There isn’t an actual dog park in Las Cruces, New Mexico, but many of the residents in my neighborhood have made do with the centrally located magnet high school. Behind the main buildings is a large field where the students (all artistically inclined and favoring black as a clothing choice) sometimes deign to pass their leisure time, skulking in small groups and occasionally hiding behind a stalled out bus to smoke cigarettes.
My window looks directly out across the grass, and my desk faces this window, so that I am able, almost, to set my clock by its activities. The early afternoons are filled by the teens, lounging at recess or taking over the tarred basketball court (I’m never sure of their actual game, sometimes there is a ball involved, but usually not). Then, late afternoons until the sun goes down, the field is spotted with the practice jerseys and orange cones of local sports teams. The shrill whistles of coaches leak through my window and blend with the strident calls of neighborhood grackles. But nighttime and early mornings, those belong to the dog walkers.
I like to think we are a private lot, by and by. I imagine each of my dog-owning neighbors going about their daily chores, coming home or leaving, but checking now and again, as I do, their windows to see who is in the field. Probably, their dogs check too. Mine does, perching herself on the edge of the couch to better see, and sitting, sometimes for hours, bristling at the intruders and awaiting her imminent release.
Usually, there are only one or two of us in the field at a time. We give one another a respectful distance. Every once in a while though, unlikely companions are formed—the punk boy from the duplex to my left and the geriatric gardener of the corner lot, for instance.
Only once have I seen us all come together. It was the morning of a rare snow here in Las Cruces, in December, when none of the area school were in session nor were the sports teams practicing. On this winter morning, we were blessed with a beautiful snowfall, not the stringy bits of dust we sometimes get, but the good thick stuff, that groomed the field into a cotton-coated glory.
It was as though all us dog owners had been waiting for that snow. We emerged from our dwellings at the same time, bundled in our haphazard layers of desert winter clothing. Beside or behind us came our dogs, close as shadows, resembling us as familiars might: there was the old man with the bald head and his little schnauzer (he was a lawyer, I think, we’d met once in early morning), there was the pretty cafe owner, her dog a sleek mutt with brown eyes just the color of her master’s, and there, too, came I, springing my dog free for a jaunt in the field at an unexpected hour. With all twenty or so regulars in the field, we let the dogs off their leashes and watched.
The snow was gone by noon, unable to stand up to the New Mexican sun, as were the dog walkers. But I like to think we are a little less shy now. Or maybe I was only ever the one who was. At any rate, whenever I take my dog out to the field now, we are sure to see at least someone from that snow day, and sure too, to engage in conversation, about that freak storm, or a good vet, or sometimes about things having nothing to do with dogs at all. And it is nice to know there is a community of us, waiting behind house windows for the emptying of the field. Waiting to take back what is ours.
photo by Heather Herrman
