Hear Me Calling Your Name

On Friday morning, I woke up from the first night in my bed in over a week, wrote one poem and finished another, cleaned my room, and got in the car to go to a family lunch. At the bottom of the driveway, there was a dog. This dog, in fact.

In our lives, there has been the lack of a dog. One dog, in particular, but also dogginess in general. In fact, the night before we had just been talking about getting a dog, whether it was too early, etc. I slammed the car stopped, jumped out, and the tick-covered little love ran straight into my arms.

I could tell you about how she crawls way down low because of mean people that hurt her, how she flips over on her back and puts up her tummy to be rubbed, how she scrambles herself into one's lap as if she thinks she's still a small puppy. I could tell you about the sickening number of ticks that covered her, the way her ribs feel as though they are about to break through her skin, the complete sweetness and trust with which she endures medicines and tweezers and all kinds of doctoring.

But to make a long story short, I'll tell you only this: her name is Gypsy.