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The Fox and the Devil Dog
Looking for signs in the wild
I saw a fox out the bathroom window early on a cool, spring morning. It was trotting across the backyard, then cut through the path by the marriage tree before picking up pace in the thick. I caught glimpses of the copper coat as it raced through the early green, heading who knows where. It was a beautiful, sleek, healthy fox.
This felt important, symbolic somehow, even though I know it’s not. It was just me needing to pee at the moment the fox cut through the yard. Fox sightings are fairly rare here, and this one seems a meaningful bookend to the devil dog I encountered a few years ago. A hopeful sign at what is hopefully the back end of my long dark night. This reading is built by my brain, but isn’t everything? Aren’t we desperately seeking meaning, always? My symbolic fox may be your symbolic smoke ring, your tea leaves — found in the universal, meaning is personal.
Spring it was, too, years ago when I saw the devil dog. Steven was half a country away in Texas managing the affairs of his dying mother. I was here, home in New York, with kids and animals in various states of disarray. Some of us were breaking down, some near an end. I was here with me, the rattled and unraveling middle version of me. My euphemistic ‘change’ was a years-long house of horrors, one that I still seek words for.
