Dogs do not care who you are pretending to be.
They tell you about the fur and the early mornings and what it costs. Nobody mentions that you will be seen, daily, by something that has no interest in the version of you that you built for everyone else. Four years of that will undo a person, in the best way.
How it started
Good things come in the small package.
Daisy arrived at eight weeks old, all ears and outsized confidence, and she has been teaching me things ever since, mostly without knowing she’s doing it.
I started writing down the lessons. She never apologised for taking up room. She asked for things straight out, without the little preamble I put in front of everything. On my worst days she came and put her chin on my foot and loved me exactly as much as she had the day before. I was forty-four years old and taking notes from a dog.
What it’s about
Rescue human.
Four years of growing up alongside each other, and she worked it out long before I did. The notes became essays. Still about Daisy, in the way everything here is about Daisy, but mostly about worth, and grief, and the kind of love that asks nothing of me, and how long it took me to let any of it in. I don’t resolve much. I sit with a thing until it has said what it came to say.
And yes, unavoidably, it’s about a dog. A very good one.
About Daisy
The one who started it all.
Daisy is a Pembroke Welsh Corgi, four years old, with a remarkable gift for leaving fur (which she insists on calling “glitter”) on absolutely everything. She has an unshakeable conviction that every person she meets has come specifically to see her. She is not wrong about this.
She doesn’t know she’s the subject of my writing. She thinks she’s the subject of walks, dinners, and the occasional piece of cheese. This is, I suspect, the healthiest possible relationship a person can have with their own story.
Say hello.
If any of this lands with you, or you’d just like to say hello, I’d love to hear from you.