A beloved pet is remembered as treasured family member

Little Family

of the Orchard

He was asleep when I got there, his face mashed into one side of his pillow. The pillowcase featured a print of parrots amid tropical foliage, and a matching comforter was tangled around his lower legs. These were perhaps the most garish bed linens on record, but he loved them, and had had me order them out of a catalogue: chartreuse, metallic blue, orange, scarlet, ochre. When our dog was a puppy she had peed on the comforter and glancing from her—a pathetically skinny, ugly mongrel, to the owner of the dark glare that was making her cower—I dreaded being forced to choose between man and beast. At the Laundromat I’d once washed his favorite beige dress shirt along with a pair of my favorite red socks, resulting in a pink-hued shirt with odd bursts of crimson on one pocket and sleeve. He’d lectured me hotly, told me I was never to launder his clothes again.

“Really?” I asked delightedly, hardly contemplating this as punishment. But the pup, I feared she would not get off as lightly. He was not crazy about dogs. I was crazy about dogs, especially this needy scruffy little thing a friend had rescued on a busy road. When he spied her “accident” there was thunder in his voice, lightning in his eyes. His thick eyebrows shot up nearly to his hairline. He puffed out his cheeks and drummed three fingers against his thigh. I scooped up the puppy and put her outside. We lived in a trailer in an orchard in those days, with terraces carved into the hillside and planted in nut and fruit trees. She bolted for the top of the hill. There was no ball tossed. No rabbit had crossed her field of vision. But she ran and ran and ran. For the sheer joy of being young and having the energy to do stunts like that. She ran past the almonds, walnuts and macadamias up to the next terrace, where she zoomed past lemon, tangerine and orange trees, and finally to the top where she dodged among fig trees, peaches and plums.

I peered down at the trailer. The man who cherished the garish parrot linens had his nose pressed against the window. He was watching this lunatic mutt run as if her tail were on fire. She was tireless, racing the course over and over, faster and faster. Her name was Zoe, nicknamed Zosy. His name was BeeKay, from his initials, BK. BeeKay clapped his hands and shouted “Zosarosa!” from the window. She ran even faster. He laughed. As we drove home from the Laundromat that night, Zoe slept in the laundry basket curled atop a parrot-print pillowcase.

We were free spirits, never really the settling-down kind, so a good match. We didn’t want kids, but when Zoe came into our world BeeKay dubbed us “the Little Family.” She went camping with us on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, in-line skating with us in Santa Barbara, hiked to Sandstone Peak in the Santa Monica Mountains with us, the only one to have any energy left at the windy summit, and once tried to come snorkeling with us at Big Dume Cove by biting onto one of my swim fins and hanging on tenaciously.

Home was a humble travel trailer tucked in the coastal foothills, with a broken toilet, no heat, no phone, and electricity that failed us each time it rained or the dew was too heavy. But the tradeoff was being surrounded by 15,000 acres of undeveloped parkland and proximity to a sparkling creek. There I learned about rock hopping, striped racers, newts, pond turtles and skinnydipping. Zoe learned that she was the luckiest dog on the planet, who got to splash, swim and romp all day. Often BeeKay toted her home, exhausted, asleep in his arms, only pitching her into my embrace when crawling ticks, biting fleas or doggie flatulence offended him.

Holidays were celebrated together, the Little Family escaping their broke-down old trailer to splurge on a beachfront motel in Ventura County. Always there would be Christmas and birthday gifts for Zoe. From her, there would be Valentine’s cards for me, but the handwriting looked suspiciously like BeeKay’s. Once believing himself to be original and clever he’d dipped her paw in something and left this impression on the card. Whatever he’d dipped her paw in was indelible. She looked like a blue-footed booby for years.

Many seasons of shared adventure and tenderness passed. Plagued by arthritis and neurological problems at 14, Zoe began to weave and hobble, her youthful joyous incandescence sputtering out, kind of the same condition as my and BeeKay’s love light by then. But in her last year the Little Family reunited, drew close once more. I can’t really say why. And that’s what brought me that bitterly cold February morning back to the trailer of the man who still slept beneath the parrot-print bed linens, their pattern now faded with many launderings. I waited silently until he awoke, not wanting to startle him, then struggled for a steady voice.

“Our baby’s gone. Last night. I want to bury her in the orchard, under the almond tree.” BeeKay extended a long arm, reaching to tug at my hand, and drew me close, wrapping us inside the once-bright linens where we wept and reminisced. Later we went outside. He got his shovel and attacked the nearly impenetrable clay. I asked him to wrap her inside her favorite blanket, a ratty old afghan nearly as garishly colored as those parrot linens once were. He is a big man, six feet and a little too pounds-plentiful, with strong arms and stout legs, thick brown hair and even thicker eyeglasses. He drew in a breath as he lifted her.

“This is the hard part,” he whispered, tears misting his eyeglasses. We collected rocks from the hillside to mark her grave, sowed a packet of wildflower seeds in the fresh earth, hugged then said good-bye. And each Feb. 14 he phones me, his voice so fond and familiar, to tell me how beautiful Zoe’s tree is, filled with blossoms that shower down onto a bright floral carpet.