My husband seems to know what I need, even when I’m initially reluctant to participate. He took me for a drive last night, the summer season in blooms and greens.
The drive ended in tears for me. I saw a dog, for all purposes dead even if just abandoned and forgotten.
In the corner where two sides of a chain link fence met, he had frequented his exclusion enough to make a depression and kill all life around him. He lay unresponsive as we drove past. No change in expression, no upward glance or twitch of muscle.
Emotional neglect of an animal unfortunately is not a prosecutable crime.
In this time of not belonging, of placelessness where entire families and lone individuals have few corners in which to hide and many of those places unsafe, tears were all I had to offer in our society of the abandoned, forgotten and overlooked.
2012©Sandra Davidson