Heat

Heavy dog panting woke me up at 3:42 am. My sweat-soaked Virginia T-shirt startled me as I shook every last bit of sleep from my head. The cabin was cooking.
Heat: the quality of being hot; hotness, or the perception of this. This is the first of Webster's many definitions of heat. Reading this makes heat seem simple. For many people, heat is an afterthought, something constant and taken for granted. Heat is a utility, a bill that needs paying.
Heating a house with wood connects me in a deeper way to heat. I appreciate it more. Coming home to a cold house, my first chore is breathing a fire to life. Heat here is alive, another organism living with me, a welcome guest. Heat requires attention and fuel or it dies. In turn, I require heat or I burn out.
Life here reminds me that everything is cyclical. I live no further removed from this ecosystem than the dogs that protect it, the water that feeds it, or the heat that warms it. We all do our part.

Dogsong

Snoopy sang a song for me this morning. We hopped into the truck for another work day, just like usual. My ipod spilled Old Crow Medicine Show's CC Rider from my truck's busted speakers. The static song filled the cab, Snoopy howled for the first time known to me. Apparently Snoopy likes harmonicas.
The song ended. Snoopy appeared a bit bashful about her new found voice. I tussled her hound-inspired ears and kissed her for caressing my human-inspired ears.
Our love session ended in a fury of hand and tail wagging. I wondered if dogsong conveys emotion similar to human song. Surely Snoopy didn't understand CC Rider's lyrics which mention the cruelty of a woman... Or did she?
I noticed in her huge coffee-brown eyes a lonesome aching. That could have been my human lens portraying human emotion into a hound. It might have been the emotion the song pulls from me.
The emotion I picked up from Snoopy was a young dog settling into herself, opening up, and celebrating her life and home. It was a beautiful morning after all.
Snoopy turns three in one month. She always possessed a bit of a timid side. It seems to me that she's finally waking into the hound she always was. She's grown into her ears so to speak. She gifted my ears with a song, making me aware of her new self, all courtesy of an old-timey harmonica song.

Photo courtesy of Stephanie Sposito