Free Horsekeeping by Roxanne Bok

increasingly cozy up to our pets, from our wonderful seven-year-old poodle Velvet to the menagerie at the farm, they
will suffer too. I hope they will agree, beyond the illnesses witnessed and losses keenly felt, that the presence of animals, their unconditional love and companionship, is well worth it.
    My husband Scott, however, has steadfastly kept his distance from our pet canines, and though he now denotes the first dog of our married life his favorite, this affection latently bloomed after “Peanut’s” demise. My stepmother surprised newly wed Scott and me with this shih-tzu puppy straight from a puppy mill in New Jersey. Only four months after graduation from college, two months of marriage, and two months of law school for Scott and work for me, we were already parents. Scott bristled at his mother-in-law’s imprudence, but I secretly delighted, and our little “Nutter,” inbred and crazy, barked and chewed her way through our new teak furniture and the baseboard moldings of a series of rental apartments for the ten years it took her to outgrow her puppyhood.
    Peanut never learned a thing: would not come, sit or stay and ran just out of reach every time we needed to catch her. Never fully trained, I scrubbed a lot of carpet, and my impatient father almost killed her several times—she was that infuriating. She craved water and would leap from my dad’s speedboat at forty miles an hour to take a swim: we would scoop her up in a fish net, eventually outfitting her in a tiny doggie life jacket with a handle on the back for easier retrieval. What she lacked in brains she made up for in kooky charm, and she saw us through the first sixteen years of our marriage, surviving six months of quarantine during our move to London, my first pregnancy, and the first two years of Elliot’s life. Putting her down was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do.
    It took five pet-less years for me to realize I was not as happy a person without a dog in my life. More careful this time, through a breeder I found our current Velvet, a smart and slavishly affectionate poodle. Meek and sweet, she lacks Peanut’s high-octane personality, but is much easier to live with. Whereas Peanut would inevitably vomit in the car, Velvet dreams peacefully as we stop and start through New York traffic,
sticks to me like glue, comes whenever I call her, and as the quintessential lap dog, contentedly drapes her black furry body across my thighs, resting her head on the armrest of my desk chair to keep me warm while I write. But Scott focuses on her only fault: she begs at the dinner table. Scott always sees the bright side, so how does he only see the bad in Velvet, I wondered?
    Unlike Scott, I had been weaned on dogs. A largish white miniature poodle “JouJou” loudly growled his teeth into my diaper to tug toddler me from the freedom of the front yard. Unfortunately, once I was safe in my mother’s care, JouJou would take off after his true passion—chasing every car on the road. He limped home from his last rampage to quietly die on the back door rug. Our subsequent small white toy poodle “Tigre” ate only table scraps and lived twenty-one years, toothless and blind but still perky to the end. Llaso apso “Boucher” served as child substitute to my empty-nester parents when I left for college. Alongside my immediate canine companions, my grandfather’s sleek black mutt Velvet hid deep in the closet under the eaves when it thundered, and my aunt’s clumsy rust-red Irish setter and my grandmother’s series of graceful afghans showed me the pleasures of the larger breeds. I remember them all fondly.
    Even the mean ones that scared me I revered. My cousin’s grandparents had a boxer-pit bull mix named Butch to protect their one-room home down the port in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Butch would just as soon tear your head off as look at you unless called off in Polish by