Place Post #1

My place: North and South Farmview Drive in Dover, DE; the neighborhood where I walk my dog each day. M. is a coworker I live near, and we walk our dogs together often.

Above me is our favorite Winter constellation, or Orion. My astronomy professor had nicknamed all of the constellations, but our favorite Winter constellation is the only one I remember. Every night when I take Sadie out before bed, it is right above us, sometimes a little more to the left if I’m early, sometimes almost over my fence if I am late.

Earlier, I was walking down to pick up M. and her dog, Daisy, and the moon was just above the houses, a dark yellow color, glowing . It looked full to me then, but this morning when I was driving to school, I realized it was waning, just a bit, and it was a pale white again.

Tonight’s final walk consists of me opening my sliding glass door and stepping out onto my concrete back porch, having Sadie take a few steps out onto the grass, and telling her to pee. It’s getting colder out, and although we have lighted sidewalks in the neighborhood, I don’t like walking Sadie late at night by myself. Sadie is sniffing around the grass that I haven’t cut since mid-November until she finds a patch that doesn’t come up to her knees. She squats, but I can still see her nose puffing up and down, like a rabbit, as she sniffs around. And I am looking at Orion, thinking about how I used to follow it back to my dorm room after night classes, about how I can find it on my back porch when I’m at my parent’s house.

You can only see Orion in winter; it’s the only constellation I know.

Sadie is up, not quite standing, and tense. She has seen something in the darkness, and I hope it isn’t a rabbit, because I didn’t put her leash on her for this trip. I shift my weight back towards the door, and I step on something that makes a scraping noise. Sadie responds almost instantly, coming back toward me, nose to the ground again. She sniffs once or twice more, then runs around me, and back into the house. She sits a few feet from the door, waiting for me to come back in.

I have stepped on a splinter of wood from my fence. The duplex’s back yard is split by this fence, which curves about eight to ten feet out of the house. It was slightly damaged in Hurricane Irene this summer, and so the panels don’t all fit together correctly anymore. The splinter is a little longer than my hand, and just a little fatter than the widest part of my thumb. It tapers at the end. It is a good six to eight feet away from the fence, and it has been blown towards my house. I have no idea how it got here, or what made it break the way it did.

Sadie whines from inside. I throw the splinter into the grass and come inside too. Sadie bolts upstairs. It is time for bed.