored in a way that suggested this was not a new problem. The smoke had kept some people home, or at least in bed. Gus took his usual route — a slow sweep of the perimeter, presenting himself to whoever was there, sitting down beside strangers as if they had been expecting him. I had other business. The grass at the edges of Hollinshead in late July smells like everything that has walked through it all summer, and I have opinions about this, and I attended to them carefully.
Nobody said anything about the collars. Not a word. One woman looked at us the way people sometimes do — assessing, then settling — and then she looked at Gus’s ears and whatever question she’d had dissolved.
I thought about this on the way home. The collar is not the dog. I knew this. Everyone there seemed to know it too, without discussion. What I am is not stored in the clasp. It is in the way I move through a field, in the particular angle of investigation I bring to a patch of dry grass, in the fact that I was already in the car before Dad finished his sentence.
The smoke was still there when we got back. The ponderosas came through the doggy door, which they always do after the air has been doing something interesting. I found my position in the studio. Dad was at the desk. The cookie came from the jar.
Everything in its place.
The collar question will resolve itself on the next walk. It is not a crisis. It was, if anything, a small experiment — conducted accidentally, concluded without incident, filed away under things that turned out not to matter as much as they seemed like they might.
Some mornings simply ask you to be exactly what you are, without the usual accessories.
I found this agreeable.
~P.W.