Hope is the thing
Four months after the dog who was my soulmate died, I brought home a puppy. I drove four hours both ways on busy highways and twisty back roads to get her, switching off driving with my friend when it became too much for my joint pain and ever-present exhaustion. I plucked this puppy, chosen for me and named over a month before, from where she was sleeping in a pile of her siblings and carried her out to my car, feeling guilty to take her from her warm bed, to take her from everything she’d ever known. Feeling elated that a dream of mine was in the process of coming true, as long as we could just get home safe. She threw up in the car at least three times on the way home, stood confused but full of sweetness at the rest stops, wagging her tail and gazing up at us with soft brown eyes.
We got home safe.
Raising this puppy has been an act of hope, in the midst of all-encompassing grief. Raising this puppy has been an exercise in persistence, in patience, in dreams seen through to reality but messier in the transition there – as they always are. “Florence, what are you doing?” is an oft-repeated phrase in this house. Things have been chewed and destroyed and (regrettably) swallowed. I have been under pressure; I have not reacted always with the sort of preternatural patience I envisioned for myself, and I have certainly not always done things perfectly by the book (or webinar, or podcast, or the current general wisdom). I have felt guilt over that, I have compared; look at what so-and-so is doing with their puppy, and how much that puppy knows…
Yet I have raised this puppy, this sometimes-wild animal, this roguish little creature, to almost a year old. And she is (has remained) good, and sweet, and brave.
Raising this puppy has meant buying into a future I do not always fully envision for myself. I have these bouts of depression, sometimes twisting darkly through my head, catching claws on thoughts better left unsaid. But I envision a future for her, and for my other beloved dog, and I am meant to be there with them, making sure they are met with patience and love and understanding. And I want to see who she grows to be. I want to see who she is at three years old, at five, at ten, if we are blessed enough to get there.
She is the embodiment of morning sweetness and chaos and triumphant fanfare heralding a new and brilliant day. She is named for the city I love more than any other in the world. She is paws on the counter and licking the coffee out of my mug, she is leaping into the air wide across the living room to land heavily on the couch, she is boundless curiosity about every new item that enters this apartment. She has never met a stranger, canine or human. Everywhere she goes she is wagging her tail.
I have not been perfect, these last eight months or so, and neither has she. But I have, each day, treasured her existence in my life. I have marveled at her every day. And we march onward together, carrying on this act of hope, buying into the future still.