I’m becoming one of those people. My last four Facebook posts were pictures of my dog and it’s only because I vaguely remember being put off when people posted endless pictures of their dog (why was that? I don’t seem to be able to remember) that I haven’t posted more.

It’s been three weeks since we got a little rescue puppy we named Coco, and I’m under her spell.

Getting a dog is feeling like one of those watershed moments in my life, a portal that issues the reader into the next chapter, where lessons are learned.

Here is one: at this mid-life stage I find myself in, in which my children are still young enough to require inordinate amounts of work, but old enough that I’m striving to forge new work for myself, when the demands of one and the other and the flickering distractions of 21st-century life mean that I’m constantly either trying to get to the next thing or avoiding getting to the next thing, Coco allows me to be present in the moment, to open my senses to the world around me.

Take this morning, for example. By 6:20 a.m., we were up. I had hoped it would be 7 something, but Coco decided she had had it with the crate. Time to stretch, to sniff, to explore. So, we did those things, but, after a spot of breakfast, I was still so tired that I collapsed in a corner on the window seat with a view down on our backyard.

Coco’s crate is on the floor beside the window seat and, when she’s tired, she’ll often retire there, but her legs must have grown just that tiny extra bit, because, as soon as I laid down, she sprung up onto the window seat, cat-like, climbed onto my belly and found a good spot for a nap.

Outside, it was dark. I closed my eyes in sympathy with the darkness, and then it began. First winds, like a visitation, lifting and rising, and then rain, a tumult. I lay there, next to the window, pelt to pelt with my breathing companion, listening to the storm. 

How cozy to be indoors when it rages outside! I could hear the path of the water, as it slid down the roof and traveled through the gutters, like veins, slippery, alive, making its way back to the ground. All was wet and moving, breathing, alive. 

I thought about my father who, in the last days of his life, wanted to look out at the mountains in California where he lived. The hills there are closely cropped, covered with low-lying chapparal, and you can trace their sensuous shapes easily with your eyes. You can follow the hawks as they echo those shapes.

My father didn’t wait until he was dying to appreciate this beauty and, yet, why do I think of that moment? Does it seem as though simply looking at the world is something we do at the very end of life? I don’t know. But I do know that, as someone who writes and thinks about our connection with natural world, I find it so easy to be pulled away from it.

Babies help with this, though, human babies and, it turns out, canine babies are pretty good too, especially as they force us outside, sometimes in the middle of the night or, at the least, early. They bring us eye to eye with that sharp edge between night and day. They keep us still when the rain comes, so all we can do is listen and be there.