July 8th, 2021

Lauren turned eleven on July 8th, 2021. We call her Lolo. The first video here is her birthday morning in the living room, It was a happy fun time.

By late afternoon she and Ben had the badminton net up in the yard. That photo is 4:16 in the afternoon, and it is the last ordinary thing in this post.

An hour later I got word that Mom and Dad had taken Scout to the vet and that she was not coming home. Heart failure. The photograph from the exam room is the three of them on the floor with her, a few minutes before they said goodbye.

Scout was thirteen. She got parvo as a puppy and lived through it, which is not how that usually goes, and then spent the next twelve years being my parents’ dog.

She was a mini Aussie and an unusually well-mannered one. Not timid, not aggressive, just settled. Good with kids, good with everybody, and completely fine with whatever dog somebody brought along with them. That tolerance did not extend to anything that showed up on its own. A stray in the yard got run off. So did coyotes. She had a clear idea of where the property line was and who was invited.

I stopped back by the house to tell everybody. While I was standing there a front came over the ridge, and I took one frame of it, because I could see how fast it was moving and I knew we were about to run out of time. Then I drove the two miles to my parents’ place ahead of the storm so we could get Scout in the ground before it got there.

I dug the hole under her favorite tree and laid her in her favorite blanket. It was my mother’s favorite tree too — of everything on that property, the two of them had picked the same one, which is the only reason the hole went there. That is the animated photograph, 6:55 pm.

Two minutes later the tree was struck.

I do not have a clean account of it, because I was inside it. What I have is the order my body took it in. Heat first. Then a static pressure, like the skin of a balloon pushing out through my chest. Then nothing at all — my mother and I both blinded and both deafened, completely, in the same instant, and both of us knocked flat on the ground.

I was force-blinking, trying to get my eyes to come back, and what came through first was embers. A rainfall of them, coming down through a tree that was swaying hard enough that I thought for a moment it was going to come down on top of us. The back of my neck was covered in burning bits of bark. I was digging with a fiberglass shovel. I have thought about that a lot since.

We crawled toward the house. We were screaming at each other the entire way, not out of panic but because neither of us could hear anything and neither of us knew it. We were in shock. No pun intended. I never once had to work out what had happened — there is no ambiguity about it while it is going on — but I cannot overstate the intensity of it.

The three-second video is from right after. The five-minute one is the two of us coming into the house, and it is mostly swearing and two people trying to work out what had just happened to them. It is 720p and it is shaky and it is not going to get any better than that, and it is the only real record of that hour.

The rest of the day is inventory. Flowers knocked flat on the porch. The tree standing there dead. The root system levered up out of the ground in a ring around the trunk, soil and all. A strip of bark blown off the full height of the trunk, the wood underneath still orange and wet. An octagonal window on the brick side of the house, a hundred feet from the strike, shattered — same as our eardrums. The hearing came back. The ringing never entirely has; I still have it as I write this, five years later.

The last photograph is the view back out at the tree, through the hole in that window.

We finished the job that night. Scout is under it.

Mom said afterward that she hoped this was not going to turn into Pet Sematary. That is about the right register for it. Thirteen years, a dog that beat parvo as a puppy, put in the ground under the one tree she and my mother both loved — and that tree picked those two minutes, out of every minute it had been standing there, to explode.

Well, that’s it. What a day.