dog person

     I love Dixie so much.  I love going out the front door each morning and receiving her love.  She comes over to me wiggling because her tail wags so hard she can't really even walk.  I rub her neck and her chest and her chin and she turns around and around slowly at my feet all the time wagging that tail.  Dixie's tail is basically a club stuck on her bum.  When she wags the club, its heaviness moves her entire body.  When it strikes my leg I feel her solid love.  She can knock my kid down just by wagging her tail and nailing him in the chest with it.  I love Dixie so much.  When I come home she is right there to greet me and occasionally if she's not, I look for her and long for her and can't do anything until she comes bounding up the hill to beat me with her tail and lick my hands.  Loving a dog is such a wonderful, true, fulfilling experience.
     This is all new for me.  Dixie has been with me for almost a year and its the first time in my life to have a dog love.  I was not a dog person before I met Dixie.  I have friends who are dog people and I was not one of them.  I always respected their relationship and I knew that I just couldn't understand it.  Being a dog person was just a different love of dog that it was clear I did not have access to.  I liked dogs but my dog person friends loved their dogs on a level that was out of reach for me.  I figured it was just something to observe, never suspecting that one could be brought to the other side.
     And then it happened.  I met a dog that brought me over.  I found her on Craig's List and went to visit.  She jumped up on me and on her owner and on a tree and on anything she could find.  I don't like it when dogs jump up.  But I couldn't get enough of this dog.  She's big too, part Mastiff, part Pit Bull, real solid.  I could feel Dixie telling me that she just needed to run.  She was shut up in a small, fenced in yard in town.  Her humans loved her but their lifestyle just didn't fit her energy.  Somehow I just knew, like the sky is blue, that this dog would be wonderful once she got out of the yard and out into the open.  It felt like the deepest truth I'd ever known.
     So Dixie hopped in the back of my car and came home to the farm.  She runs every day for what seems like hours.  She never jumps up on me or anyone else.  She's my dog love and my heart just bursts thinking about her.