At the dog park
I saw my daughter sprinting towards the bridge at the dog park, and I knew something terrible was about to happen.
Her too-long legs propelled her forwards in a couple of seconds, not enough time for the alarm in my brain to reach my mouth.
I saw her trip, momentarily float, dive, and smack her face on the concrete. She came screaming towards me with blood pouring from her mouth, spilling down the front of her blue school jumper with the apple tree emblem.
I dropped what I was holding and ran, our dog Mack dancing at my feet waiting for me to throw his red rubber Bunnings ball. My mum and my little daughter looked on as blood flowed, offering tissues and shooing away the oblivious dogs.
The girls had tied a leash across the bridge railings as a gate to an imaginary kingdom, but the oldest one forgot about it as she played, ran, and hurtled towards it.
In the end, it wasn’t too bad — a tooth had punctured her lip and her chin was grazed and swollen. An evening in front of cartoons, yoghurt for dinner, and strawberry flavoured painkillers soothed her.
As we scurried away from the dog park that afternoon, my daughter - named after a character in a Shakespearean tragedy - screamed through her bloodied teeth: “We are never coming back here again. Never never never never”
The road to the dog park is not promising. You drive past the carwash, the train station, the servos, the saddlery place, the lawnmower repair shop, the warehouses full of bathroom tiles. You go up and over the railway line, past some forgotten houses, the used car yard, the old brothel, and out towards the hospital and the oval.
Then, just past a row of tall poplars, you turn right and pull up on a dirt verge. The off-leash area stretches out across an enormous patch of grass, surrounded by old gums, the narrow concrete bridge arching over the creek. In summer, someone made a little tepee out of twigs around the trunk of a tree.
Usually there is a Kelpie named Ellie who gets down on her haunches to round up Mack. There’s Charlie the huge poodle cross, an unexpected product of the farm dog and the house dog. Beetle is actually a pug. Sometimes we see an Old English Bulldog named Gloria. Gloria. Once, a couple of tiny puppy Staffy brothers came bounding towards us, jumping up for pats and demanding affection. One of them, named Vinny, latched his tiny teeth onto my husband’s nose and hung on, dangling for a moment and drawing a spot of blood.
There is a woman we see quite often, who wears a snood and likes to disagree with us about everything. No, it is cold and your children are underdressed. No, your bitsa fluffy black and white dog does not look like he has border collie in him.
Once, out of nowhere, she told us that whether or not you felt the cold comes down to how much sex you have. Ok, bye, enjoy the walk.
There is an etiquette among dog owners. You apologise when your dog smells another dog’s bum with far too much enthusiasm. They’re embarrassed when their dog steals your dog’s ball. You feel quiet shame when all the other dogs sit on command. Dogs are excellent conversation starters. Once a friendly couple admired Mack and bid farewell with: “Watch out, there was a brown snake down by the big gum this morning.”
By the time we’re ready to go, Mack has wrestled and run and growled and sniffed until he is ragged and grinning, his tongue lolling. The girls are always tired and usually want to be carried up the steep hill, bundled back into the car.
The sound of the wind in the leaves, the birdsong, and the burbling creek have been a salve. We’ve seen the grass turn from deathly brown to a delicious green. Dust has become mud. The creek was dry, but now flows deep and fast enough for my daughters to have boat races with leaves and twigs. They pick the yellow dandelion flowers that have sprung up everywhere and hold the posies under our chins: “Yep mum, you like butter”.
Spending time out there among the ancient trees makes me think about the past: the loss, hurt and disappointments that add up to being 34. I think about all that in the frame of this moment, marked by widespread isolation and suffering.
This year and all its challenges came just in time for me to stop and look up and around. And just in time for me to say to myself: I am never going back there again. Never, never, never, never.
