Mary Novaria

I love to see my friends’ dog posts and pictures on Facebook and Instagram, especially now because the pups are so glad to have their people home all the time. I crack up at memes of happy dogs and pissed off cats, and I’m tickled when pets walk through the frame during Zoom interviews on the news. I commented to a friend the other day how blessed she is to have her two beautiful retrievers during this season of staying at home and how it sucks to be dogless. “Write about it?” she suggested, because she is wise and knows that writing is healing. Anne Lamott once said that when we are sick, the dogs are the nurses. She also wrote, “Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.” I could never say it any better than that, and my words could never do my girl justice, but here is my story. I miss our Bella, a spunky, yellow lab mix who was game for anything as long as she was with us. No matter how many pets you ...

Instead of going to the gym, I got my cardio when a hummingbird flew into the house. These birds are so dumb, I thought. But then I remembered, I’m the dummy who routinely leaves the sliding doors open so the dog, a yellow Lab mix, can come in and out as she pleases. In other words, I’m lazy and I don’t want to get up to let Bella in and out every time she has a whim… which is about every ten minutes.  Leaving the doors open is one of the perks of living in a place without tons of insects. It’s a habit that never would have flown when we lived in Kansas. There, June bugs are bigger than hummingbirds. Like moths, they crash against the coach lights on the porch and invite themselves in if you so much as crack open the door to let the cat out. When the kids were young, we had what John called The Nightly Bug Watch. “Daddy! There’s a spider on the ceiling.” “Something’s buzzing in my room!” As if my night owls needed any more excuses not to go to sleep. ...