Don't Fence Me In!

   
     

My childhood neighborhood was magical. I practically lived outdoors—running barefoot, catching lightning bugs, and climbing the tallest sycamore tree in the neighborhood, all the way to the top where I could see for miles.

The neighbors to the west of us had a pug named Fawn. To the east were two poodles, Nikki and Sheree. The only time I ever saw Fawn outside her fenced yard was the day she bit me—right in my little eight-year-old stomach. To be fair, I had been trying to throw a blanket over her eleven-year-old owner. Fawn did not appreciate horseplay.

Two doors down lived Schatze, a schnauzer who, like the others, was a house dog. I had some sort of relationship with all of these dogs, but the one I was closest to was Penny.

Penny was a beagle–cocker spaniel mix—black and white, twenty-five pounds of pure mischief. She wasn’t a house dog, but she had a fenced yard that she rarely stayed in. It wasn’t that her owners were careless. They fed her, gave her water, and kept the gates shut. Penny simply refused to be contained. She was a free spirit with a taste for adventure.

Her trick? She climbed the chain-link fence. She’d stand on her hind legs, hook her paws into the metal diamonds, scramble up to the top, and leap over. I saw her do it more than once, even when the honeysuckle that twined through the fence tangled her way. One afternoon, I heard frantic yelping and rushed outside to find Penny in our yard, licking her paw. She had torn out a toenail—all for the sake of freedom.

You never knew where Penny would go, but you always knew where she had been. The dog doo I slipped through on summer days was almost always hers. Most of the neighbors tolerated her roaming, but Mrs. Thompson was not among them. She was the neighbor all of us kids dreaded—the one with the immaculate yard no one dared step foot in. Riding past her house on my bike, I always felt a chill in the air. She had seen me with Penny, and Penny had no respect for property lines when it came to leaving her messes. I sometimes wonder if Mrs. Thompson was the very reason people were eventually required to pick up after their dogs.

In all her wanderings, Penny only managed to get pregnant twice, each time with six or seven puppies. They never looked like they shared the same father. Naughty Penny.

As she grew older, she developed some kind of allergy—not itchy skin or ears like most dogs, but sneezing fits. She would sneeze several times in a row, spraying streams of yellowish snot in every direction. If we kids were nearby when it started, we scattered in a hurry to avoid the fallout.

One summer, her owners had to put Penny down. I was away visiting my grandmother, and when I returned, she was gone. My parents must have thought it best that way; they knew how hard I would take it.

You see, that mess named Penny was my mess.