OpieWorld is gone forever

Today I drove down the dead-end street behind my house, the street that used to be the place where my dog Sully and I walked every week, often several times a week. On the way to the end, there is a house where a miniature brown-and-white goat lived with her geese guardians. I would wave to the goat and she sometimes bahhhed in return (if her protectors let her). Near the end of the road, there is a five-acre property on the east side with a mini-pond and three empty houses and, on the west side, a county-owned pond behind my subdivision. At the dead end, there is a long gate with a big lock, but people have cut a path through the bushes and trees along the east end of the gate. Sully and I would follow the path and then ramble down the packed down dirt and grass service road to a pond with a wide open area on one side and a forest on the other three sides. The entrance is guarded by four white cement pillars in disrepair, the remnants of a wall to paradise that never happened perhaps. The pond is so serene, so quiet, hardly a ripple in the water. Rarely do any birds visit the pond; if that happened, it would just be a wading bird or two standing on a tiny island near the shoreline, just watching, just being still. Sully and I would continue our trek down the service road, past our own subdivision with its pond populated by a pair of geese, a beautiful white male and a more subdued female who stuck together, never more than a few feet from each other. And then we would pass another subdivision with a pond quieter, darker, and more lonely than the other ponds. Then it was just wilderness on both sides, the road becoming a well-worn path, shadowed by tall trees and electric-carrying poles sometimes gilded with purple words or drawings. All this time Sully was off-leash, enjoying being a dog in a place where there are no cars, no bicycles, no cats, no noise, just the occasional human fishing in the creek farther up the path. We would amble along slowly, stopping to explore, me to look at a flower or a small animal path and Sully to do whatever dogs find exciting.

When we returned to the dead-end street, we would play on the grassy area in front of our subdivision's pond, which is owned by the county and enclosed with a six-foot chain link fence topped with barbed wire. We could have seen it as a prison of sorts, but Sully and I enjoyed our time there. He rolled in the grass, chased thrown sticks, sniffed at the residue of humans that came before us. I watched the geese swim in the calm water, one of them always the look-out, watching me. I started to wave to them every time we visited the dead-end street and tell them it's okay, they're safe with Sully and me. Amazingly, after awhile, they let down their guard and swam, fished, dozed without worry.

And then Sully died. And someone spray-painted vulgar words and drawings on the four white cement pillars standing to the entrance of the serene pond. And the miniature goat and her guardians were suddenly gone and their pen area left to the weeds. And the male goose in my pond disappeared, most likely died, hopefully not at the hands of humans. And someone moved into one of the empty houses on the five-acre property. And now the lone female goose is gone too. My subdivision's pond, the pond where Sully and I made "friends" with a pair of wild geese, is empty.

It's been almost eight months since Sully died and I still can't walk around our neighborhood without a crushing, nauseating aloneness. Occasionally I drive down the dead-end street to check on the geese, but now they're gone too and I find myself flailing in the air that I breathe and breaking into pieces. I once told a man at work about my choking inability to walk by myself around the neighborhood that Sully and I walked together, seven days a week, often twice a day, for almost 18 months. The man said just walk it. Would that I could be that tough, that fierce, but I have always been someone ripped apart by the world and what happens in it; I may heal but I am marked by many scars and sometimes they're just too damn heavy.