“It's hard to imagine Anne without Trixie,” my friend Karen said on Friday when I had to say goodbye to my beloved 15-year-old dog. It's hard for me to imagine me without Trixie either, because we were so connected, nearly inseparable, for the past 14 years. I feel a kind of naked I've never known... Continue Reading →
How appropriate that the cat would die on New Year's Day after a year like we had, disabusing me of the notion that the flip of a calendar page would somehow wipe clean the disaster of 2020. Jasper did himself and us the great favor of dying with relative ease and seeming peace at the... Continue Reading →
I wasn’t looking for another dog. We already had one, and he was damn near perfect. But when I saw Trixie’s black, white, and tan face, I was done for. A tiny color photo in an email was all it took. That was 12 years ago. Trixie came all the way from Arkansas in a... Continue Reading →
At first I was curious about why or how anyone even noticed a female orca in the Pacific Northwest carrying her dead baby. I figured it must have been a random sighting and, concurrently, a random demonstration of animals expressing grief. Simultaneously, I wondered how a sea animal “carried” something at all. By the time... Continue Reading →
Our first house was set into the side of Mount Nonotuck, a smallish mountain in Easthampton, Mass, at the western end of a smallish spread of hills called the Holyoke Range. The nearly 100-year-old structure, which had an angled dirt basement with actual boulders sticking up in it, was seriously “settled,” meaning its floors tilted... Continue Reading →
Anne Pinkerton 