How Dogs Brought My Neighbors Together

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.