A little dog died ...

We take turns cooking dinner here in our apartment.  Monday was my night to cook - very easy because Richard had fixed his super risotto the day before and there were lots of leftovers.  I put a couple portions in the casserole dish to bake, and prepared a potful of carrots and asparagus to go along.  While things heated, I watched the street below.  6:30-ish ... tail end of the traffic rush ... drizzling rain.

I didn't see the car hit the dog.  What I saw was the man getting out of his car to walk back and pick up the dog he'd just hit.  Or maybe he'd seen it get hit.  He carried the small white animal gently, his hands under the shoulders and hips.  He laid it down on the parking strip, close to the sidewalk.  The poor little dog's legs twitched for a moment and then drooped.  The man went back to his car and moved on, leaving the little canine on the ground.

Maybe it was new to the neighborhood, a puppy, and hadn't learned the rules of the road yet?

Richard watched too, commenting he was pretty sure he'd seen that dog patrolling a few houses to the right.  The large, curly-haired white dog, next door to where this little one now lay, is the noisy one, barking at every passerby.  The fat, shaggy, golden brown dog who lives in the house in front of which this corpse now rested, came out to sniff:  first the butt, then the belly, then the face.  No connection, no response.  Que pena!  Pobrecito!

Cars passed.  The rain stopped.  People walked by, both on the sidewalk and on the street.  We ate our risotto with vegetables and then Richard moved into the kitchen to clean up, while I walked downstairs and next door to the grocery store for a box of grapefruit juice.

When I came back to my window, I watched two young men stand in the grassy median of the street.  Each hefted his back pack as well as some tool in the hand.  As they walked out of the median, crossing to the far sidewalk, I saw that one carried the spade of a shovel, while the other carried the handle.  The canine corpse was gone.  No doubt they'd lifted a plug of grass in the median and interred the little dog.  Rest in Peace.

Photo taken Wednesday night around 7 pm.  

I don't think the men had any connection to the little dog except that they saw a fellow creature in need of burial.  They left the shovel pieces somewhere behind that plywood-paneled truck and walked on down the sidewalk to the left.

"Lyf so short ... The craft so long to learn."  ........ Chaucer