Imaginary Landscape

We were in the corral, working with our newly adopted mustangs, when a shot rang out to the west. A dog yelped in pain. Another shot…then silence. My husband and I looked briefly at one another, oats in our hands, grubby with horse slobber and dirt from the recent rains. "Where's Cocoa?" I asked, referring to his Lab/Catahoula cross. "She's around here, I'm sure," was his quiet reply. "Do you think that was Cooper?" It felt wrong to ask; I was sure it was. Orvy nodded. "It was bound to happen sooner or later." We looked for him throughout the day, but three days later, he hasn't returned. ∞ It was just hours before we were supposed to be married. I was still giving a final at Baylor University and I received a text message from Orvy that his oldest daughter "got something for our wedding." How thoughtful, I thought, until he let me know that the 'something' was a dog that she had found wandering at school. We wer...

There was a time when I had trouble with the gender of my pets. People often wondered why we had chosen the particular names my pets had. Every instance has a perfectly logical explanation. It was the quantity of the misnomers, I think, rather than just one little misnaming. Let me explain. First, I worked with a friend of the family, named Tom, oddly enough, who had a farm cat that, as farm cats often do, had produced a litter of kittens. The hobby farm now had more felines than mice, so he was giving the litter away. He offered me one, and after consultation with my other half, and in spite of the fact that we had a slightly deranged golden retriever, we decided to adopt one of the kittens. We told Tom that we wanted a tom cat, however, as getting a tom fixed—or broken, as the case may be—was generally less expensive than breaking a female cat. Tom brought this little ginger cat to work one day. I don’t think he was old enough to leave his mother, or if he was the constant attention ...