The Return of Spanky

"Subdivision neighbors,” Spanky and I called them.

Well, I did at least. Spanky is my 16-year-old rescued mutt. I knew he must feel the same way about how the area was changing.

When I first moved here and turned a rugged old hunting lodge into a cute cabin, it felt like the country. Now, subdivisions had sprouted up like weeds. A row of stately oaks along my property line had shielded me until the developer cut them down. So Spanky and I did our best to get used to all the new strangers around us.

Then one day a thunderstorm spooked him and he broke through the screen porch door. When Spanky gets spooked like that there’s no telling where he might hightail it to. I looked everywhere and talked to all my old neighbors. I was getting worried.

Well, nothing left to do but ask the subdivision neighbors. I walked up to the first house. “I’m Roberta,” I said to the woman on the porch. Her little boy played with a red truck. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen my dog Spanky? A shaggy gray mutt?”

“Your doggie lost?” the boy said. “I say a prayer: Doggie come home!”

“We’ll all pray for Spanky in our house,” the woman said.

I spent the next few hours driving around shouting Spanky’s name out the car window and praying I’d see him cowering under a bush. I kept thinking about the subdivision neighbor. Who cared if her house didn’t look cozy and country? It too, like my own, was a house of prayer.

I turned into my driveway to find a white pickup. There was a man with a muddy gray mutt—Spanky! My dog leapt into my lap. “Showed up at the tavern tonight,” the man said. “Guess he smelled the steaks we were grilling. We let him stay for the NASCAR race.”

Spanky needed a bath pronto. But I said a prayer first, a prayer of thanks for my neighbors—old and new.