Dog Bite
Our dog bit our 7-year old neighbor.
It was shocking, nauseating (think blood on the snow), and saddening for all involved. Knowing you have caused that type of injury to anyone, let alone a young girl, is very hard to swallow. She ended up recovering fully, after five stitches to her lower eyelid and several scattered around her chin, throat and lips. She may have a watery eye due to damage to a tear duct on one eye. This does not sit well. The last I talked to the parents they were considering getting a basset hound. Something to help with any stigma or trauma their daughter might face concerning dogs. This was surprising and hopeful.
The ensuing weeks following the incident were full of confusion, frustration and mixed emotions. We loved our dog, but we also knew he was unpredictable and potentially unsafe around our own children. Deciding how to move forward was difficult. Put him down or re-home a dog with a bite history? I made an appointment to have him put down. 6pm on a Monday. I won’t forget that and might never forgive myself for that. But thankfully, through a serendipitous coincidence, we managed to find a family that adopted him from us.
This did not make it any easier. Our house was quiet and somber without his energy.
We now know the family he is with and they send us pictures. I’m not sure this helps. To see him cuddling with a family member in a selfie or sleeping on someone else’s bed is hard stuff and I worry about my kids trying to process this. Why do they get our dog? is a recurring question that we have answered, but the answer is insufficient to stop the question from coming back later.
Something about him being gone makes me want to leave now more than ever. The house without dogs – Frisco passed less than a year ago – is strangely dull. I worried that I wanted to put him down, or re-home him, so that we could travel. These nefarious, selfish thoughts crept through my brooding: if he’s gone, we can travel. But I know now that we had no choice. We could not keep him after what happened.
So now, an avenue has been opened. Yes, in a sad way, but there it is.
Wendy’s Restless Inklings
Wendy had for many years been trying to get me to do something different. Here are some ideas I remember her suggesting: starting a school, opening a local market – think cheese shop, or meat market, starting an elderly home and going off-grid to a farm. I, to my shame, never really jumped on any of these, though they all could have offered a way out of the usual 9-5 type rat race we live by both working full time. And, I even use to work on farms! Both in Massachusetts, one in Concord and one on Martha’s Vineyard.
I think I am somewhat resistant to change. I like things being stable and predictable, so that I can go off on my adventures and come home to the same comfortable environment. Perhaps this is a result of my upbringing. Perhaps not. I am conventional. I have these thoughts about things and frame them in the lens of, ‘what should I do?’ or ‘what am I supposed to do?’. When the answer, which I don’t want to admit to myself, is that you are not supposed to do anything. But I feel more adrift with that answer and so I fall back on what I know. My dad was never a stay-at-home dad, so I probably shouldn’t be one either. My dad never worked in the trades, so I probably shouldn’t either. My dad wouldn’t have felt sorry for himself, so I probably shouldn’t either. Of course, I ended up doing all these things.
Either way, I failed Wendy in trying to help her change and get out of the rut of school-year after school-year, plugging away in the administrative trenches of public elementary school warfare.
This idea of living in an RV for a year, however, was an idea I could get behind (well, we weren’t planning on working, so there was that!) The trauma of the dog bite, the realization that Wendy had been striving for something different for some time, my feeling of stagnation and the understanding that we all love a good adventure couldn’t help but persuade me to look closer at this idea.
The Factors
1: Sienna was too young for her grade. Even she would agree that she would rather be in 7th grade. The thought of high school was not exciting for her. Friends were disappointing her. I will let her speak for herself before I go any further. But the idea that this trip could allow her to enter high school at an appropriate level for her was encouraging.
2: A chance to leave the highway 285 corridor. No more to be said. There are stickers for a reason that say, ‘Pray for me, I drive 285’
3: Overwhelmed by stuff: I have long coveted things that give me an evocative sense of history. I can open an old box and pull out a receipt book that I used for expense reports for my overseas trips 15 years ago and be reminded of things I haven’t thought about since – like writing off a police bribe (it was that or go to the estacionamento policia for going down a one-way street the wrong way!) in Mexico as ‘Tire Repair’. It’s the possibility for things to trip a long suppressed memory that keeps me hanging on to things I don’t use. However, there isn’t necessarily a need to be reminded of those things. It keeps us in the past, and that isn’t the right place to be. I recognized a few years ago the power in getting rid of old stuff. I felt a sense of unburdening that is unmatched. The more I felt this unburdening the more I felt oppressed by how much stuff I really had. This trip would give us an opportunity to CLEAN HOUSE!
4: The nuts-and-bolts certainty that this could actually work. I don’t have a career. I can leave. Wendy is willing to leave her job. Sienna wants to go. If we sell the house for the right amount we will have enough to make it work. We have the gear and the know-how to travel and adventure. We have friends and family all over. We are both educators and can handle homeschooling for a year (said nonchalantly as experienced homeschoolers shake their head in mock laughter).
5: My love of adventure: this could be the ultimate adventure. One for the ages. All my experience planning and executing trips could come to the fore in making a trip like this happen. I’ve always been a lone wolf, heading off on my own. But on those trips there is always a moment when I wish I had someone to share the experience with: when the sun gets low and ignites a sheer cliff of Navajo Sandstone, when the stars start popping into existence at the start of astronomical twilight like a switch has been thrown, when a fox strays into your campsite and you sit there still as stones staring at each other for a fraction of a second that feels like it encompasses your whole life. These are things I want to share and who better to share them with than my closest friends.
