A quick review before we get to why I am telling you this story.
I worked for five years as a volunteer dog walker at the SPCA before I met Leah.
She was a grossly neglected, 17-pound, black-and-white terrier mix. Her original owner, overwhelmed by the needs of three kids under the age of seven, had recognized his limitations and surrendered the puppy on her first birthday. I’ll always be grateful.
She suffered a bloodborne disease she’d contracted from a tick bite, was on antibiotics, had just been spayed, and had never been groomed, so her hair hung in her eyes and draped from her black, triangular ears like a bat. It was difficult to see her face in the oversized cone placed on her little head to keep her from licking her incision, but a kind heart, one that seemed unconditionally forgiving of her own neglect, radiated from two shiny, bright eyes. As I’ve said before, with a lot of reasons to expect the worst from this life, Leah was love with her high beams on.
I entered the run, and she immediately put her front paws on my knee, stretching as high as she could in her unwieldy headgear to lick my face. She was so sweet and so grateful, but I didn’t fall in love.
I know! I can’t believe it either!
I couldn’t take her on the creek trail because of her stitches, so we just jogged around the admin building and back into the dark and noisy run assigned to her. A week later, I chose her off the walk board again, and we made our second circuit of the admin building. Once again, she climbed my knee, balancing on her hind legs, in an effort to land a grateful lick on my face.
Sometimes, I am soooo slow to hear the universe calling.
The third time I chose Leah off the walk board, a light went off in my head. Small, young, female, dog needs loving home. I’d been dogless for five years. What was I waiting for?
I asked about her availability and was told I had exactly two hours to commit to adopting her. Two hours. At lunchtime that day, I took home a breed I knew nothing about and a companion I was pledged to serve until death do us part. Mine or hers—whoever leaves first.
Here’s what I discovered about her.
She can run 38 miles an hour. She was bred to hunt.
She barks at everything from the Netflix logo to the doorbell.
She hides things, then waits for me to find them. Usually in my bed.
I also discovered that dogs form a unique attachment to one person, even within a loving household. It is not me, and I am not complaining. Love is not a feeling. Love fronts up. I am not the one who feeds her and walks her in the sleet, in 27-degree weather, and I don’t begrudge loyalty to the one who does, though I do my share.
I was walking her in the linger light; the official term is civil twilight—when the sun is no more than 6 degrees below the horizon but going fast. When we were just a few yards from the front steps, I unleashed her so she could run the rest of the way home. She took off on a tear for the brick steps as she always does, but for the first time ever she just kept going.
In an instant, she was beyond my ability to catch up and had disappeared behind a private residence. I chased her, calling, “Leah! Come!” which, let’s face it, sounds a lot like “Leah! Run!” Suddenly, she reappeared—on the fly—airborne, racing out of the first yard and into the next one, clearly on the hunt—taking off down driveways to disappear in neighbors’ mysterious backyard spaces ringed with security cameras and warnings to trespassers.
She was working her way methodically, yard by yard, toward the busiest traffic artery in town. If she got there without me, she’d be a dead dog—no doubt about it—she had tried to bite the rolling wheels of the Fed Ex truck on numerous occasions.
I kept running but was uncertain of my direction because it was longer and longer between sightings. She was now a comet—a shooting star—sightings of this black and white rocket whizzing by a neighbor’s woodpile or garage were becoming less predictable, less frequent. Panicked, I turned back and ran for my car. My car can go 38 mph indefinitely. I cannot.
My neighbor Steve stopped raking leaves, and positioned himself in the road to direct the posse. He pointed silently and emphatically up the next street—She went thataway!
I turned and glimpsed her flying down the hill into yet another stranger’s yard, so I threw the car in park and ran for her. By now, a little boy, maybe 11, sensing the excitement, had joined the pursuit on his scooter. He was following her into neighbors’ yards, one by one, trying to flush her out to where I was now positioned like a goalie between her last known location and the deadly intersection. We became a team, this child and I.
Suddenly, a rabbit raced out of a neighbor’s yard and took off down the sidewalk, Leah in hot pursuit. The boy cut them off as cleanly as if he’d been on a quarter horse. She veered, heading straight toward rush hour traffic and me at a dead run.
As she flew through a patch of ivy, I managed to snag her safety harness. Overwhelmed with relief, I snatched her up in my arms. The boy on the scooter glided up, grinning.
“You watch football?” he asked, navy ballcap over his eyes, one sneakered foot on the scooter, one on the sidewalk.
“Some,” I said.
“Well, that’s what you call ‘escaping the pocket.’”
I glanced down at Leah, now incarcerated in my arms, then back to the boy. “My hero, thank you,” I smiled, thinking my goodness, I love you; I had a boy like you once.
I carried my jailbreaker to the car. And here, at last, is why I am telling you this and why now. At civil twilight, though the sun is gone, you don’t need artificial light yet to see clearly and this is what I saw.
Love is not a feeling. Love is not what you say, no matter how well you try to say it. (This kills me; you know it does.)
Love is that wild, primal instinct to help anyone and everyone. To find the lost. Shelter the injured. Protect the vulnerable. We help the panicked mother who has lost sight of her child at the mall. We offer an arm to the elderly man feeling faint waiting in line. We leave a note on the windshield warning a driver that his tire is flat before he drives off.
We give in the context in which we live, so in the grand scheme, our offerings are small. That’s how fortunate we are. But this is the same instinct ignited by the nightly news. If you could, you would save every injured child in Gaza, shelter every starving refugee, protect every Ukrainian hospital from bombing, and save every hostage the world over. This is the part of you that would hold the world in your arms if you could. The part of you that prays.
Sometimes I think we are nothing more than love looking for an opportunity to express itself.
Maybe love has no gradations. There is no big love and little love. There’s just us, giving what we can.
Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.
