Revisiting a childhood dream. Remembering a childhood friend.
***
I spent my childhood on the top of a mountain, in the charge of three guardians: my mother, my father, and a watchdog named Buffalo. Not quite a German Shepherd, not quite a Collie, he was only one thing for certain—my protector.
In the summertime, his cautious brown eyes followed me through the woods, keeping track of me no matter where I roamed. When my youthful adventures led me near his house at the edge of the woods, he danced with a gleeful heart. In the winter, when the weather kept me indoors, he watched the woods silently—king of the mountain, at home in the cold. I couldn’t have loved him more.
When I was 13 years old, Buffalo died of cancer. It took him quickly, within weeks of the first sign. A life as long as my own ended abruptly—his eyes finally closing to the world around him. My father buried him on the same hillside at the edge of the woods where he had watched over me for years. He drove a makeshift wooden cross into the earth that was still worn from all the dancing.
The year after that, my father’s job relocated to Ohio and we left the mountain.
With the end of my childhood imminent, life whirled around me—time passing by all too quickly. It would be over 10 years before I really went back.
***
I remember the winter that I discovered birds. Safe and warm behind the sliding glass doors of the kitchen, I sat on my knees and watched them gather at the feeder. Blue, red, brown and black—they fluttered and fought and fed in the woods just beyond the grass.
“They’re so beautiful!” I exclaimed, interrupting my father’s reading of the newspaper. “I want the red one! Dad, do you think I could catch it?”
He set the paper aside and looked up at the cardinal.
“You know, Angie—that’s the strange thing about mankind,” he told me solemnly. “We see something that’s beautiful in the wild, and we want to capture it. We don’t realize that the beauty can’t be caged.”
Capture it! That’s what I would do!
I would set a trap by the feeder and lure him in with something much more delicious than just plain birdseed. I would put him in a cage in my bedroom, and teach him to sing all the same songs I could play on my flute. I would even teach him words if he was inclined to learn them. I had heard that some birds were.
***
It’s amazing what 10 years can do to change a place. The same mountain-top, the same long gravel driveway, the same woods, the same house. All of it is the same. But everything has changed.
It’s smaller, for one thing. Walking the boundaries of the property with my parents, I am startled to learn that boundaries actually exist. Looking at the woods all around me—woods that seem so endless—I realize that when I was a child, as far as I was concerned, it all belonged to me.
Inside the house, my bedroom is now a dark shade of green with white trim. It’s a small room, and this dark color makes it seem even smaller. I remember the year that my mother and I painted it pink. The room was enormous back then. When the painting was finished, I felt we had accomplished something incredible.
Inside of this room, I cannot help but steal a glance out the window. I am transported back in time. Pines and oaks tumble down the mountainside to the valley below—the same valley that twinkles with lights after dark, inspiring one to imagine an entire world beyond one’s childhood bedroom. Then, behind the valley, mountains roll on for as far as the eye can see. The view is so beautiful it moves me to tears.
I once knew a little girl who enjoyed this very same view every day. She never knew how lucky she was.
Back outside, my father and I walk side by side toward the car. We’re both lost in thought—feeling the quiet ache of nostalgia.
“We have some good memories of this place, don’t we?” he asks, already knowing the answer without my having to say a word.
When we near the edge of the woods where Buffalo’s old house once stood, we turn and look up at his tiny plot of land. I close my eyes, and I can still hear his chain snap to attention as he rushes out to greet me. The metal tags on his collar jingle musically. I can hear his feet dancing over the leaves.
Then, suddenly, I hear my father gasp.
“Look at that! After all these years—I can’t believe it’s still there.”
Opening my eyes, I see it. Buffalo’s cross.
It has sunken into the ground until only the upper half shows—the part that matters. Years of weather have taken a toll on the wood and faded it, changing the color to green. But it still stands just where we left it, reminding anyone who looks upon it that a dog once watched over this mountain—and his family—with a steady heart.
And then, racing back in time to find them, I can hear my father’s words:
That’s the strange thing about mankind. We see something that’s beautiful in the wild, and we want to capture it. We don’t realize that the beauty can’t be caged—
And finally, I understand that he was right.
Sometimes traps for birds don’t work out—no matter how ingenious they seem to the young trapper. The cardinal remains free to flutter about the feeder. The child grows older—not remembering that she remembers her father’s words until just the perfect time. And on a hillside nearby, the watchdog’s cross is left untouched.
I liked this story and the dog is still watching I put one out for my Trooper and he has been gone for three years. Still sometimes I can feel his presence watching over the person he loved so much.
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I spent my childhood on the top of a mountain, in the charge of three guardians: my mother, my father, and a watchdog named Buffalo. Not quite a German Shepherd, not quite a Collie, he was only one thing for certain—my protector.
