Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Tag: dogs
My Walk with Swirl and Punchy
It is snowing. It is snowing hard with big, storybook snowflakes like we made in third grade with white paper and blunt-nosed scissors. In our bedroom, Swirl is sleeping stretched out on the floor on a little girl’s flowered quilt, a half-eaten roll of…
The Mystery of Punchy’s Rankness
We’ve been puzzling over it, Punchy’s rankness, figuring at first that it was the accumulation of eleven years in the dog yard with all the spit and mud and rolled-in dead things that might have fallen from the trees or been passed dog to…
Light Heart
It is so dark I can’t see my feet but the Big Dipper is hanging in the sky so close it looks fake as if someone strung lights over our house to trick us and I stumble in the dark, worried that I’ll twist…
Hygge Friday Round-Up
Hygge (hue-guh) is the art of wintering gracefully. It’s about making the ordinary lovely and warm but in small everyday ways, intentional but undetectable. It’s a Danish thing. I have a Danish friend whose name is Marcia. She takes hygge with her wherever she…
Dog Day
We went to the Midwest Sled Dog Symposium in Curtis, Michigan, today where our retired sled dog, Swirl, was fussed over like a returning war hero by the people who raised, trained, raced, and ran him for seven years. One after the other described…
Love is Patient
“Wait a year until you let him off leash. Wait until he really knows you’re his people.” So said Tasha, the owner of the sled dog kennel where we adopted our big beautiful sled dog, Swirl. He follows us through the house, looks back…
Walk Away
We had a red cocker spaniel named Rusty. We had this dog for a long time, from before I was born until I was nine or ten. And then she disappeared. My dad said she just walked off. She was very old, he said,…
The Next Day
Of course, I come in my office, sit down at my desk, and there are two Milk-Bones sitting here. I’m waiting for the Cardinal to appear in the tree outside. Or a row of pennies leading me down the back steps. Not really. I…
Unbeknownst to Me
My dog has a dent in her head about two inches long and an inch wide and I never saw it before the vet pointed it out this morning. “She has partial facial paralysis,” he said, adding that was why her left eye was…
Dog Days
Today was a better day with my new dog, Romy. I didn’t get head-butted putting on his leash. I can still feel the result of yesterday’s crash if I move my fingers along the bone under my eye but there’s no bruise. So it…
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect.
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
