The GUS Tree

 Shortly after my dog passed away on July 1, 2020, his likeness appeared on a tree. I should say his licheness as a fungal version of our beloved family pet had mystically materialized onto the bark. It wasn’t like an algae blob that kind of looked like a dog shape if you squinted hard enough or closed one eye or looked through the phone camera.  No, this was a canine apparition, a paranormal pooch so strikingly similar to our sweet pup it looked as if woodland nymphs had spray painted his portrait onto the dogwood. It was unmistakably, inexplicably, heartbreakingly Gus. 

The summer of 2020 had already been a strange and surreal season. My husband and I decamped to upstate New York from the Upper West Side. We weren’t running toward the country so much as running away from the city. Renting a “Tranquility Barn” on Airbnb seemed like the ideal escape from the epicenter of the global pandemic. Before Covid, the owners of the barn had hosted yoga and meditation retreats there. Now they hosted a couple of anxious, middle-aged Manhattanites and our 12 ½ year-old Havanese. 

We’d been in the barn a month when Gus passed away peacefully on a sunny summer morning. And I mean really peacefully. He collapsed on a pink meditation cushion and died suddenly after his off-leash walk along a quiet, tree-lined country road. 

Without Gus, my husband and I continued to do our twice daily walks. It was a hard habit to break. One evening, as we ambled along Schoolhouse Road, the gravel crunching beneath our feet, I glanced at a group of trees and noticed a phantom pup staring back at me. Gus? The otherwise amorphous algae had transformed into a beautiful portrait of our dog on the trunk of a tree. I looked away at the road and then back at the tree to make sure I really saw it. Yep, Gus was still there. 

David's head was in his phone so he didn’t see it, and I was too stunned to say anything. Plus I was worried he wouldn’t see what I saw. In our partnership, I’ve always been the West Coast woo woo who believes in the power of vision boards, journaling and mantras. David is the practical, semi-agnostic former federal prosecutor who plays his cards closer to Blackjack than Tarot.

“My wife’s from California '' is his frequent refrain and I was certain this would be another one of those "CA Crazy" moments. But it was too magical for him to miss.

“David,” I said, “Do you see anything on that tree?” 

Without hesitation, my cynical, non-believing, rational husband yelled “Gus!” We ran over to the tree and wrapped our arms around its trunk. We patted Gus' lichen head, kissed his algae paws and cried as we told him how much we missed him. And we began to heal that deep wound left by his sudden passing. I took lots of photos in case it really was a grief-induced hallucination, a mirage that would vanish with the setting summer sun. When we got back to the barn, I texted a photo of the Gus Tree to our Airbnb host and his simple reply said it all. 

“Holy shit,” he wrote. “That’s a miracle”