Useless

a dog's tale

There was a dog. She just showed up and started following us around the neighborhood. As I remember her, she was likely mix of collie and shepherd. The neighborhood dog. She wasn’t lost she was just aways there, following a pack of kids.

She adopted my family. It may have been because of the table scraps I kept sneaking to her. We named her Useless, I don’t remember why. I was ten, maybe eleven. Maybe it was an adult judgement, “that dog is useless.”

She became ours, which meant food twice a day and the fenced backyard at night. I’d stand in the back doorway as evening approached and yell, “Here, Useless!” She’d always come. Our fence was her refuge and she would mostly settle into the night quietly.

Then one stretch of nights she wouldn’t stop barking. My mother raised the window, yelling at her to quit. Sometimes she would.

One night one of us left the gate ajar.

She ran into the woods behind the house barking loud, and suddenly there were police cars and officers with flashlights everywhere. They caught a “Peeping-Tom” she’d treed in the woods. Turns out the police had been listening for her. The man had been reported moving through the neighborhood for days.

Useless wasn’t. She never was.

Time passed and we grew older and more absent from the neighborhood. Gradually, she stopped coming home every night, until she didn’t come when I called at all. Later I discovered she had found another family a few blocks away. Smaller kids with better scraps, I guess.

I think I understood even then — she was never ours. We were hers. She stayed as long as the work took, and then she went and found the next place that needed her.

I’m still not sure what to do with that, except be grateful she chose our yard at all.

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Photo by Kasper Rasmussen on Unsplash