![]() And maybe so, found as she was, running along a rural highway on the flank of a mesa 10,000 feet above the sea. Half fox, people say, when they see her out walking. And then she is gone, off about her own business, smelling or eating or watching or dashing about in seemingly random ways that no doubt have their own sacred order-the base order being, if I had to guess, pure joy. We two are bodies here for a moment, it seems to say, so let’s lean and rest and revel in this one point of shared warmth. ![]() The press is brief, but firm-you feel the touch as bone to bone. If you are chummy and the moment is light, and you are sitting beside each other on a couch, it will be her forehead into your shoulder. If you are new, and she is tentative, but approves, and you know the right places to scratch her under her collar or just beneath her ears, it may be her forehead into your knee. When she knows you in that deep way that dogs do, once they’ve spent even a few days with someone, she may lean, with all of her weight, her forehead into your forehead, her thin forearms flung about your neck, her paws hooked over your shoulders. Taiga is small and point-eared, with a full lexicon not of words, but of gestures that may as well be words. Friends, upon unexpected sight of each other from opposite sides of the street, sprinting into an intersection to embrace. The host of a dinner party flinging a saucy spoon into the air at the arrival of his guests, spattering the ceiling with a Jackson Pollack arc of pureed tomatoes and olive oil. The teenager who bags groceries jumping and singing at the sight of a familiar customer. Proof once again that love can draw blood-mostly metaphorical, sometimes literal.Įach time her affections explode into uncontrolled demonstration, I imagine what it would be like if humans greeted each other this way. ![]() Once, after a 13-day visit to Alaska, she reached my face in a single bound from the floor, her nose making high-speed contact with my mouth. When I return home from a trip, or really from any absence longer than 15 minutes, my dog Taiga greets me with the canine equivalent of pyrotechnics: Leaping, writhing, twirling, lip curling, a quiver full of hyena sounds. This post originally appeared in February, 2020
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