Lucy had her first puppy class. She is a very eager student, and despite eating her blanket during the instruction period, she quickly learned the basics.

We were told that these first few months are the best time to teach her as many tricks as possible since her brain is still so plastic.

Lucy has already taught herself quite a lot. Here is what Lucy can do at 5 months old.

1. Sit stay.

2. Hide in the chair and then leap onto her sister’s back when she walks past. Her sister, who already trended towards neurotic, has developed an eye twitch and the hypervigilance of a combat vet.

3. Down stay while loudly sharing her opinion of this undignified position via moans, whines, hoos and barks.

4. Steal plums from the counter, take one bite, and then hide them under furniture.

5. Jump on.

6. Testing her puppy pen for weaknesses and then busting through like the Kool-Aid man, using a running start and her hard little head as a battering ram.

7. Touch.

8. Eating anchovies on the beach in enormous quantities at enormous speed before the humans can intervene.

9. Leave it, unless it is an anchovy.

10. Snuggling, but only after 9 pm when she is too sleepy to resist.

I spent two years trying to tame the wildness out of Emma, or at least turn down the volume so we could move through a day without steamrolling toddlers, knocking off stranger’s glasses, and inciting wild dog riots at the beach.

I cried, I raged, I threatened to send her back to the 60 acre ranch in Utah from whence she came. But I’m stubborn and I have a hard time accepting the sunk cost fallacy. And so we kept her and I kept working on molding her to be the dog
I wanted, every day, all day.

For training treats, Emma got fresh Atlantic salmon fillets, steak tips, soft scrambled eggs, aged cheddar, french yogurt and rotisserie chicken. She ate much better than any of the humans in the family, and still, those delicacies only worked about 70% of the time. And they didn’t work at all at the dog beach. Emma would run in the other direction while a circle of other people’s dogs sat hopefully at our feet, showing us their best “sit.”

When we had her annual check up at the vet, they told us that she was getting too chunky. Come to think of it, she was starting to resemble a bread loaf with legs. She had lost her sleek, streamlined build. They suggested we switch out food for toys.

Emma didn’t like toys, so I spent a small fortune on imported dog toys made by Swedish dog trainers specializing in reactive dogs. Emma now has a collection of tugs made from organic sheepskin, Canadian raccoon tails, a beaver fur crinkle toy and a chaser made from wild Swedish badger, among others.

Then there were the weekly two hour round trips to agility classes in the mountains with a world-champion instructor and virtual classes with a certified dog trainer in Maine.

Somewhere in the middle of this never-ending slog of training, Emma calmed down. I woke up one morning, shortly after she turned two, and realized that I had a biddable, obedient and almost sedate adult dog. I was devastated.

“I think I broke her spirit,” I told my husband, sadly watching her ignore the overtures of a shaggy Great Pyrenees puppy at the beach. In the past, she would have started a game of tag or a wrestling match in the sand. Now, she just wandered over to sit at my side.

My long suffering spouse, who has watched the disposable family income slowly get spent down on fox fur bungee tugs and training classes, did not see the problem.

“She just grew up,” he said. “Well, that and all your training,” he hastened to add. “I thought that was what you wanted?”

Yes and no. The curse of getting what you want is a sneaky curse indeed. I missed what we had.

We have a new puppy now. She is much calmer than Emma ever was and laughably easy to train. She will do anything for a piece of kibble. And sometimes, if the mood strikes her, we get a glimpse of the old Emma as she chases the puppy in a wild game of tag, crashing into furniture and bouncing off the walls.

Even though I live 650 miles from the Canadian border, this quote from Thomas King feels like truth. I don’t have a horse, but I do think about getting eaten on a fairly regular basis.

I started taking our first dog, Emma, on early morning walks to avoid people and dogs. It wasn’t that she was aggressive, it was that she was too friendly. She would tear off down the path towards joggers, mountain bikers, and dog walkers, determined to say hi whether they liked it or not. Recall didn’t work. Leashes didn’t work. Everyone was grumpy and frustrated.

Hiking at 6 or 7 am was a revelation. I didn’t need to be hypervigilant. I could actually enjoy the path and the scenery without nervously clutching a dog biscuit and scanning the horizon. And Emma could get her energy out in a long, loping, sniffing walk without restraint.

Eventually Emma’s recall got much better, but we kept doing early morning walks because I fell in love with it. The forest was peaceful, dark and silent when we got started, slowly transitioning to rays of golden light as the sun broke through the fog. No bros on mountain bikes roaring down the path. No packs of loudly gossiping runners. Just a very social dog and her antisocial human.

Sometimes Emma balked and refused to go down the path. This usually happened in one particular spot, a more open section where the path was covered in rocky gravel and lined by manzanita trees. She would freeze in place, staring straight ahead and refuse to move. I would cheerfully stride onward, calling her name, shaking my head at my stubborn dog. Emma would wait as long as possible and then run to catch up with me, immediately stopping again and giving me a look.

“Coyotes,” I thought. Emma famously hates coyotes, but I figured that between the two of us, we could easily take them on. I continued on at a steady clip, enjoying the smell of the early morning air and the sound of chirping birds.

Recently my friend informed me that mountain lions chirp. She was hiking with her border collie and was warned by another hiker that there was a young male mountain lion in the vicinity based on the loud chirping noises. My friend, a no-nonsense Mainer, picked up a big stick and continued on, dog at her side.

“Crap,” I thought, thinking back to all those times that Emma was desperately trying to tell me something. I googled mountain lions in Santa Cruz and discovered a recent and alarming uptick in sightings. A local news outlet included a video of a mountain lion loping off with a house cat dangling in its jaws. Attacks on humans are rare, but not unheard of and almost certainly fatal. They seem to be more likely to happen to short, solitary females in the early morning. From behind. The articles included pictures where attacks had taken place. Those pictures looked exactly like our hiking trail.

For a few mornings I dragged my reluctant husband along for strength in numbers, and, if we are being brutally honest, to serve as a distraction while Emma and I escaped. But everyone was miserable. So I went back to my solitary dog hikes. Every now and then I whirl around to scan the trail behind me, as if I could catch a mountain lion mid leap. I also have taken to singing Lucinda Williams songs, very loudly and off key, with the hope that the big cats will look for easier, less deranged prey.

Now we have a snack sized puppy. It makes me even more nervous as I watch the puppy frolic down the path like a chubby chicken nugget. The risk equation feels like it has tilted slightly more towards the dangerous side of things.

I am still conflicted about whether I am doing something incredibly stupid or just living life to the fullest. I take slight consolation in the fact that, were a mountain lion to attack, the dogs would be ok. They would both run for it, leaving me to my fate.

The puppy got a bunch of new puppy bones when she came to live with us. The older dog would step over her own pile of beloved chews and take the puppy bone out of the puppy’s mouth and then run off to the high chair, which was too high for the puppy to reach. Then the big dog would settle in for a good chew.

The puppy was rightfully indignant and would yip in rage from the floor as the big dog peered down at her and then carefully moved the bone further back on the chair, safely out of reach. As a scientist, I love a good observational experiment. Perhaps the puppy bone was objectively better. It was less chewed, softer, bacon flavored, just the right size for reaching those back molars. Or maybe the puppy bone had value simply by virtue of belonging to someone else.

I brought home two identical puppy bones, both brand new and bacon flavored, and gave one to each dog. They took their respective bones and trotted quickly to opposite corners of the room. Blissful silence ensued, broken only by the sound of contented chewing. And then I heard a bone clatter to the floor. Then another. They each went for each other’s bone at the same time. The big one reached the puppy’s bone first and ran away. The puppy, who had been going for the big dog’s bone, abandoned it to chase after her former bone. Chaos ensued, involving collisions with chairs and a high speed chase that ended with both dogs skidding on the slippery floor and crashing head first into the wall.

Luckily, they both have very hard heads. At this point, the human parents intervened and put the dogs in separate crates for a cool down period. Silly dogs, I thought, as I went back to enviously scrolling on my phone, reading about other people’s perfect lives.

I got a lot of unsolicited advice when I was the parent of a baby and a toddler. It is nothing compared to being a dog owner.

When our first dog was a puppy (and even now that she is full grown), perfect strangers felt morally obligated to tell me what I should or shouldn’t be doing with my dog.

Sometimes the people introduced themselves as “dog trainers,” a term that I have come to hold very loosely. There are a remarkable number of “dog trainers” in this town. Sometimes they were dog owners. Or past dog owners. Regardless it was open season on the harried lady with a wild puppy.

The Bridget Jones quote kept running through my head:

“..you seem to go out of your way to make me feel like a complete idiot. And you really needn't bother: I already feel like an idiot most of the time anyway.”

As a new dog owner, I felt like I couldn’t stand up for myself and my pup. Sometimes people started proactively training her for me, without asking me. They would yell “down” when she jumped, thoroughly confusing the issue since she knows that command as “off” and “down” meant something else.

Others vigorously kneed my dog in the head when she jumped. Emma loved the “getting kicked in the head” game and redoubled her efforts.

“You should try teaching her commands or something,” a lanky college kid suggested on the street in front of our house. “That way she will do what you want.”

He had stopped us on the street and asked if he could say hi to Emma. I could see a slight trembling of hindquarters that told me she wanted to leap up and kiss him, so I asked him to wait for her to sit nicely in front of him before giving her attention.

I wanted to explain the value of implicit versus explicit commands. I wanted to tell him that Emma knows hundreds of commands, that we have been working on commands every day since she was 8 weeks old. That we have weekly calls with a trainer and weekly classes that I drive two hours to get to in the mountains. That I sit down each night, exhausted, to write out an updated training plan to work on the next day.

“Training commands is a great idea,” I said. “Thank you.”

Now that we have a new puppy, I’m resolved to stand up for myself and for her. Sometimes it’s not a good time for people to say hi to her. Sometimes it’s not a good time for her to play with other dogs. Or be off leash. Or to greet your toddler. And never is it a good time for her to play with your aggressive dog to help “socialize” him.

Instead I’ll work on my deep breathing, treat no as a complete sentence, and have more faith in my own imperfect training efforts.

Childhood may be brief but puppyhood is even briefer. Now that Emma is two, I regret not slowing down and enjoying the puppy time more. She changed week to week, day to day. I was so busy checking off the boxes on my training plan that I missed a lot.

I wish I had taken a time to sit and watch her sleep, the tiny running paws, lip smacking and sleep woofs as she chased down (and finally caught!) a dream squirrel. I wish I had gotten down on the floor with her more and enjoyed playing, just for fun, no ulterior motive. I wish I had slowed down and really watched as she explored her first beach, her first forest, and her first park. There is only one first time.

At the time, I felt that I couldn’t slow down. I had a list of 50 commands that we were working through, plus potty training, crate training, and sleep training. In addition, I was training her not to do things: don’t bark, don’t bite, don’t jump, don’t eat toes, don’t unspool toilet paper, don’t gnaw on computer dongles. And also, get socialized to every conceivable variation of every person and every dog. Exhausting.

Our agility instructor says, “I have always had good luck with going slow.” She takes her time, works on each behavior one piece at a time, getting it locked into place. She doesn’t rush. If the dog isn’t getting it, she backs off, slows down and retraces her steps until they get it right. If the dog gets it wrong, it is her fault, not the dog’s. She wasn’t making things clear. This is a partnership approach. The dog is set up for success and training becomes a fun game to play together.

The irony is that in my rush to get all that training locked in, I ended up having to do a lot of extra work. I had to retrain commands that weren’t well proofed. I had to work hard to bring the fun back into training. And I had to do a lot of convincing to show the dog that I could be a wild and crazy human, not just a training robot.

The new puppy is a fast learner. When I catch myself starting to charge forward too quickly, I pause, mentally smack myself upside the head and remind myself to go slow. There will be years and years to train. There will be only one year of the puppy.

This is Emma. Look at how in love she is with her human, gazing up adoringly.

“I would follow you anywhere. I will shake, roll or high five for you. Anything you want. Just ask.”

The person in this picture is not me. It is a worker at her doggy daycare. Emma would not be this excited to see me.

We read somewhere that for socialization you should introduce your new dog to 100 people and 100 dogs in 100 days. We are competitive people. It was game on.

I made a doggy sling and carted the puppy around the neighborhood, her head and front paws sticking out as she graciously accepting treats and pats from her admiring public. The first time we took her to the nearby college campus, she was so excited she clawed her way out of the sling, climbed my face and perched on my head. I heard one girl hang up on her parents, saying, “I’ll call you back. It’s a puppy!”

Everyone was out milling around in the pink and purple twilight and we had attracted quite a crowd of students missing their family dogs. Knowing that there was a strict no dogs on campus rule, I braced myself when I saw the security guard striding purposefully towards us, eyebrows lowered. “We are so busted,” I thought. When he got to us, he made kissy faces at Emma and asked how old she was. Turns out he wanted to pet the puppy.

The upside is that Emma is a very well adjusted dog. She loves anyone and everyone. The downside is that she is “meh” about us. This makes many things hard: training, recall, play, our feelings of self-worth.

We have been advised to do two things to reignite the passion.

First, make Emma’s life boring. Keep her home so much that we become exciting in comparison to napping and watching the sun move across the floor. This has not help our feelings of self worth, but it has helped with training.

Second, spend less time with her so she values the time we have together. The new puppy has taken care of that one. Emma is so jealous of our time and attention that she sprints across the room and flings her body at our feet when we walk in. Who knew that boredom and neglect could be such powerful training tools?

We left our first puppy alone….never. It was full on attachment parenting.

Here was a typical schedule:

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4 am: wake up next to puppy
6 am: morning potty walk with puppy
8 am: training session with puppy 
9 am: nap with puppy (because you've both been up 5 hours already)
10 am: beach trip with puppy
12 pm: lunch with puppy
1 pm: another nap with puppy (you could both go to bed at this point)
2  pm: walk downtown with puppy
5 pm : dinner with puppy
6 pm: evening potty walk with puppy
7 pm: fall asleep on couch with puppy ( it feels like 2 am)
9 pm: go to bed next to puppy

We were very smug about being such great puppy parents. The neighbors who left the dog alone to bark its head off for hours? Not us! The friends who left the dog in the crate to go out for a nice dinner? Not us! The parents who both attended their daughter’s musical and left the dogs at home? Not us! We took turns going to her show.

We got nothing done because the puppy never learned how to be alone. When we attempted to leave her in her pen to make dinner or, god forbid, work our actual jobs to keep her in the kibble, she lost her stuffing. So we didn’t chance it.

When a long awaited movie came to the theater, one person stayed home. When the family wanted to eat out, one person stayed home. When it was karaoke night at a friend’s house, one person stayed home.

Finally, when the dog was two years old, my husband left town for ten days. Something inside me snapped. I just couldn’t be with the dog 24-7, so I installed a puppy camera and left her alone every single day. An hour while I swam at the pool. An hour when I ran to the store. A half hour when I visited a friend. And guess what? She was fine. She whined a bit, sometimes even barked for five minutes, but then settled down with a big sigh at the back door to wait for my return.

I wish we had done this a long time ago. The dog learns that you leave and come back and the human gets to have a life. There is much less resentment from spouses and children and friends when you aren’t mutating your life around the dog. Now that we have a second dog, we are determined to start early in teaching her how to be alone.

Of course, the new puppy will never be completely alone. She has her big sister to keep her company when the humans leave. And that is a whole other problem.

We thought we were great dog parents with Emma, our first dog. We took the “100 people, 100 dogs, 100 days” advice VERY seriously. Every day we were out and about, meeting and greeting.

We forgot to hang out at home and just play with the puppy. We did a little bit of tug of war and ball tosses, but often we just set out the toys and hoped the puppy would entertain herself so we could have a cup of coffee or take a shower.

“The dog smells better than I do,” my husband said, a bit grumpily. His morning routine had been hijacked by the new puppy. I leaned in and buried my nose in the puppy’s tummy fur, inhaling the clean scent of Fluffy Puppy shampoo. Mmmm,” I said. “You’re not wrong.”

Slowly over time, the puppy lost interest in playing with us. It didn’t seem like a big deal until two things happened: we started agility training and the vet told us that Emma was getting chunky.

Suddenly, we had no way of reinforcing behavior that wasn’t food based. I couldn’t toss a ball over a jump to get Emma to drive forward. I couldn’t swap out turkey jerky for a game of tug to reward her for great recall. I watched other dogs in her agility class run entire courses for one frisbee toss. Emma only worked for cubes of aged cheddar.

We had to slowly build up her love of toys again. Every time she had the zoomies, I grabbed a furry tug toy and raced around the room. I hid chunks of boiled chicken in rabbit fur tug toys and tossed them across the field.

We are slowly making progress, although it feels like we missed a prime window of opportunity.

Lucy, the second dog, gets so much playtime. I gather the squeaky dog, the duck tug and stuffed capybara. I hide them all behind my back and then pull them out, one at a time. We do a game of tug and then I’ll toss the toy. As Lucy runs after it, I pull out a new toy and shake it about until she comes back. This way she learns to return to me rather than run off with the toys. It is a blast.

Lucy loves her toys. And Emma loves Lucy’s toys. There’s nothing like a little sibling rivalry to make toys valuable again.

Emma was our first dog and she was our guinea pig. We made a lot of mistakes. Sorry, Emma! Despite her inexperienced humans, Emma has turned out to be a fine dog.

Then we got Lucy, puppy number two. The day before the new puppy came home, I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote out my top five puppy resolutions. Like most second children, the new puppy will have an easier go of it.

#1: Choose kindness.

Everyone told me that Aussies were the smartest of dogs. They could read your mind, know what you wanted and have it done before the thought made its way into your consciousness. I had high expectations for Emma. I prioritized obedience over bonding.

We made a special potty area in the yard so clean up would be easier. We expected Emma to go on demand, exactly where and when we wanted. It went as well as you might expect. Inside her potty area, Emma would play with a stick. Emma would chew on the chicken wire fence. Emma would lie down and go to sleep. She would not go potty. We spent hours trying to get that puppy to poop on a small square of astroturf. She was miserable and confused. We were frustrated.

Now I look back and think, “Why? As long as she went outside, what did it matter where she went? Those are hours we could have spent reading, or playing with the dog or eating ice cream.”

The new puppy does not like the designated potty area either. She has picked her own special potty spot, behind the Calla lilies. As long as she doesn’t go in the kitchen or under the coffee table, she can have her pick of the yard. She is happy. We are happy. Flexibility for the win.

With Emma, we approached crate training with the fanatic rigor of new parents doing cry it out sleep training. Emma went into the crate downstairs at bedtime and there she stayed until morning. Again, you can imagine how well that went.

Emma was used to sleeping all night in a cuddly puppy pile. She suddenly found herself alone in a dark crate. She tried to let her humans know that something was seriously wrong. First she whimpered, then yipped, then escalated to panic barking: bark-BARK! bark-BARK! bark-BARK! For hours.

We proudly told the trainer that we were not reinforcing the barking by going to comfort the puppy. She was appalled, but hid it well. “She is still pretty young. Maybe you could lay next to the crate for a bit? Let her know you are there?”

The new puppy’s crate is next to my bed. At night I stick my fingers through the bars so the baby can snuggle her wet nose against my palm and lick my fingers until she falls sleeps. There is some light whimpering, but I keep my painfully cramping fingers thrust through the bars to let her know she is not alone. Eventually we’ll move her crate downstairs next to her sister’s, but there is no rush.

Training a puppy should be fun. And funny.

When I find myself stressing over Lucy’s training, I stop and think of the sign that used to hang a our local coffee shop: “Relax, you have plenty of time.”

My daughter found this on a card today in our favorite art store and showed it to me. I snorted and she giggled. We both imagined Robert Frost and his famous horse in the woods, turning around and around again, completely lost:

“What the hell? Didn’t we just pass that rock a few minutes ago?”

And then it was time for lunch and errands and dog walking. We both moved on with the day.

Only, this little joke burrowed into me, hiding under layers of to-do lists and laundry and emails until I was lying in bed. Then it pounced. It’s not nearly as funny when it’s midnight and you are staring at the ceiling, feeling completely unmoored.

When I was a kid, I was taught first A, then B. Degree, marriage, condo, another degree, tenured job, fixed rate mortgage, fully fenced yard, kid. And of course, always take the well-marked trail or you’ll end up with a bad case of poison ivy.

Turns out, you can do everything right and still feel like things are wrong. So we tried going B to A. We moved to a place thousands of miles away where we didn’t know anyone. We quit stable jobs without new jobs lined up. We sold a house without knowing if we would ever find such a low mortgage rate again (probably not). We started spending instead of saving. We got a dog before we had a yard. Then we got another dog, still without a yard.

Choosing any path is hard. Choosing the less traveled path harder still. And perhaps we are missing the point entirely by focusing on which path is best. Frost apparently said as much:

"You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem—very tricky."

Maybe it doesn’t matter what path you chose but how you walk it. Do you notice the way the sun filters through the paper birch trees? The cluster of wild irises? The deer watching you from the shadows? Or are you too busy regretting the unchosen path? We humans are good at finding meaning and most likely, at the end of the day, we can tell a good or a bad story about any path.

Around 2 am I decided that I’m going to sit with the discomfort of not knowing where the hell I am. I tell myself that I can always just follow the dog. She strays far off the beaten path, yet never fails to find her way back to what matters: her pack, a warm bed, and a fully stocked kitchen.

My humans are being extra nice to me lately.

I’ve been taken to the beach every day. We went on that really long hike that I love, the one that makes my humans very, very tired. I got a vanilla pup cup at the ice cream parlor twice in one week. And peanut butter yogurt. And a new chew toy.

There have been no baths and no crate time. Instead, I’m getting extra belly rubs and more walkies.

I wish I could just relax and enjoy it, but it feels like something bad is about to happen.

Footnote from Emma’s humans: The new puppy arrives tomorrow…

This is the nice, midwestern way of saying someone is a little bit wacky. Slightly kooky. Interesting. Emma is our first dog and she is a half bubble off plumb, even for an Aussie.

As a clinical psychologist, I thought that training a dog would be easy. I spent seven years studying behaviorism and decades providing care for patients with complex mental health needs. The first book I was assigned to study in grad school was Don’t Shoot the Dog, the seminal guide to behavioral training methods.

“How difficult could it be to train this fuzzball of a puppy?” I asked myself.

Turns out, very, very difficult. Sobbing in the shower difficult. Self-medicating with pints of ice cream difficult.

Dogs do what makes sense for them in the moment. For Emma, this meant being an independent agent. She did not like cuddles. She did not like her crate. She did not like her leash. She wanted to explore the amazing world on her own terms. She could be enticed by food, to a point, but cookies were far less interesting than dogs, people, smells, squirrels and cats.

At the dog beach, Emma used to run in the opposite direction when we called her name. She knew it was time to go home and she was not having it. She did not care that we were waving about broiled salmon chunks. She would race away down the beach while all the other dogs flocked to us, eagerly showing off their polite sits. We relied on kind strangers to corral and leash Emma so we could go home. It was deeply embarrassing.

Somehow we all held on and made it through.

Now, just shy of two years, Emma is starting to blossom into a lovely adult dog. Thousands of hours of slow, gradual training means that she has decent recall. She will wheel around, out of a pack of running dogs, to come to us (and our cheese) when we call her name. It is magical.

Sometimes I wake up at 2 am and take a moment to revel in the silence of the house. The dog is deeply asleep.

“No barking! No whining! No toenails click-clacking about!” I whisper quietly, hugging myself with joy before rolling over and going back to sleep.

The new puppy arrives in three days.

They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Like getting a second dog when the first one nearly broke you. This is not a decision made by someone of sound mind. If Emma is a half bubble off plumb, so am I. Together Emma and I will forge on, both slightly askew, with a new puppy trailing behind.

Four hours into a mediocre Agatha Christie adaptation, one of the characters pulled out this one liner as he headed to the beach. It made it all worth it. The dog and I have decided that this is our new away message.

We visit the same beach and it is never the same. We spend hours exploring what washed up overnight: nuggets of pottery, worn sea glass, prehistoric looking horseshoe crabs. Emma takes a cautious sniff of a dead manta ray and then leaps back, alarmed at whatever the scent conveys.

Winter storms shift vast quantities of sand, exposing fossils and sea caves and tide pools. Then another storm comes and hides it all away again. The entire topography of the beach changes and then changes again. As I walk the beach I like to think about what is buried deep beneath my feet, just waiting for the fury of a southern swell.

If the day is foggy and the wind carries the briny smell of the ocean all the way to our house, miles inland, I’ll pack a thermos of tea and a scone so I can linger even longer. Emma has learned that if she sits patiently by my side, she is likely to get bits of scone with strawberry jam and clotted cream. She keeps an eye on the seagulls and I watch the waves, both of us taking our time.

Research suggests that dog personalities are cemented by the age of one. I think it is fair to say, as we approach her second birthday, that Emma is a wild child. After thousands of hours of training, she understands how she needs to behave, but doing and understanding are two different things. Her wildness breaks through with some regularity, like the Kool-Aid man busting through a brick wall.

My frustrations with Emma not being a well-behaved, biddable dog were not serving me nor her. I ordered Emma a leash embroidered with “can’t be tamed” in big purple letters and decided to go all in on my “woo-hoo” dog.

At the dog beach, she is the life of the party. She makes the rounds like she is at a dog cocktail party, meeting and greeting, sniffing butts, initiating games of tag. At our local coffee roaster, she gets her biscuit from Sienna and then runs outside to see Lady. Lady is a reactive rehomed German Shepherd with extensive trauma history. Emma is her only friend.

Lady greets her with excited grunts and whimpers. Emma drops to the ground and tries to shove her snout under the chain link fence from one side while Lady tries to shove her snout under from the other. They boop noses. When Lady is let out, Emma lies still on her belly so Lady can have a thorough sniff. “Lady’s hackles are down. That never happens,” says Sienna, watching the two dogs calmly check each other out. “Emma should be a therapy dog for dogs.”

On an evening walk downtown, a group of frat boys cluster around her, stooping down to pet her before going into the Mongolian BBQ. One of them hangs back, too cool for petting puppies. Then she rolls onto her back for a tummy rub. “Ok, I’m in!” he exclaims, bending down. We pass an exhausted women at the bus stop who wants to give Emma a pat. “How’s your day going?” I ask her. “Better now,” she says, as Emma drapes herself over her shoes.

Emma jumps in the back of the car. ‘Love the One You’re With’ is playing on the radio and I sing along with feeling, watching Emma’s ears bob in time to the music. My wild child and I are going home.

Our family has a saying: don’t pee on the gift. This essentially means that if you are going to do something nice for someone, just do it. No resentment, no strings attached, no quid-pro-quo, just kindness.

I’m sure Buddha had a more elegant way of putting it. And I will be the first to admit that on any given day, I am a long way from the Buddha. I am grumpy and peevish, taking care of a dog and a teenager all day, every day. “You need to haul-ass to chem today,” I yell up the stairs to my daughter after getting the robocall that she has been tardy again. “Emma! What are you doing? Get back in here!” I holler at the dog, who made an executive decision to go to the park by herself.

My husband doesn’t yell, but his voice carries well from upstairs: “Are you telling me that you forgot to wear your retainer for a week, were too scared to tell us, and so waited another three weeks and now your teeth have moved?” There is a quiet mumble from our daughter. I sip my coffee and wait. “We’ve spent six years and quite a lot of money to give you straight teeth!” Indignant mumble.

My husband stalks downstairs to call the orthodontist and I practice some deep breathing exercises. Then it is time to pack the kid’s lunch and get her out the door and then pack the dog’s water and hiking snacks and get her out the door.

By 9 pm, it’s quitting time. The dog sleeps on her back in her big chair, her paws twitching, growling at dream squirrels. I gave her the best day I could: tug of war with her stinky duck and a creek hike. I picked ticks off her eyebrows, twigs out of her butt fur, and scratched that itchy spot on the top of her head that she can’t reach. I reviewed Spanish homework with my daughter and made her a cup of tea. I washed her clothes and listened as she tried to decode complicated high school social hierarchies. My phone pinged, alerting me that she was late to chem, again. I let it go. Just one more day of trying to avoid pissing on the gift.

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I am the person in our family who wanted a dog the most. I begged, cajoled, and bullied my family into dog ownership. I am also the person who can’t complain about what a pain dog ownership is now that we have one. It is both a literal and metaphorical pain, especially if you own a very active and independent minded (stubborn) dog like Emma.

As a puppy, she would literally bounce off the walls if we didn’t get her out for morning walks in the forest, afternoon runs on the beach and evening romps in the park.

Emma has aged into a two-year-old dog who appreciates the joy of day napping, but we still go on twice daily hikes.

“The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine,” I think to myself as I’m slipping and sliding down a muddy hill in the pouring rain, on yet another long hike while my husband sips tea at home and munches cookies.

I used to enjoy hikes in the redwoods of Northern California, but when you make them mandatory, it starts to feel less like a fun hobby and more like a grueling, severely underpaid job.

Monday: Three mile Pogonip Fern Trail hike, check. 
Tuesday: Six mile Land of Medicine Buddha hike, check. 
Wednesday: Four mile Twin Gates Loop, check. 
Thursday: Six mile Chaminade Loop with an even crazier Border Collie friend, check. Friday: So very, very tired, but rally for a walk on the fire road. 
Weekend: Laze on the couch eating snacks and watching Netflix? Not on your life. Even longer weekend hikes!

To complicate things, I’m doing all this on one leg. Technically the prosthetic leg helps, but barely. I’ve always thought of myself as an active amputee, but I have never felt as disabled as I do with this dog. Amputees were not made for long daily hikes in the mountains. Luckily, I’m friends with a wound nurse, who slips me Tegaderm and hydrocolloid dressings and gives me concerned looks.

My other, “real” leg starts to give out. My achilles tendon is tetchy all the time and I get alarming twinges in my knee when I walk up stairs.

“You know,” I muse, as we drive past rolling meadows on the edge of town, “this would all be a lot easier if I could ride a horse. Emma could run alongside me and we could cover a lot of ground.”

My husband was driving the car and I could see his eyebrows lift above his sunglasses.

“Are you actually telling me that we need to buy a horse to make our lives easier?” “Well, yes. But it isn’t just to make my life easier. A horse could provide companionship for Emma.”

Silence. I could feel myself losing this battle. He cleared his throat.

“So you are telling me we need to buy our dog a horse?” I made a noncommittal sound. “How serious are you about this?” he asked. “Less than 50%. Okay, maybe about 50%,” I said.

My husband rarely says no, but when he does, he means it.

“We are not getting a horse,” he said. “I didn’t put my foot down about getting a dog, but I learned my lesson. It’s either me or the horse.”

I let it drop, but I still like the idea of riding a horse across the fields, watching the cloud shadows race over the ground. I think Emma would like it too, trotting companionably alongside. In the meantime, I take a deep breath, lace up my hiking boots and hobble off after my dog.

PS We got the dog a dog. My husband apparently did not learn his lesson, but at least we don’t have a horse. Turns out that Emma is terrified and enraged by horses. We drove past one cantering in a field and she lost her stuffing. She gets along with the new puppy just fine, most of the time.

I am rubbish at being in the present moment. My brain runs on hyperdrive, worrying, planning, and obsessing. I can go for a ninety-minute walk with Emma and not be able to tell you how the air smelled, which flowers were blooming, and how the sun looked when it finally broke through the mist. When I notice this happening, I look to the dog.

Emma raises her head and sniffs, so I sniff too; the air smells like fog and California lilac, with a hint of jasmine. The golden yarrow and purple lupine run riot over the hills. Emma gets purple lupine petals embedded in her fur and becomes a little free love hippie dog. Small critters skitter away as we approach, sensing a threat. My dog, the big bad predator, prances down the trail, head high, ears bouncing, butt fur swaying.

She follows a scent trail, weaving in circles and figure eights, nose to the ground. I stop to watch. She suddenly lifts her head and freezes, peering into the woods; I look too and see the herd of deer standing very still, watching us. Emma caught their wild horsey smell. The deer gave us the side-eye, not alarmed but very much aware of us. After a moment, the deer flow through the shadows of the trees and out of sight.

Emma pauses to nudge and poke a salamander with her nose, taking in its cold blooded scent. I crouch down with her to peer at it, amused by its undulations, left, right, left right, indifferent to the big dog nose snuffling its tail.

Being present is freedom. It allows you to start moving thoughtfully and deliberately toward what is important to you. This is the most valuable work: not moving away from problems, but towards what matters. As Mary Oliver said, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Emma is a wild child, a free range dog who loves to wander. She is not a leash dog. Because we do not have a yard, I find myself breaking the law daily so she can run off leash. We rotate through ten trails that are difficult to get to and unpopular with other hikers. When we arrive at the trail head I look both ways to make sure the coast is clear. “Just us chickens,” I say to Emma as I let her off leash, silently adding “and coyotes and mountain lions.” It seems an ok trade off, just a slight risk of mauling to let Emma run free for an hour.

I save the popular trails for days when it is pouring rain, too cold, wet and muddy for any sane person to be out. “Let’s go!” I cry, throwing on her harness and my rain hat and heading out the door. When the weather is really foul, we can complete two-hour hikes without seeing a single person. When we get home, both of us are soaked through, covered in mud and quite content.

Every morning, I toast a bagel and make coffee. Emma stretches out at my feet, licking cream cheese from my fingers as I fire up Zillow and pour over real estate ads: a house on four acres in rural New Hampshire with a creek, a cabin on seven acres on an isolated island in British Columbia with a forest, a ranch on twenty acres in the exact middle of Wyoming with nothing but flat scrub brush. I imagine having a pack of dogs, running free together.

“I’m turning into my parents,” I inform my husband. “I’m going to live alone on some isolated farmstead and eventually get eaten by Emma.” “On the upside,” he said, looking thoughtful, “the property values are quite reasonable.” He is right, they are quite reasonable. Some day we will be off, but for now we just skulk around illegally in the woods and try not to get caught.

I often lie flat on my back on the floor of the living room after a run, exhausted and sore. This is Emma’s cue. She comes running from wherever she is in the house to thoroughly lick my face. Whining in pleasure at the easy access, she works over every inch, inserting her tongue deep in each nostril, lapping my closed eyes and mouth, exploring my ears.

When I blow a raspberry, she jumps back startled, eyes wide and ears pointing straight up in shock, and then she resumes licking with renewed vigor as if to say, “Stop goofing around, this is serious stuff.” Finally satisfied, she flops down on the floor next to me with a big sigh and we both lie there for a bit. I absent-mindedly scritch her side and breathe in her doggy scent, yeasty and warm. Then I press my nose to her toes because they smell like Fritos.

Standing in front of this automaton, my family all agreed that Tipu’s tiger was giving the British soldier a good face lick. The resigned and slightly alarmed expression on the soldier’s face was familiar to me. Most likely, a tongue had just been inserted into the nose. The complete delight and focus on the tiger’s face was also familiar. Perhaps some leftover lunch had been discovered on the soldier’s face, a bit of salted pork or a speck of boiled beef, an unexpected bonus.