The dogs got wilder and wilder until one day nobody looked after them. They could tell that something was wrong with my father and Susan wasn't usually home. He paid them no attention and they knew he was no longer the one to feed them. He who wasn't there. Andy stared at me as I loaded the truck to return to Seattle. After Sterling was neutered he became easier to hold. The sweet one was eaten by coyotes.
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Tuck, the new one, wasn't properly house trained. I had never been in charge of training the dogs and didn't realize that neither my father nor Susan were handling it. Tuck peed on the carpet even after she was old enough to have puppies. Sitting on the lawn we let her puppies fall over each other in the grass as Andy and Sterling looked on. We took pictures. These pictures, that day, my father's hair blown out in the wind. One by one the puppies were sold and I cleaned up the kennel and Tuck ran back out to play.

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I feel like I haven't been sad enough, or that it's too late, or that I don't feel about my father's sickness. There was a time in Seattle, after I had come back from the farm, jobless and isolated in a moldy apartment, when I thought about it constantly. In retrospect I think this would of been considered mourning, but I had nothing to show for it, no funeral or confirmation that anything had actually happened. At that time, the only people who had any idea of the damage were those that were there in Mineral Point: Susan, Ted, and a few other good friends of my father, the ones who come to visit even when he can no longer remember their names. It's a beautiful day in Oakland. I need to get ready for class.