a little more juju

Even taking away the homesickness I knew I was going to feel, moving to Michigan was not going to be easy for me. Moving across town is expensive, so yeah, it was going to be thousands of dollars to move across states. So what did I do? I said, “fuck it,” and bought a 2004 Fleetwood Tioga 31-W and then got rid of a bunch of my stuff because I only have so much storage space. Then I packed up myself and my animals and drove eight hours to the southeastern part of the state.

I thought that was going to be the hard part, but if you read my last post, lol. Yeah, it wasn’t. But it wasn’t difficult for just me.

For you see, Nelson, my beloved hound dog, change was … difficult, to say the least. He’s always been an anxious boy; I mean, when my sister first met him, he was nervously pacing and panting in his cage at the shelter. He doesn’t like being left alone, and he’s used to having a human being around most of the time. So when I started to have to leave him in the RV – significantly smaller than the house he’d been used to in Tennessee – for a minimum of 12 hours so I could go to work, he’d bark until he was either too tired or too hoarse to continue. I hired a dog walker, got people at the KOA to check on him throughout the day (this was before I went to night shift), and spent every other minute I wasn’t at work with him. He chilled out when I was there, but the second I left, he was back to restlessness. I even had to use a bark collar for him (it only beeped and vibrated, but it worked).

But then I went to nights.

I’d come home to poop tracked everywhere. I didn’t have any space for another dog crate (Zuzu’s is up in the loft area where the cats’ litter box is), and I know how he is in kennels in the first place, so all I could do was see if my landlord could check in on him and maybe take him for a walk before it got too dark (which she gladly did). I even tried calming drops from Oh, Norman! which actually seemed to give him temporary zen. But it just got worse. He started peeing on my bed.

The final straw was when I went to the Sarah McLachlan concert in Detroit – which got canceled because of the air quality from the Canadian wildfires – and came home after only three hours of being away. He had peed on my mattress multiple times and had taken a steaming shit in the middle of my bed.

When I say I broke down? God, I ugly cried. I yelled, mostly at myself, and flailed my arms and stomped around as I cleaned up the mess. And I’m not proud of this. Both Nelson and Zuzu avoided even making eye contact with me, and seeing Nelson cowering as far away from me as he could get broke my heart. I texted my sister out of frustration and desperation, and she said, “Maybe it’ll be better for him – and you – if you bring him back here.”

I had threatened him with this earlier, out of anger, but I knew even then that was going to have to be my next action. Stef was coming up in September, but I didn’t think Nelson could handle being in Michigan … in the RV … with me … for any longer.

After I got off the phone with Stef, I curled up in a ball on my bed and bawled. I was a bad pet owner; not only had I screamed at my dog, who wasn’t doing anything out of malice – he was just stressed and overwhelmed and had no other way of communicating that to me – but I couldn’t fix it. Nelson is my best friend. We bonded in a way I’ve never bonded with a dog before, and probably never will again. And yet, it wasn’t enough.

So after I’d gotten some sleep and could think more clearly, I called my mom in the morning and asked her if she and Dad could meet me halfway to pick up Nelson that weekend. She agreed, and then on Saturday, July 18, I drove to Cincinnati and watched my parents drive away with Nelson in their back seat. Luckily, I had Zuzu with me, so I had a companion for the drive back to an emptier RV. I didn’t cry; I was just too numb and probably didn’t have any further tears stored up to shed, anyway.

Even then, with my heart broken, I felt at ease. Underneath, anyway. I knew he was in a better place, a house he is familiar with and a person who loves him.

And honestly, my life is a lot simpler now; Zuzu is her own version of chaos, but it’s manageable. We have a routine that I wasn’t really able to develop until after Nelson left – we wake up around 1600 and go for a walk, during which she pees and poops, and then she gets her dinner – and having a dog walker come on nights when I work actually makes a huge difference. She doesn’t really seem to miss Nelson all that much either. I think she might prefer being the only dog; she doesn’t feel like she has to compete for my attention, so she’s a lot less pushy.

Whenever I talk to my sister, she gives me Nelson updates: he’s eating better, looks happier, and even plays with her two dogs. The featured picture for this post is one she sent me a couple of days after he got home to her. It’s bittersweet. I miss him, but I know he needs the stability and space that my sister can provide. Maybe in the future I can do that for him, but for now? I’m happy with my little pack of Zuzu and the three cats (Mushroom, Ramses, and now Hazel).

I’ll just love him from afar.