Just Prose

I imagine a dog who's traveled far and wide. Then, after years of living under lush canopies, he embarks on another adventure like Seaman the dog, first over the Appalachian ridges, then falling away from its plateau he touches the dry earth of the West, where he will rebuild his scent memory of a place he once knew. This place—a sensorium of land and season that for humans lives often in our imagination, stitched together from books and film, enough to justify staying put or, at times, to compel the journey itself, yet for a dog there is no such imagining, only the immediate truth of his nose, arriving at each new ground with a completeness carried easily in the salubrious air of Spring—though for this dog, it is simply another widening of his umwelt, a world comprehended intensely but held on lightly in time.

It is not the gratitude humans often feel in the passage from winter to spring that similarly compels this dog toward contentment, but rather his endless proficiency in it. As he discovers each new scent for the first time again, so too does his human discover gratitude in the subtleties of life that might otherwise remain unknown without him; for a man may think consciously about how he will become happy, but a dog needs only what is to be so.