dogs | Michael Valliant

Harper’s House

I agree with writer Jim Harrison when he wrote:

“Barring love I’ll take my life in large doses alone–rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.”

People can be difficult. Dogs are different. Dogs bring love to our lives unconditionally and with no questions asked.

Earlier this week, we had to say goodbye to our dog Harper. She was spring-loaded with love and energy; she bounded and leaped in place like Tigger from Winnie the Pooh when her people came to the door.

A growth in her stomach changed her over the last couple weeks, which we hoped might be pancreatitis and tried to treat with our fingers crossed. It wasn’t. When we got home Wednesday night, she couldn’t get off the couch. She was shaking and panting and suffering in constant pain. She let us know it was time.

Harper changed our lives. When life hit the restart button in 2014, I moved into a guest house down a long winding road that had a no pets policy. The family pets stayed with the girls’ mom, and the girls spent equal time with each of us. This was the first time in my life, and theirs, that any of us had lived without pets.

After a year we moved to Oxford into another no pets house. A year later, the girls and I talked and decided our house needed a dog. We weren’t a family without one. Our landlord agreed to a dog, up to 35 pounds.

Through Operation Paws for Homes, we learned about an “Australian Shepherd Mix” who had been found on the streets of Columbia, SC, and who was now being fostered in York, PA. We knew from the picture that she was our dog.

Six-month-old Harper on the drive to her forever family.

I drove to pick her up on June 4, 2016. They guessed she was about six months old. My older daughter Anna wanted to name her Harper after her favorite baseball player, Bryce Harper—when he was still a “good guy” and played for the Washington Nationals I told Anna that players don’t often stay with one team, so we need another namesake, which was writer Harper Lee, of “To Kill a Mockingbird” fame.

Harper made our house a home instantly. She zoomed around the fenced in yard, loved walks around Oxford, and enthusiastically greeted dogs and people as they walked by the house. Two years later we moved to Easton and she patrolled the yard; learned to begrudgingly deal with cats, and kept our house safe from walkers and dog walkers in the neighborhood. Harper was a big fan of the pandemic lockdown in 2020–it meant we were always home.

Pandemic walks with the girls were a Harper favorite.

Walks around Tuckahoe State Park, Wye Island, and Easton’s Rails to Trails or Easton Point Park were Harper dreams turned reality. With her herding personality, she stuck close to her people, even in the house, or the writing shed out back, always lying next to one of us, always where the people were.

Seven years ago she met Holly’s black Lab puppy Luna and the two hit it off and loved to play at each other’s houses. We called Harper the “hall monitor,” as she didn’t tolerate off-hand behavior and would tell on Luna if she was trying to get food off the counter, get into the trash, or engage in any behavior that seemed suspicious.

Harper brought unconditional love and unbridled energy and enthusiasm to our lives. Every night, she slept against me, and every 0’Dark:30 alarm clock, she bounded out of bed ahead of me to go out and then curl up for morning coffee, reading, and writing.

I come back to this Milan Kundera quote frequently:

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace.”

There is a stillness here now, a silence that is not peace, though Harper is at peace. We have loved and been privileged to share life with her. Her presence was her gift. She made us more of a family.

Wherever she was with us, it was Harper’s House.

“Awakening to New Wonder”

God is bigger than church. Church isn’t the only place you’ll find Him. For a long stretch, church was one of the last places I looked. Nothing against it, but I felt like I connected with God better in nature than in a building.

I still talk to God more outside than I do inside. My most prayerful places are by the water. I treasure those times and those places. Yesterday, Harper and I took our dog walkabout to Wye Island, a place where I have run close to 30 miles at once, have run at night, have lost keys, hiked, reflected, prayed. Our walk didn’t disappoint, following trails, sitting, listening, reading and praying by the river; and Harper would have liked to have chased down her first buck, though I’m not sure what she’d have done with it if I had let her go.

I’m a slow learner, and have never been one to take anyone’s word for anything. I have to find things out for myself, experientially, even though it frequently means falling on my face and dusting myself off, eventually coming to the same realization that was suggested at the beginning.

If we only look for God in church, we are selling ourselves, and Him, way short. But I realized I was selling myself, and Him, short by choosing to only look for Him outside a church. And part of what that comes down to is misconceiving “church,” as being just a building, or a set of beliefs. And not seeing it as a people, coming together to worship, quite literally to be the body of Christ, alive in the world. I like the way Richard Rohr looks at the Trinity:

God for us, we call you “Father.”
God alongside us, we call you “Jesus.”
God within us, we call you, “Holy Spirit.”
Together, you are the Eternal Mystery
That enables, enfolds, and enlivens all things,
Even us, and even me.

It’s that understanding, of having God alongside us, and working through other people, and finding that, feeling it, knowing it much deeper when I started to find other people walking their own walk, struggling with their own questions, coming together to worship and to pray and to help one another. Finding church.

Yesterday sitting along the Wye River and this morning in church, I felt grateful; an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Thomas Merton explained what I felt better than I can explain it:

To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything… Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him. Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise the goodness of God. – Thomas Merton, “Thoughts in Solitude”

I’m a work in progress. That’s all I will ever be, trying to put one foot in front of another along the path and not be distracted chasing every other SQUIRREL! life throws at me. But gratitude and prayer are pretty good at helping sustain and focus me when I pay attention.

This morning’s sermon was about praying. Can I pray? Can I pray always? Can I pray proactively? Can I be persistent, not just praying when I am troubled, but also when and because I am grateful. The sermon closed with a prayer from Archbishop Desmond Tutu (which he adapted from Sir Francis Drake), which I felt in my bones:

Disturb us, O Lord

when we are too well pleased with ourselves
when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little,
because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, O Lord

when with the abundance of things we possess,
we have lost our thirst for the abundance of life
when, having fallen in love with time,
we have ceased to dream of eternity
and in our efforts to build a new earth
we have allowed our vision of Heaven to grow dim.

Stir us, O Lord

to dare more boldly, to venture into wider seas
where storms show Thy mastery,
where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars.

In the name of Him who pushed back the horizons of our hopes
and invited the brave to follow.

Amen.

To Sit With a Dog

I lived with pets for the first 42 years of my life. I was preceded in my family by a grouchy, black cocker spaniel mix and a large Siamese cat. Dogs and cats were a part of life until separating in 2014, and rental agreements prohibiting pets.

Truth be told, at first I liked the quiet. And the clean. And not having to worry or be responsible for a pet. Daughters were enough. I was burned out.

But a funny thing happened in a quiet home. Quiet became silence. Silence became stillness. And home wasn’t home. There was a void. And the girls saw what it was before I did. They started asking to get a dog. As kids do. But I felt it. I am dense, but at some point it sank in. And our landlord agreed to allow a small dog.

We knew we wanted to rescue a dog, knew a bit what we were looking for, and through Operation Paws for Homes in northern Virginia, found Harper (named for Anna’s favorite athlete Bryce Harper and for author Harper Lee).

From someone who takes a philosophical approach to life, dogs teach us more about life and about ourselves than we ever teach them.

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil, or jealousy, or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace. – Milan Kundera

When I walk Harper through town, just the two of us, something different happens to my mind. I am slowed from running, not in a hurry, and watching what she sees. Hopefully not a squirrel.

I need more “mindful” and less “mind full” in my life. And dogs can help get us there. Harper helps me get there.

Harper was found on the streets. She is skittish around big machinery; you can see some of what she’s been through. But at eight months old, she is one of the most chilled out puppies I’ve seen. And she puts smiles on the girls’ faces and laughter in their hearts in a way I haven’t seen in my house over the past two years.

Most everyone in our neighborhood knows Harper and speaks to her by name when they walk by and she’s in the yard.

She sleeps in the bed, against the back of my legs. On nights the girls are here, she often rotates sleeping with one of them. As I write, she is crashed out on her dog bed in the sun room. She is constant, consistent, boundless, loving unconditionally. Except maybe food and walks, those might be her terms.

There are days when I come home from work, and Anna or Ava will tell me that they took Harper for a walk around the neighborhood, and detail their route and what they saw. This has quickly become one of my favorite things.

I understand Jim Harrison when he says:

Barring love I’ll take my life in large doses alone–rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.

In our case, Harper has added something to our family that we couldn’t have found any other way.