A haibun is a mixture of prose and haiku.
Chessie was a puppy until the day he died at age 14. He was full of energy and strong-willed; the joy of our family and secretly kind of in charge. He loved tug-of-war, chase, swimming, frisbee, and of course, fetch. A walk couldn’t tire him out; he needed fetch in the backyard on a regular basis. Eventually we learned that we could launch the ball further with a tennis racket. He learned to drop the ball with enough momentum that we could pick it up with the racket on a bounce. You definitely wouldn’t want to touch the drooly, fuzzy mess with your hands! Sometimes we’d count — 50 throws! 100 throws! For Christmas, Santa Paws always left tennis balls under the tree. Some backyards are used for grilling, football, vegetables, flowers. But our backyard was Chessie’s.
Last summer, more than 10 years after Chessie’s death, I went home for an extended visit. The pandemic lockdowns and isolation had left my dad fairly obsessed with gardening. He had enthusiastically cleared brush and weeds to create new, named sections of the yard. The Red Cedar Grove. The Fern Nursery. And a winding wooden walking path, with planks handmade from leftover pallets. The easiest way to make my dad happy was to let him show me around the garden. The first morning, coffee mugs in hand, we clomped onto the Walking Path towards an inviting bench. And I saw an old, beat-up tennis ball tucked next to it.
“I find them everywhere,” my dad said.
A brown tennis ball
Sits waiting beside the bench
A dog-planted flower.
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