A week ago, I flopped on the sofa, feeling melancholy about leaving the house. My house, my first house. The bead board, the crown molding, the 18-inch square tiles in the kitchen. The screened porch, the porch swing. The yard, my Amish-built shed, the fence, the butterfly bush, Boonie.
The heat recently—my god, the heat: unrelenting, punishing, angry. The air conditioning slowly evaporated beads of sweat off my upper lip. The sun slanted through the panes of the west-facing window in the living room. Violet lay frog-dog on the hard wood. Redford stood in front of the couch, jovially commanding affection. I patted his butt. The beam of late-afternoon sunlight suddenly became swirlingly opaque.
And I thought, “That’s a lot of dirt coming off my dog.”