Recycling Day

It’s the second Thursday of the month; the day my street puts the recycling at the curb for pick up. Collecting the last few cans and water bottles from the counter, I put them in a bag and head for the door. It will be the second time I have done this since my dog (Buddy Jeanes) died and I think that I will forever think of him when I do this. I’m not sure why he liked it so much, but he got excited and scratched on the door whenever I made a run for the recycling bin. Maybe it was just that he knew for sure I was going outside, but somebody would invariably say “Buddy loves some recycling”. One of those little inside family jokes.

I bagged the last few items up and headed for the bin. It was kind of a tight squeeze in the garage because we had crammed both vehicles in last night due to bad weather, so I made more noise than usual getting everything out. As I walked up the driveway with bin in hand, my neighbor’s two little dogs begin to bark. “Shit-snappers”; Buddy hated both of them. The closer I got to the street, the closer both of them came, tails cocked and ears erect, toward my location. They wouldn’t be doing this if Buddy was around, I think as I place the brimming bin beside the road; he would just look their way and they would go silent. I gave them both my best evil eye, but it had little effect; they continued to bark. Note to self: work on my evil eye.

As I headed back toward the house the barking died down. The two little dogs drifted over to my neighbor’s fence across the road and marked their new territory. It was obvious that they were still unsure about coming in my yard, and maybe they weren’t as stupid as Buddy thought they were; he had only been gone a month. No sense in getting rolled over a bad decision!

As I reached the end of the driveway I looked down the hill behind the house at the leaf cover mound that has become Buddy’s final resting place. It is really a beautiful sight this time of year with all the changing leaf colors and it made me stop and think for a few minutes. I silently told him not to worry about the two “street crappers” next door; I would keep them away from the cats and out of the garage. I told him that I missed him every day but that we would be ok without him. I thanked him for watching us for 11 years and offered my best assurance that we would try to remember the things he taught us. The exact location of his grave was hard to spot from my vantage point, and the changing season had begun to cover it as well. In less than a month his memory was already starting to fade.

The wind was blowing a steady stream of leaves from the trees and the woods felt alive with movement. I could think of nothing else to tell him, so I just stood and looked, without really looking at anything, down the hill. My focus changed and I realized that a deer was standing behind a bush just a few feet from his grave. She was uninterested in my intentions even though we were less than fifty feet apart. It gave me the start that all hunters understand, and when I really looked I realized that there four other deer around her, almost encircling Buddy’s grave. How had I not noticed them before?

I stood there for a few more minutes as the deer looked for acorns on the hillside. Of course I tossed a pinecone in their direction to make them run; I wouldn’t be a true boy if I didn’t do something like that. But I continued to wonder why I had stood there for so long without noticing the deer. They had to have been there the entire time and if they had walked up while I was standing there I certainly would have seen them. How can we ever fully understand what is around us? How will we ever really know who or what is with us if we cannot see even what is offered up in plain view.