One of the Many Things I Learned from My Dog
Human beings have a weird tendency to project ridiculous ideals on themselves. Until someone or something sets them straight and they learn to embrace and live with who they really are. For me, it was my dog and a cherry tree. Yeah, a cherry tree. And my doggo.Several years ago, my husband Olivier and I bought a house out in the countryside. Like many people in the same situation, we wandered through the empty rooms seeing nothing as it actually was. We only saw everything as it could be. None of the rooms appeared empty. We were operating under a hallucination, each corner filled with our furniture. Our wall art, bric-a-brac, and books. From room to room, projecting ourselves into the blank spaces. Each of us meandering through our own personalized holodeck.Outside, we inhaled the scent wafting from the lavender bushes and craned our necks to gaze up at the tops of the tall pines in the front yard. We...