Eternal is the right frame of mind.

Barbara Kingsolver

It was the black thoroughbred galloping through the trees in our backyard that made me long for a horse. But two years of begging my parents had brought me absolutely no success in that department. So, when I was five I began to plead for a dog. My father came home from the office one day with a remote controlled, robotic fuzzy poodle that could sit up and yap. It was cute, but I wanted a real puppy. My mother made me a deal. If I would stop sucking my thumb, I could have my dog. I was addicted to my left thumb, but this was definitely worth the sacrifice. I quit cold turkey.

Pucci was my aunt and uncle’s dachshund. She lived with them on the eighteenth floor of a Manhattan apartment building that overlooked Central Park. By the time I remember Pucci, she was well into her teens. She was a bit saggy and lumpy and her pink tongue leaked out of her mouth in the places where teeth were missing. But I loved Pucci. I loved the feel of her short, brown hair under my fingertips, the click of her sharp nails on the kitchen linoleum and even the musty, yeasty odor of her. She smelled just like my aunt and uncle’s apartment if you took away the scent of stale cigarette smoke. She was prone to snapping with her few remaining teeth, but I was undaunted. It was a foregone conclusion that I would get the baby version of Pucci.

My puppy was born a few days after my sixth birthday. I got to pick her out of the litter and we took her home when she was five weeks old. We called her Mitzi. She had a sleek mahogany coat and was barely bigger than a hamster. She had that intoxicating new dog smell.

That first night my mother set Mitzi up in a wicker basket with an old quilt and a ticking clock that was meant to simulate the heartbeat of a littermate. Mitzi was not convinced and yowled so pitifully that she was soon settled into my parents’ bed. Thereafter, her place at night was in one of our bedrooms, burrowed as deeply under the covers as she could get.

Mitzi gave me my initial, rudimentary understanding of the birds and the bees. When she went into her first heat, every loose male dog in the neighbourhood followed me to school, including one very determined beagle mix who fastened himself to my lower legs and attempted to enter the building with me. Our ancient teacher, Miss Clark ordered me inside. I watched in horror from the open door as Miss Clark, her pale blue eyes bulging impossibly large behind thick wire-rimmed glasses, proceeded to swat the poor little lothario on the head with her heavy pocketbook. He ran off through the playground, mournfully turning his gaze back in our direction one last time as he disappeared into the woods. Mitzi’s love life was over. After a short stint in doggie diapers, she went to the vet’s and came back with a straight, cruel track of metal stitches up the middle of her belly.

In her first few months of life, Mitzi’s teeth were tiny razors that tore into our hands and forearms, but she matured into the most gentle and good-natured dachshund ever. She never snarled or nipped like Pucci. She obliged us as we dolled her up in knitted caps and baby dresses and pushed her around the block in an old pram. She sang along in her own key of dog when we banged on the piano. (Her favourite melody was Strangers in the Night.) She perched herself in the gold upholstered chair, front paws up on the sill of the living room picture window, and waited for me to head up the driveway after school. She stretched herself out along the top edge of the bench seat of our ‘56 Chevy and managed to balance there even when the car was in motion.

Mitzi’s recall was unreliable and, like many dachshunds, she would devour first and ask questions later. We learned to place anything of value and/or remotely edible, like earrings and pennies, out of her reach—although she was known to clamber up ladders and bookcases if something enticed her. She was the mischievous, adoring and adored little nucleus of our family and we all revolved around her.

I think we just assumed that Mitzi would live to be old and ripe like Pucci, but she was only four years old when she slipped a disk in her spine. On a rainy September afternoon, my mother bundled my dog in a blanket and rushed off to the vet’s office. She came back alone.

There is a character in the novel All the Pretty Horses who pronounces that “the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal.” I like to think that it’s the same way with each one of the dogs that has ever been and all the dogs that have shared their lives with me—that Spirit somehow connects each individual to the eternal.

These days I am drawn to the hillside of nasturtium that sits above the ocean. I rest here with my shepherds and the sun seeps into our bones. The dogs tilt their slender noses upward. Their nostrils twitch, deciphering messages from the air. Their ears pivot toward sounds I do not hear. In these moments, on this hillside, we are suspended in something outside of time. Yet, even in our stillness, the orange flowers dance as the bees dip into their petals. The shadows shift and the clouds rearrange themselves across the sky, reminding me that nothing in this world will ever stop its moving.