It had been hanging there for a few days. It wasn’t fresh. It resembled a twisted piece of bandage and I could tell it was bothering her.  Mia had been at her tail again but now the licking that used to just result in hair loss and bloody skin had progressed to chewing. The strip that she’d taken off exposed the cartilage around the middle of the tail.  After almost three years of trying to save it, we had no choice but to have it removed.

We were in France in the summer of 2009, eating fresh, local food at a little cafe on the square in Rennes-les-Bains while we listened to live music and watched the visitors congregate by the natural hot springs.  It was magical.  We were there to seek out the real or imagined paths of the Templars in the southwest and stumbled upon the most charming villages so rich in history with a bounty of local wines, cheaper than water.   Mia wasn’t able to come with us and instead we left her with someone who put her in a cage and then ignored her.  When we picked her up she was missing four inches of fur on one side of her tail.  We never brought her back to that place, but she took away a souvenir.  The anxiety that made her lick the hair off of her tail never went away.

Mia’s tail was of the table-clearing variety.

A foot long and powerful, it was a fine coda to her perfect body.  When it was happy we learned to walk wide circles around it because it hurt if it slapped our legs.  The cats were afraid of it and it made noise as it banged against the walls and furniture. It would hover in anticipation when she ran across the path of another dog, rigid in her display of dominance, or it would falter when she realized she wasn’t going out the door with us. It had a two foot diameter when in full-wag, which it frequently was; when still its gentle upward curve perfectly balanced her profile.

Mia’s tail was the same height as our daughter’s eyes, which she would flutter and turn away to protect from the tail’s wild exuberance.  Defiled and injured, the tail would still swish this way and that, leaving tiny and delicate trails of red along the walls as Mia made her way down the hall to the door, telling us “Welcome home. I missed you.”