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Spring turned to summer. Families went away on vacations to the Cape or Maine or Martha's Vineyard, taking their dogs with them or boarding them at kennels. The park was quiet and hot and smelled of mown grass and car exhaust. Gardeners in sun hats and rubber clogs worked in the community gardens; young parents who could not afford to go on vacation pushed strollers to the elementary school playground and then across the soccer field and into the park for a picnic or to nap on a blanket under the big spreading maple tree that stood alone in the bowl-like meadow. In the background floated the oceanic roar of the Massachusetts Turnpike. No new signs about dogs were posted; the old polite ones faded in the sun and eventually were torn down or blew away.
In September, just after school was back in session and the evenings were turning cool, the aldermen voted to grant a three-month trial period to dog park proponents. The meadow of Baldwin Park would be "off-leash" between 8:00 A.M. and 10:00 A.M. on weekdays, and for two hours on Saturday and Sunday evenings. If all went well, these hours would be expanded. An editorial in favor of the dog park appeared the next day in the Gazette, pointing out that Littlefield had historically embraced freethinking. Community gardens occupied half an acre of Baldwin Park; Clean Up Littlefield Day was an institution, as was Celebrate Your Heritage Day (twenty-two different countries with tables last year in the elementary school gym), and for the past six years the high school had celebrated Gay Pride Day with speeches and banners. Let us not be guided by visions of what could go wrong, wrote the editorialist, but by what could go right. Certainly we are tolerant enough of our fellow creatures to designate an off-leash area in Baldwin Park. That same morning, a woman named Margaret Downing drove her dog, Binx, into town for a walk in the meadow.
On her way to the park she stopped at Whole Foods to pick up a loaf of bread for dinner, parking near the store entrance, where a bearded young man in a yellow T-shirt stood with a clipboard, shaking a ballpoint pen that appeared to be running out of ink. Canvassers often hovered outside the glass doors, and Margaret made a point of signing their petitions for Green Alliance initiatives or to ban plastic bags, though usually she declined requests for donations. She contributed online to three charitable organizations and was trying to keep an eye on which ones did what with the money. But after being asked twice this morning for a donation to Friends of the Earth, she did offer the canvasser a pen from her bag. He was thin, morose, dark, and foreign-looking in his yellow T-shirt, and was being avoided by other shoppers.
"Here's to a better world," she said, handing him the pen.
He frowned as if she'd made an off-color remark and took the pen without thanking her. Walking quickly to her car, she passed a small, portly black woman in an orange turban; normally Margaret would have made an effort to smile at the woman, even more out of place in the Whole Foods parking lot than the canvasser, but she kept her head down, feeling his eyes on her still as she climbed into her Volvo station wagon, the back window decorated with Nature Conservancy and Sierra Club decals. Had he thought she was being snide?
She was glad to find she had the park all to herself; by ten o'clock the dog owners and professional dog walkers who visited each morning had come and gone. Against a taut blue sky the heavy crowns of oaks and maples were dark green, interrupted here and there by a few gold leaves.
Her dog was a black Lab, still a puppy at ten months old, a big, handsome, sleek animal, already almost sixty pounds. She didn't often let him off his leash; despite months of puppy kindergarten, he didn't come when she called, he rolled in dead things, and he jumped into any kind of water. You accept certain responsibilities, the breeder had told her, when you have a large dog, and one of them is simply holding on to it.
Excerpted from The Dogs of Littlefield by Suzanne Berne. Copyright © 2016 by Suzanne Berne. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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