Mudflap

When I was 19, I lived in a house with three other girls. Two of them were named Emily.

It was a Craftsman-style house from 1910 and architecturally-speaking, the coolest house I’ve ever lived in. It was also close to a bus route, had adorable curb appeal and the tiles in the bathroom had little sailboats on them. Not sailboats on tile in a tacky “beach-house-maritime-theme” way where you would also expect to see a painted board proclaiming “Life’s a Beach!”, but sailboats on tile in a posh, Old-world British way. The landlord made us come to his house in-person, all together, to sign the lease so that he could tell us, in-person and all together, that under no circumstances should any of our boyfriends ever co-habitate with us in that house. Also, no pets.

About a month into fall semester, one of the Emilys bought a Great Pyrenees puppy. This puppy was a white ball of fluff and slobber for about a nanosecond before it became a glacial mountain of fluff and slobber. It is difficult to hide a dog from your landlord when it is of average size, but it is extremely difficult to hide a dog from your landlord when it is essentially a small horse. We spent many months playing “hide the fluffy pony” from the fuzz before eventually getting caught during a surprise mailbox repair. The dog went to live with that Emily’s boyfriend, along with that Emily for the most part, and we kept ourselves busy with hiding the kitten that we had acquired that had not yet been discovered.

As the spring semester wound down, things with that Emily’s boyfriend started to unravel and she came back, along with the giant dog. We got back into the business of making sure the coast was always clear before letting the dog out for a piss and hedging our bets that we could charm our way out of a serious consequence if we were to get caught again. One afternoon, there was a knock at the door and we opened it, fearing that our luck had run out, to find a woman standing there with a box of puppies. Four puppies, in fact. She wondered if any of us might be interested in one?

I’m approaching middle age and I’ve had a fair number of interactions with people over the years and can tell you that I have never met another person who was approached at the front door by a person wielding a box of puppies. It’s surprising that it doesn’t happen more often because I’m not sure if there is a more effective technique for offloading unwanted dogs than going door-to-door. Because when faced with a box of puppies, there is only one reasonable response.

And that response is “Awwwwwwwwwww.”

So we took all four puppies.

Fortunately for us, our landlord, and those puppies, we only had about two weeks left on our lease before we were all peeling out for the summer. The sheer amount of excrement produced in that time period was other-worldly — and we ended having to take our couch and all the rugs to the dump — but I wouldn’t trade walking around town with my roommates with four nearly identical yellow lab-looking puppies for those two blissful weeks for anything. It is the closest I will ever be to a celebrity. It was spring, we were young and we had pure unadulterated cuteness at the ends of our leashes. When the dust settled at the end of term, a couple of the roommates realized they weren’t cut out for motherhood yet so one dog found its way to an ex-boyfriend and one ended up with another ex-boyfriend’s mom. I kept mine and the girl who shared the sailboat-tiled bathroom with me kept hers too.

I named her Bella Fabulous because I thought she was both beautiful and fabulous and I loved the idea that the vet would call out “Bella Fabulous” in the waiting room at visits. I was right, they do call out their full names, and I will never have a pet without a middle name again.

I think I took Bella to the dog park everyday for two years running. I took her by myself, I took her with my friends and I even went on dates there. I crate-trained her, I took her to two different obedience classes and I got professional photos of us taken. If I was going somewhere, Bella was going somewhere too. When I got married for the first time and moved to a big city, Bella and I ran or walked together on the sketchy trail that went by our first house everyday. She went from fiercely friendly to fiercely protective without hesitation when I needed her to. I never felt unsafe when she was with me. When my then-husband and I drove out west to “find ourselves”, Bella rode in the backseat.

One night when he was working late and I was home alone in that first house in Colorado, I heard what I thought was a person walking up and down the stairs of our front porch. Bella sat beside me as I cowered on the couch cursing myself for being such a wimp. When I gathered the courage to scope out the noise, by looking from the lit interior of our house that didn’t yet have any curtains upon the darkened yard, she put herself between me and the door and growled. Then, when I pressed my face against the glass of our front door to see better, because it was so dark I couldn’t see even six inches into the murkiness, and I saw a man’s face pressed against the glass staring right back at me, she didn’t move. Then when he started to bang, bang, bang his head against the glass, she used her body to push me away from the door as I tried, unsuccessfully, to scream. She stayed next to me, with all her hackles up, as I stumbled to the stairwell — the only place in that tiny house without a window — and told the 911 operator that there was someone trying to smash their way into my living room with their head. She sat beside me as I heard that person open the gate to my backyard. The gate that led to stairs that ended near the back entrance that hosted a dog door large enough for a human to easily crawl through. A fact I had confirmed a day earlier when I locked myself out of the house. I listened, time frozen, as he made his way down those steps and watched in horror as he began to flick at the flap of the dog door, testing it. Only then did Bella leave my side. She sprinted to the door and barked and gnashed at his advances until it got quiet again. The police arrived minutes later and caught him limping down the alley behind our house. He couldn’t walk normally because he had a sword shoved into his pant leg. Apparently he’d been watching me for awhile from the darkened yard before he approached the stairs. When the victim’s advocate called me the next day to check on how I was doing, she let it slip that he had recently served time for attacking a woman. I don’t know where I’d be without Bella that night.

It‘s worth noting at this point that there was another dog there that night. Sadie, my then-husband’s absolutely stunningly beautiful Husky mix. Sadie was on her back when the dog flap was disturbed by the potentially homicidal intruder, impatiently waiting for that person to rub her belly. Sadie was gorgeous, but she was only ever in it for Sadie.

I experienced my first serious bout of depression when I was about 23 after being sexually assaulted by a colleague. I cried on the floor a lot next to Bella after that. She’d look at me with her big brown lab eyes and I felt understood. I’m not so much of a crazy dog person that I think she actually knew what I was upset about, but I think she understood that I didn’t need to be alone in those moments. We left Colorado — for a lot of reasons but mostly because my depression was too heavy and too much for my then-husband to handle alone — and Bella rode with me in the front seat the whole way home.

We decided before we left Colorado that we would take six months the following year to attempt a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. For him, it was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. For me, it was a concession for the fact that my mental breakdown likely stole his chance of living out west. We trained Bella and Sadie to heel behind us, off-leash, so that they could accompany us on our 2000+ mile journey. In order to pull off a six month sabbatical in the woods without any income, we opted to live with my parents and save our every penny. Their home was already host to two dogs at that time and only God knows how many cats. One day, while I was out of the house taking full advantage of my landscape architecture degree to sling poorly-made fast fashion to suburbanites from a strip shopping mall, my mom opened the front door to a client only to have all four dogs take off after a cat who had been shamelessly sunning himself in their front yard. The cat made it to the safety of a very substantial patch of shore juniper in the neighbor’s yard with relative ease, leaving all the dogs to wonder what to do with their newfound and completely unexpected freedom.

I can tell you now that it did not involve returning immediately to the house with pained looks of contrition.

The driver of the Honda Accord who innocently took a right turn onto Churchill Drive that day was not expecting to happen upon a pack of recently liberated canines. She surely thought, as she slammed the brakes of her reliable sedan and saw three dogs whiz by her front bumper, that she had avoided the whole mess. But in the split-second before relief could wash over her entirely, there was a thud and a yelp. I’m told my mom and her client were there in moments, my mom carrying Bella back to the house and her bewildered client doing her best to corral the other three very poorly behaved and unsympathetic escapees.

Don’t worry, this is not the part in the story where Bella dies.

The bumper only caught Bella’s hip. It resulted in an injury that I was told meant Bella needed a hip replacement. A hip replacement that would cost every dollar that we had saved towards hiking the trail. We opted for a second opinion. The second opinion came from a vet that my then-husband’s family had used for years. A trusted, no-frills kind of guy who cared deeply about animals and tolerated their owners. His statement to me was, “Yeah you could replace her hip but it’s expensive. I can just fuse the joint together. She might limp a little and maybe get arthritis earlier, but she’s not exactly a show dog.”

This was true. Bella had started her life looking very much like a regular yellow lab but by adulthood took on the look of a yellow lab whose gene pool may have been limited to immediate family members. Her physique was a bit …well… lumpy. And her head was definitely very undersized.

In any case, we got her hip fused and he even threw in a dental cleaning. It costs about 10% of the cost of the other surgery and we were back on our way.

Or so we thought.

Whether it was the result of the car hitting her or neurosis brought on by the trauma, I’ll never know, but Bella would not stop licking her tail after the accident. She lived in a “cone of shame” on and off for a month, because every time we took it off, she started licking again. She licked all the hair off, and let me tell you, a dog’s tail without hair is nausea-inducing. We took her back to the crusty vet and he offered to lop it off for us. “She’s just going to keep doing it. I can leave her a little mudflap to cover up her butthole.”

So he did. He cut her tail off except for a little nub that perfectly concealed her butthole. She stopped licking it and we hiked the trail. Without her or Sadie. Bella couldn’t have done something that strenuous after the accident and it felt unfair to take Sadie without her. So they stayed with my parents who probably deserve a lot more gratitude than we ever gave them. We came back and we did a lot more things, including having two children and getting divorced. Bella was with me for quite a few more crying-on-the-floor sessions through all that for sure.

When I think back on my life so far, I think a lot about Bella. She was there, right alongside, for a lot of big stuff. Good stuff and really hard stuff too. She protected me, she soothed me and she made me laugh. I’m grateful for that mudflap because she could still wag it so I never had to guess how she felt about something. Bella was almost 16 when I put her down — she had developed terrible dementia and stumbled around our house confused and afraid. It seemed too cruel an end, but it always does.

We just got a new dog. A black lab named Ruth. She’s got those same brown lab understanding eyes and she is as sweet as they come. I know I’ll mark the next phase of my life by her presence. The adventures of our blended family, living in this house and in this neighborhood, the older children leaving and going to college and my younger ones going to middle and high school. She seems like an incredible dog and I love her so much already. I don’t know if she’ll ever save my life from anyone or accompany me on a cross-country adventure, but I’m sure we’ll do lots of cool things.

Oh, and her middle name? It’s Bader.