Tess

There's one thing people forget to tell you when you hit your early- to mid-twenties: Your childhood pets—the ones you got when you were in elementary school, and who saw you through braces, glasses, and really bad hair—start to get older and fade away.


We got Tess when I was 9, and we lost her New Year's Eve this year. I could go on for ages about the kind of dog she was: smart, ornery, and fiercely loyal. But I'll just let the photos speak for themselves—even a writer has nothing to write sometimes.


Part of me wants to stamp my feet like a 5-year-old and demand I get my dog back. It's not fair! Good dogs—Tessie dogs—should live forever. But the other part of me realizes that she was 15 and her body was failing and we had to set her free.

It's true that in the universe, energy cannot be created nor destroyed. So it helps to think that Tess's special energy will never be gone from us entirely; it simply lives somewhere else now.

I just miss her.