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Home is Where the Dogs are Buried
I’ve never felt entirely at ease in large homes or dreamed of owning one myself. Rattling around in all that space makes me anxious. I’m like Omar, my chihuahua mix who always wedges himself into corners, or presses his back against a wall before he drops off to sleep. At my dad’s house in Florida, he’d squeeze himself into a nook on the bottom shelf of a bookcase, between a row of plastic three ring binders containing old recipes, curled up on top of a stack of placemats. I imagine these snug spaces make him feel secure. Right now, for example, he’s pressed between my lower back and the back of my office chair.
My moves over the years have resembled a hermit crab’s quest for shelter, discarding one close-fitting shell for another that’s just slightly more accommodating for the stuff I’ve accumulated than the previous one. In 2001, less than a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I stumbled across the threshold of the house I had just bought in Takoma Park, having moved from a 650-foot square one-bedroom coop in Adams Morgan. On the morning of 9/11 when hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 flew into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center, I was in the dog park across the street from my building with my two dogs and my friend Kristyne, still blissfully unaware of the news.