There is a place in the heart of a dog that defies understanding. There is a look in their eyes of yearning and reaching to communicate — of wanting to, to, to what? Wanting to eat, to sleep, to be near and ready to chase squirrel, rabbit or ball, ever willing to chew on a stick or a fine nylon bone? But that look — that seeking of something just beyond comprehension — that sadness as if they know we just don’t get it and perhaps never will.
And then that contentedness, as if we don’t understand because it’s just so simple — that leaning in as if all they ever yearned for was that hug, that rough massaging of the ears, that two-handed yes-you-are-such-a-good-dog affirmation.
Those are the moments when maybe we do understand each other and all that was really needed was a nearness, a companionship, an I see you and it is enough to be next to each other and having a moment together, and all the yearning either of us ever had is satisfied in this quiet moment, this indescribable quiet, this “here you are and here and I and nothing else is necessary and nothing else matters.” And maybe I do understand after all.
The weather forecasters were fooled by Ma Nature this time. A snowfall that was supposed to bypass us or leave a dusting morphed within a couple of hours into a winter storm warning. There were six inches on the back deck when I took this picture, and that doubled by the time the snow moved on late in the afternoon.
That big willow tree looks over Willow’s Field, which I named after Willow The Best Dog There Was, because it was the first place we took her after we adopted her and because she loved walking and running and chasing her flying disc across the grass.
Willow would have been 14 today, Sunday, March 26. The almost 12 years she was with us changed me. It wasn’t all Willow’s doing, but she was a big part of it. Dogs are strange and wonderful and dare I say magical creatures.
Summer, our year-and-a-half-old golden retriever, is always nearby, it seems. Right now she is in repose, stretched out, her nose on one paw, the snout about 4 inches away from my left foot. I can hear her steady breathing, but she is not asleep. If I were to get up and move to a chair in the next room, she very likely will come in there and settle near me again. At the end of the day, I will climb into bed and she will hop up and curl next to my feet.
Dejah, our 9-year-old puppy, will greet me with Summer when I get home after being away, but then Dejah will go about her business. She does not seek out my companionship the way Summer does.
She is barely out of puppyhood and engages in some exasperating behavior. She digs holes in the back yard. When cavorting with Dejah in the house, she will nose under an area rug to “hide.” I am constantly folding the rugs back into their proper position.
Now Summer has rolled completely onto her side and has fallen asleep, her front paws folded one over the other. I haven’t left this chair for a half-hour, so I guess she trusts that her companion will still be here if she risks a snooze. I wouldn’t mind spending a day like this.
How did we build this interspecies love and trust? Her ancestors’ ancestors would be out in the cold on a day like today, unsure where or what their next meal would be. How did they know to trust humans, and how did humans intuit that they could be trusted?
I don’t know the answers to the questions, but I’m grateful for those ancestors’ ancestors, because the sweet calm of a dog trusting me to watch her sleep fills me up.
Hey there, Summer-Sum-Sum. I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal to you that I changed my Facebook profile picture yesterday, but you have no idea. It’s just that when Red — that’s what I call your mom on the blog — showed me the picture of us the other day, I could see that we have finally made that connection, me and you, my little pal.
I’ve told you about my friend who lived here before you did, Willow The Best Dog There Was™, and how we were friends as close as friends can be, and how I’ll probably never have a puppy girl as special as her ever again, and how I try not to compare you with her because that’s not fair to you, and just because we can’t be as close as Will and I were, that doesn’t mean we can’t have our own thing.
I mean, I know you’re not the same dog. For instance, I could go outside with Willow and she would stick by me, and if we got separated all I had to do is call, “Willow, come,” and she’d look up and come running to me, whereas if I call “Summer, come,” you don’t look up and you definitely don’t come. On a good day you might look up and wonder what I’m yelling about.
So nope, you’re not Willow, you are definitely a different dog.
But I look at the expression on my face in this picture, and I look at the expression on your face, and what do you know, I recognize those looks. We are pals, aren’t we? We’re in this thing together, aren’t we? I’m sorry that I still miss your predecessor, who’s been gone almost two years now, but I’m finally understanding that you’re pretty special in your own way.
So that’s why I made a big deal out of taking down the old picture of Will and me and posted the new picture of you and me, Summer. When they play “Mr. Bojangles” and get to the part where the dog up and died and after 20 years he still grieves, well, that will be me about Willow.
But darned if you haven’t found your own spot in my heart to snuggle into. And so I replaced the picture of me and my best friend from five years ago with the picture of me and you from three days ago.
Summer, my little pal, I guess they call that a sign that I’m finally entering the “acceptance” stage, though I’ll always miss her like crazy. I just wanted to thank you for helping me get here. Come over here and give me a hug? Summer, come? Oh well, I didn’t expect you to.
The wind chimes were a present from our dear friends who witnessed our at-last exchange of vows almost 20 years after we met. The chimes hung from the eaves outside my window in the old office and provided a tuneless melody that played during these musings for most of the last nearly six years now.
For that reason — and the fact that Red can’t sleep with a tuneless melody constantly ringing along — the wind chimes had to migrate with the rest of my office to this end of the house. Alas, Red will not let me mount the 20-foot ladder that would be needed, or let me on the roof to approach from the top so I can hang the chimes from the eaves at this end. Before, I could casually reach from the deck and hang them by the window.
And so I bought a shepherd’s hook and hung them in the garden underneath the window, It turns out the melodious no-tune is just as soothing from below as from slightly above. And there’s a gale warning tonight, so it’s quite a tune.
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Summer needed a walk, so we went out on the field, up on the mound, beside the old irrigation trench, and into the woods, where she sniffed around and found the perfect stick, which she carried all the way back to the house, passing occasionally to lie down and gnaw at it.
I wondered if she would still love it after it had lain on the porch for a few hours drying in the sun. Not only did she still love it, but for the past four days, every time we go out the front door, she has picked the stick up and carried it into the yard for more gnawing.
Quite a few years ago now, I bought a pack of Uni-Ball Jet Stream Sport pens and fell in love with how they fit in my hand. It’s the most comfortable pen I ever owned. I have not written with anything else since, and I routinely buy refills so I can reuse the pens over and over. It feels weird to wield any other pen.
There I was, writing with my ever-present Jet Stream Sport about Summer’s obsession with one particular piece of wood. I know all about finding the perfect stick.
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I was browsing through an old journal and found a reference to an adventure story I was working on that I’d completely forgotten. And so there’s another item on my list of unfinished projects. Strangely, instead of raising the same old frustrations, I felt a jolt of pleasant rediscovery.
Not: “OMG, I can never finish anything! It’s miserable!”
But: “OMG, look at all these stories I have yet to tell! It’s wonderful!”
She had been in this body for a little more than a year, and the colding time was starting to return. She had trained her human to take her outside, when she gave the signal, to let her deposit waste on the edges of their yard. He always attached a length of cord to her necklace so that they wouldn’t be separated, for his safety no doubt, because the wheeled machines that sped along the smooth path up the hill looked like they could be lethal.
Sometimes, before the ceremony of the waste, the two of them would stand side by side in the dark, staring up at the sky or across into the darkness, which was quieter now with the colding on its way. In warmer times they would listen to the cricket and frog song together and contemplate the width and breadth of the universe.
Tonight, after the ceremony, he started toward the door to their abode, but she pulled him toward the smooth path. A short length of smoothness led off the main path and into the abode, and her humans owned two of the lethal machines. They had all ridden together in the machines, which were quite comfortable inside and took them to strange other worlds. The machines reminded her of other vessels, but these did not fly.
She walked her human to the top of the hill, then sat back on her haunches and looked up. The moon near the horizon was due to set in a couple of hours, and stars by the million twinkled in the cloudless sky. He sighed, and she too was overcome by a sad homesickness.
They looked up at the tiny lights in the sky, and he spoke for the first time.
“What do you see out there, girl?” he said. “Do you see your home? Are you from the Dog Star? Lord knows there are times you don’t seem like you’re of this world.”
She raised her eyebrows at that. It was almost as if he knew, but of course he couldn’t. For all he would ever know, she was born on this planet, one of many wrigglers who scattered to different homes with different humans, all of them charmed by their wriggliness. They sometimes seemed to suspect, just like her human had just now, but they never really understood. They couldn’t.
She was on a mission — a mission to bring peace to a troubled world — a mission that millions before her had been a part of. “Are you from the Dog Star?” He wasn’t capable of knowing how close he was to the truth. On the other hand, he did seem to be more intuitive than others of his species, so — no, she was crediting him with too much intelligence.
The Dog Star winked at them from all those light years away, and she had a pang of sadness because she would never be there again.
He sighed again. “Well, let’s go back to the house. It’s getting cold out here.” And she led him back to shelter.
He seemed calmer than he had when they woke that morning. One day at a time, they said. Slowly, slowly, one human at a time, the mission was accomplishing its purpose.
