Lincoln

I grew up in Lincoln Massachusetts, home of Thoreau’s Walden Pond, where the value of privacy is outdone only by the value of real estate.  Lincoln is about a forty- minute drive from Boston, but it may as well be a hundred miles away judging by the wildness of the woods and windiness of the roads.  I used to play outside most of the time, declaring no less than 20 different outdoor forest spots as “forts” with my childhood friend, and picking wild blueberries and raspberries to bring home at the end of the day for my parents to enjoy.  I learned to identify trees – pine, oak, willow, maple, and others.  I loved discovering the quiet and noble, delicate Lady’s Slippers, an endangered floral species protected by law.  We were always warned never to transplant Lady’s Slippers, under penalty of law.  I never confirmed the truth of the law, but also never wanted to move a Lady’s Slipper.

Before being transformed into a condominium complex, the field across the street from my friend’s house was a horse farm, where people could put up their horses.  There was a stable with stalls, and a big field for the horses to run around in. The edge of the field went into the woods and became a bit swampy, featuring big solid clumps of swamp grass that a child could stand on.  The property was surrounded by an electric fence.  If we took a long piece of hay and touched it to the fence, the hay would transmit a startlingly strong electric buzz, enough to usually make us drop the hay. My friend and I regularly jumped the fence to get closer to the horses.  We enjoyed running with them and practicing our good knowledge of horse etiquette – always approach from the front, and keep a respectable distance from their dangerous rear legs.  One day when we were frolicking in the field with the horses, one of the horses cornered me so I was standing on a clump of swamp grass, with an evergreen tree behind me, and more surrounding the horse on either side of him.  The horse practically had it’s dark brown nose in my navel, just staring quietly, in that quiet horse way.  I was momentarily stymied, not sure what to do.  I called out to my friend, but she wouldn’t have been able to help me from behind the huge horse without getting kicked.  So I squeezed to the side of the horse, talking and patting the horse’s side, praying that he would remember it was me and not a dog trying to squeeze past it’s powerful hind legs.  Images of a classmate with a horseshoe-shaped line of stitches in her forehead came to mind.  That wasn’t the kind of condition I wanted my parents to find me in.

Of course I live to tell the story.  What a glorious feeling it was to run out of that fenced area.  I learned a lot about nature in my childhood, about bats, skunks, raccoons, ducks, squirrels, chipmunks, chickens, mice, and dogs.  I had a dog growing up, a mixture of a collie and something else; my neighbor had a couple of male black Labradors that needed to be de-sexed regularly (meaning that they had a little too much pent-up energy so they needed to visit a girlfriend to relieve their tension); and my childhood friend had a couple of dogs, the first a female collie who was the mother of my dog, and later, a beagle.

We used to romp around outdoors with the dogs, avoiding the tent worms as necessary.  The dogs were like our friends; we would grab their front legs and stand them up and dance with them.  It was all great fun.  It wasn’t so fun watching them lick their genitalia clean, or watching my parents remove countless swollen ticks from the ears, but the rest of it was fun. My dog was named Vicki, after the dancing bear on the old children’s television show BoomTown.  Vicki was a girl, and very well behaved. With my own dog we studied dog-training techniques, so we knew how to prevent a dog from jumping up (with a strategically placed knee in their chest) and how to show a dog the perimeter of our property. 

Vicki was a beautiful mutt and a loyal friend.  We discovered that Vicki liked Chinese food better than dog food.  Vicki missed us when we left her one summer on a very long car ride across the country.  As I was saying goodbye to Vicki, I turned around to head back to the car when Vicki started running after me and got caught short by the run leash.  Her paws came down just short of my legs, but close enough for every nail on the front paws to draw a bloody gash down the backs of both of my calves.  Screaming and crying in pain, I looked back to see four bloody lines down the back of each calf.  I was hurt, but I knew that Vicki didn’t mean it.  But still I went away from Vicki, and went into the back of our great station wagon. 

I learned later that while we were vacationing, Vicki barked for us every night, not happy with the house renters and I am afraid the feeling was mutual.  The neighbors complained.  I never saw Vicki again alive.  At summers end, we returned and somehow all I remember is that Vicki was hit by a car and returned to us dead, rolled up in a small rug.  So we never got another dog.