Spooning

It’s the kind of morning where the rain is pouring off of the roof, into the gutter, so loud that it woke me up. But since this is one of my favorite sounds in the whole world, I didn’t mind. Plus, Buddy came into my room and asked to get on the bed, and I said yes, so we lay there and cuddled for awhile.

Confession (Don’t you hate it when people say “True Confession?” Why would a confession be anything other than true? Why would anyone bother?):

I spoon with my dog. And I like it.

First, a caveat: anytime that Buddy sleeps with me, he’s on top of the covers. I’ve come a long way, but I still can’t bear the idea of a dog IN my bed. Gross. Also, it took me a very long time to get here. I never grew up with a dog that liked me enough to follow me around and want to sleep with me. At first, I thought it was weird and not hygienic. But Buddy is a) very bad at night if not supervised, since he’s a street dog(g), so since his usual bedtime partner is working night shift, I decided to take matters into my own bed, and b) he is deathly afraid of thunderstorms and there is just nothing so heartbreakingly satisfying as comforting a creature when it is frightened by something you’re not scared of.

Living with Buddy has made me a dog lover. I can’t help it. He is a very ill-behaved dog so it just crept up on me. Now I think he is beautiful and I find myself more and more likely to forgive him for the awful things he does. This will sound both cheesy and irreverent, but he truly is an example to me of what grace means—he is too dumb and beaten by life to know that he’s not supposed to:

-eat fresh banana bread off the counter,
-consume an entire grocery bag full of left over chocolates from a bridal shower (and then puke them up all over the house for an evening),
-eat our tomatoes and apples,
-defecate in random places around the house,
-etc., etc., you get the idea.

And we are all too stupid, too willful to make good decisions all the time, to choose the God-honoring path. We respond to the lessons life has taught us, often in selfish, destructive ways. It almost seems like we can’t help it. But God is going to let us back into bed to spoon with Her during the thunderstorm anyway.

All right, that was a stretch. Especially because I am a poor stand-in for God, even in a bad metaphor.

I’ll tell you a secret. When I go away next year, I will miss a lot of people. But I have a suspicion that I will miss the sweet, innocent, pure love of a dog and the cunning, sneaky affection our cats most of all. A year without pets! Quel horreur.