The 'Coupe'

In the far corner of my grandparent's backyard my grandfather built a dog house. It was old by the time I got used to seeing it behind the garden, its weathered pieces of wood were stained with black mold and the boards at the bottom were turning into dirt. The front face of the house was built between two trees at the edge of the woods. The back of the 'coupe,' as my grandparents called it, extended back to a third tree a bit further back into the trees.

The small triangular building was built for a dog, this I knew, but not even Aunt Nancie's dog Vader used it when she brought him over.

"Why'd you build this Pop Pop?" I asked him one day.

He was leaning a pile of wooden sticks that he used for his tomatos against it. That's what he did with all his extra pieces of wood.

"For Nancie's dog," he explained, putting a hand on top of the old structure. "Back when she lived here."

"For Vader?"

"No, not Vader," my grandfather said. "She used to have a dog named Sting."

I looked at the dark opening of the dog house, a cut out rectangle in the wall. I had never heard of Sting. Now it made sense that the dog house was so old. My grandfather told me later that he built it about ten years before I was even born.

I tried to picture a time when it looked new, when the wood grain wasn't visible and rotting, when it had a fresh coat of red paint--that was now chipping into countless, sun-dulled flakes, when it's rectangle door looked inviting.

I kneeled closer and peered cautiously inside. The last thing I wanted to get close to was a spider--I hated spiders--and the deteriorating dog house looked like just the place to find the big ones. The thought of actually crawling inside sent goosebumps cascading down my back. The floor was rotted out in the corner, exposing the soft dirt underneath. Several boards on the outside had fallen off or broken, allowing a back entrance for mice, raccoons, and moles.

The coupe in that shady corner of the backyard reminded me that there was a reality going on long before I came around. Things came and went, dogs that knew the same Aunt Nancie I did lived and died. It made me think about my grandparents being young at one time. That they too lived a life full of dogs coming and going, people living and growing, and that somehow I was a small part of a much bigger picture.