Remington. Still Gone. Still Here.

7 months and a week. I wonder and wonder when the sharp pain will fade to comfortable memories. I think about Amber, now, and find only quiet, warm, increasingly spare recollections. (If my mind's lens zooms in onto the morning she died, I can still cry.) But it was 2 years--two!--after she died before I could get around the untidy emotional lump that filled my available dog-loving spaces to think about getting another dog. And it was months after Remington came home before I managed to stop comparing him at every misbehavior to beautiful Amber.

So I know that I have a long way to go. One is supposed to learn such things from history.

At a stationery shop, browsing through greeting cards. A big yellow dog stands alone, quietly gazing at the invitation offered by a half-frozen stream meandering into the distance among misty trees. Just like Remington, standing on the edge of the path plowed through the Oregon forest, its surface hidden beneath February's winter water and ice, crowded on either side by the forest's understory. Gazing into the distance, wanting as always to explore strange new worlds but not at the cost of walking through icy slush, quiet, perhaps gazing farther than I can possibly see, around the bend, just three weeks further on and an infinite distance beyond where I can walk--I, suspecting that his tumor had again begun to hemorrhage but not yet knowing for sure, wanting to take him walking and walking forever, never stopping, but stymied by the deep and freezing waters.

Now it's a week later and I had to go back and buy that photo. I took none in those frosty Klamath woods while we were there. Photo by Keith Carter