FOREWORD

nce I sit down on the couch with my computer to write this, once I get really comfortable with all the pillows in the right place, my dog Rose approaches and, panting on the last warm night before I break down and turn on the air conditioning, smiles at me. Rose is a white Terrier-Chihuahua sort of dog who is pushing 14. It’s been two or three years since she’s been able to jump up on the couch by herself, and she never decides that she wants to be up here with me until I am in exactly the right position.

But now that I am and now that she does, I put the computer on the floor and get up to lift her to the spot she likes by my knees. She drops her muzzle over my shin and sighs heavily in a way I take to be a combination of gratitude and contentment, although it’s possible that it is simply a sigh of entitlement. We are both very happy this way or, I should say, I am happy. My assumption of Rose’s happiness is based on the smile and then the sigh, the languid licking on my calf that’s her way of winding down before sleep—all the things I’ve come to count as communication from her to me.

There are, of course, plenty of people who will tell you that the expression on a dog’s face that is open of mouth and squinty of eye is not a smile in the same sense as a human smile, and that when a dog licks your calf, it is not love but an instinctual desire for food or a grooming ritual because you are a member of her pack and that is her job.

Okay then, let’s not burden these dogs with our human projections. Look through these photographs and do not assume that just because that mouth is in very much the same position your mouth was in when you got the bicycle you desperately wanted for your ninth birthday or heard a very funny dirty joke after two glasses of champagne that we can call it a smile. In short, do not speak for these dogs, do not assume their joy, just have some joy of your own. Look at them squirming and rolling and leaping and laughing and let them do what dogs do best: give us an effervescent dose of wordless euphoria.

My dog Rose is looking at me now, her head on my leg. It’s hard not to assume that she is deeply in love with me, because the only times in my life I’ve looked at someone that way there was a great deal of love involved. I guess the only thing I can be sure of and therefore have the right to speak to, is that I am deeply in love with her. That’s enough.

Sometimes, the best moments in human relationships are the ones in which we have the self-restraint to say nothing at all, to demonstrate our love and joy instead of trying to break down the experience and reshape it into words. This is the genius of dogs, one of the many geniuses of dogs—they have the nonverbal-expression thing down cold. And if we’re reading too much into everything they’re not saying, then so be it. They’ll forgive us. They always do.

—Ann Patchett