Sandiversary

One year ago today, Sandy came to live with us.

We fostered a bunch of dogs during the pandemic, and collectively they had convinced me that dogs were high-maintenance animals. I was not sure I had done a sensible thing, bringing home a permanent dog. She was so frightened, her stumpy tail tightly tucked.

And then, slowly, she unfurled. She decided she could trust us. She learned to rely on having food in her dish and walks at regular intervals and occasional treats. She learned the sound of our cars in the driveway and our feet on the sidewalks. (She does sometimes get a little confused about whether it's Stella on the front porch (exciting) or the mailman on the front porch (worrying), but we all have our little moments of confusion.)

The part I wasn't expecting is that I have also learned to rely on her. If I am feeling a little down I can call her name and she will come running to sit next to me. When I come home at the end of the day she comes racing to greet me, her tail wagging like an affection-powered helicopter rotor preparing for liftoff. "I missed you too," I tell her.

She is stretched out next to me as I type, making contented little Chewbacca noises. She is still sometimes cautious about men she doesn't know -- it took her months to stop flinching if Elwood made a sudden move -- but she is an agreeable girl these days, willing to make new acquaintances.

Tonight I asked Elwood to save out a little bit of the ground pork he was cooking up for dinner, and Stella and I gave it to Sandy after her evening walk. "This," she said with her eloquent brown eyes, "is the most delicious thing I have eaten in a very long time." You may be skeptical about my capacity to interpret the language of Dog Eyes reliably, but twelve months in I'm pretty well acquainted with this particular dialect of Dog Eyes.

I wasn't sure, a year ago, that it made sense to act on the Dog Eyes message I thought I was getting. "Maybe," she seemed to be saying, "you could help me out here, Nice Lady? Because I don't like it here in this crate at all. Maybe I could go with you? Maybe that would be good?"

And do you know, she was right about that.