A memoir, told through the animals who showed up.
A life from the 1980s to now, intertwined through the animals who arrived for every major transition: the losses, the breakups, the marriage (just got one), the moves, the ebbs and flows of life, and the children that never came.
My first real, traumatic loss. A Maltese puppy, gone from parvo at only a few months old while I was abroad. No one told me until I got home.
The dog who made me fall in love with herding breeds, and why every dog since has been one. My buddy through the awful teen years, and the one who was always there.
The kitten my dad gave me when everything fell apart. For a while it was just the two of us against the world.
The early married years. The slow, ordinary work of coming back together.
My first dog as an adult, after the move from New York to North Carolina and away from my family. Ten years later he’d break my heart wide open. But not yet.
A friend for Dewey. And, if I’m honest, what I got instead of the baby that never came after two years of trying.
She turned up on the patio in the rain just after Stormy died at only nine. Sudden, and heartbreaking. We took her in, and three days later she gave birth to six kittens.
Only one of the six survived. We kept him. How could we not.
We pulled her mom from a Georgia shelter; a week later came six puppies. Snow was adopted out, and returned two weeks later with parvo. After Crystal, there was no letting her go again.
Born blind and deaf. We’d fostered her once before; when she came back after a year, the answer was already written. How could we let her go?
Heartworm-positive and just done having puppies. We nursed her healthy. Then, in 2017, Dewey died, suddenly, at only nine, and Peach wasn’t going anywhere.
Eight weeks old, surrendered, and brought home to patch a heart Dewey had broken that August. She never left.
Surrendered for being too much at eight pounds soaking wet. Aggressive enough that adopting him out wasn’t safe, so he stayed, and became ours.
Returned to us after five years with her family. Family is family. A deaf seven-year-old who needed to be an only dog is hard to place. Then COVID hit, and that was that.
The full, loud, eight-animal life I ended up building on the other side of all of it.
Grief runs through every chapter. So do the animals. That turns out to be the whole point.