...since the Brown Dog left our side. I'm sure she's somewhere, eating snow like there's no tomorrow, snoozing in a pretzel contortion, cock-a-doodle-barking, and generally doing her own thing, like she always did.

“I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.

You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.

Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won't be joking? And what would it look like? And how would that feel?

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.

I spent my life learning to feel less.

Every day I felt less.

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” 

-- Jonathan Safran Foer

Yeah, it's the tulips again.

These two dogs are perhaps among the most photographed in the world, and they are amazing to work with, so very biddable and happy. They have fans the world over, and I personally love them to bits.

But they do have their moments.

Put a lead on either/both of them, and they transform into Cerberus. They pull relentlessly, like they are on some satanic mission that only they know about. Soleil on a flat collar would literally choke herself to death before she'd stop pulling. She's the only dog I know that can actually pull quite effectively when on a gentle leader (headcollar). And when they see a human being approaching, or god forbid, another dog, they bark and lunge and act completely ridiculous.

Today, I had some errands to run, and I decided to take them along for the ride. Car rides send them into spasms of ecstasy, then once they are in the car they almost immediately fall asleep in a pile of commingled Labradorness in the back seat. However, getting them to the car is a different matter altogether. And today, they took me out on the stone front steps. It was a pretty major fall, and I am damn sore right now. Somehow, I managed to keep a hold of the dogs. I called them a few choice words (NOT 'Nice doggies'). I swear that all of my 'running' injuries are actually dog-inflicted. I just hope these ones settle into nothing more than a bruised ego/arm/leg.