S Seven Winters Without Shelter

When we were about nine or ten, our stepfather bought the family a dog. A lovely, chunky rottweiler puppy called Rocco.

We were utterly obsessed with him, always wanting to play, always campaigning to bring him into the house. But our parents would not hear of it. Being boomers, their belief was firm: dogs belonged outside. Not indoors. They were to protect the house and they were not family.

I wanted to prove that Rocco would be perfectly fine in the house, so when he was around a year old, having already survived a relentless Hungarian winter, averaging between minus five and minus twenty, I brought him into the porch.

There was a mirror, and being a silly puppy still, he caught sight of his own reflection and lunged at it. That was his doom. He was banished back to the garden.

From that moment, for eleven years, he was a garden dog with his own house in a kennel, and he only saw us when we passed through on our way to school.

My stepfather kept him mostly confined, as he ran his mechanic business from the property and the gate was always open for cars to come and go.

Our garden was divided, and I argued fiercely that Rocco should be allowed to spend his days in the inner garden, closer to us, instead of locked in a cage.

The answer was always the same, the customers were already frightened of him, and a low garden fence would not ease their minds.

I reasoned that it would be better for the dog and not for the customers. I argued that our proximity would calm him. That he would be less lonely.

You see, I loved that dog very much.

But I could not move my parents. Not an inch.

As Rocco grew, even bigger, by the age of 4, he began to sleep in front of our house, through the summer heat and the winter cold, and everyone assumed it was because he loved us so much.

Even though he had his own house in the kennel, lined with hay to keep him dry and warm, he never spent his time in it.

His last seven years were spent like this. In his final three or four, he developed a hip condition common in larger breeds, particularly dogs of his size, he was well over the weight limit for a rottweiler.

When he died, I was furious. I was certain we had robbed a beautiful soul of being truly part of the family, of feeling loved and cherished.

I knew he had spent his days lonely, especially in the winter months, when the whole family sat in the warm house and he was left outside to face the elements alone.

It was only years later that the truth revealed itself. Someone came to visit my mother and noticed the dog house. He asked what kind of dog had lived in it. My mother pointed at our collie, Dido, whom she had also kept outside after Rocco died.

The man pointed out that the dog house had a very small entrance and no heat curtain whatsoever. While the collie could fit inside, being only a medium-sized dog, a rottweiler of Rocco’s build could not possibly have squeezed through. Plus his hip problems made it simply impossible for him to squeeze through.

That is why he spent seven long winters and seven long summers curled up in front of the house.

He could not get shelter from the raging snow, the rain, the sun. He was helpless. He passed from this world unloved and never part of the family he so desperately wanted to belong to.

My mother was so stricken with guilt from that moment that she began letting the collie indoors during the winters.

But it is something I have yet to forgive. As a child, I could not make my own choices. I could not influence two unloving and uncaring individuals, my parents.

Many of my nightmares are the same. I am outside our old garden, playing, minding my own business with the other dogs and cats we have kept since. But then I remember Rocco and that I want to play with him.

And I go looking for him. I find him in my stepfather’s old mechanic shop, which has long since become a garage. He is shivering in the summer heat, lying on a heap of old clothes. He looks up at me, but his eyes are glassy and he has clearly given up.

In my dream, he just does not care any more.

My heart breaks for him every time, and I wake heavy with sadness.

I have loved all my dogs equally throughout my life. I failed only one, and I failed him as a child, powerless and shushed when I begged for help on his behalf.

I hope he knows it was not my decision. I hope he knows I would have given him the world if I could have. If I had been the one in power.

Because now I am. And I know that if he were my dog today, I could have given him the best life he ever deserved.

Because now I am able. I am potent. I am healing. I am better. I make my own choices.

I and my decisions matter.

I have a voice.