We Cannot Go Home Again

On Monday, while I was teaching, the decision came from Tibe’s hearing. He now has the distinction of being banned from ever entering Prince George’s County again. I am sad and angry and hurt. I am not sure that I can cry any more about it, but I know I will.

I have been thinking about the eighteen days that Tibe was in exile. I missed everything about him during those days, feeding him, walking him, having out with him on the couch, letting him in and out, in and out, but what I missed the most was how he sleeps next to me in bed. How his warm, muscular body melts on my leg. How he twitches sometimes while sleeping. How he moves from the bed to the floor near the bed and back again a few times every night. At the point Tibe went into exile, he had only been living with us for seven months, but I loved him, and I loved him as a part of our lives. Every day without him was painful. There was a hole in our lives that could only be filled by bringing us all together again, by having us all live together again. We came to Michigan as a save haven where we could be together.

Now we know, we can never return to our home again. The official findings say that Tibe cannot return to Prince George’s County, but how could any of us? How could we live without him? Are we to shun him from our family because of an accident? Are we to cut our ties after a terrible accident? How do people turn their hearts and homes away from animals? As terrible as the incident was, I do not know how we could give Tibe back to the rescue or turn him over to anyone else. He is a part of our lives, our family. We take responsibility for him. For better or worse, we cannot imagine making a home without him. If he is banned from the county, so are we all. If he must find a new home elsewhere, we all will. We hold his life with our love; we take responsibility for him with joy and affection.

Though taking responsibility for him clearly is not enough for our neighbors. They want lives uninterrupted by a barking dog inside a house. They want to walk wherever they wish without fear of a dog who has never bitten a human. They want to know that they can control who lives in their neighborhood, who stays, who is rejected and driven out. They want a community of their own making, one without us and our animals, and they convinced the Animal Control Board to enforce their bigoted vision. So be it.

We cannot go home again, but we make home wherever we all are together. We make home in our love and affection for one another. We make home in our resistance to doing as we are told, to doing as we were ordered by the bigots. We make home in our refusal to be like them, to act like them, to put down a dog after an accident because he doesn’t quite fit the vision of other people, because he is too loud, too nervous, too boisterous, too big. We may be banned from a place, but we go home, we find home every day in our love for one another.

And so our journey continues.

Vita and Tibe in the place we once called home.