Celia Allgood, who lived across the street from my childhood home, had no legs and nearly a dozen dogs.
Her house smelled like warm wet hair and dog food. One of the dogs, aptly named Buttons, was the ugliest, meanest, most unpleasant beast imaginable. Buttons was the butt of family jokes, and we thought of clever ways to stab him with needles or sew him to train tracks. I don't know if I will ever fully understand why Celia kept company with this four-legged hobgoblin.
Paralyzed and widowed, Celia was the eternal dog-loving fountain of needs: turn off the sprinkler, find the missing dog, mow the lawn, chop the firewood, open the dog-door, change the light bulb, till the garden, defend against evil dog snatchers, etc. Her requests always seemed to interrupt the most important activity of the day, so my whole life was filled with Celia-avoiding strategy.
This attitude changed the last time I ever saw her. One evening she requested my service and I was too old to play dumb. During this visit Celia surprised me with a smart, pleasant, and conversational demeanor. And she gave me a gift--something warm for me to wear while in England.
Ignoring the habit of avoiding her, I carefully inspected her gift in my hands, thinking what a great job I'd done at turning my high-potential childhood into a dog-hating fountain of wasted video-gaming hours.
And I wasn't the only one avoiding her. As far as I could tell during my brief and unwilling visits over the years, the wall-covering collage of old family pictures stopped being replaced around the mid-70's.
I'd never met them before, but these family members were much more visible after Celia's death. Dividing assets is always a big task and requires the most heated passions to accomplish. The dogs were not assets, of course, but were divided still the same. They lost all value the moment Celia died. Then they disappeared--Buttons too--blanketing our neighborhood with creepy silence.