Skye did not make many aggressive intellectual leaps.  He was not made for mathematics, but for peace.  He was a quiet creature.  He loved us but was never fawning.  Always seemed a little bemused.  His early hobbies were unstuffing lawn furniture and chew toys, which he did very delicately, leaving white drifts of polyester over the lawn, like snow in August.  He was G’s dog.  We had bought him because G, looking at Piper and remembering the Collie we had lost just months before, kept saying, “My other dog had a tail.”

I should probably write about both dogs to explain the one, because they were foils for one another. Piper was fierce and opinionated.  He escaped the yard whenever he could.  But Skye was sweet and agreeable, and he ratted on Piper whenever possible.  When we heard his voice go soprano and staccato, we knew that Piper had found a way through the fence.

Skye’s usual voice was tenor.  Big dog, high voice.  Except when he turned guardian.  Which he rarely did.  But if he felt like the person passing the house on the sidewalk posed a danger  – and the odd thing was that this happened only once in a long while – his voice dropped to the basement, and the barking was fierce.  I still wonder what cues he picked up that made him react so strongly  at those rare moments.  And there was the time when some people were trying to break into the house next door – ostensibly “friends” of the twenty-somethings who lived there.  Both dogs suddenly turned into Dobermans.  It was the only time that happened.

These are Skye’s collie ears.  We saw them for a while in the beginning.  But after a while, he started tucking his ears back, just like Piper’s.  We tired to talk him into wearing them up and airy, but he wouldn’t do it.  Once in a while, the ears would accidentally stand up like Lassie’s.  We’d praise him and encourage him to keep them there.  But pretty soon, they’d be tucked down again.  He was, after all, only the second dog in the pack.

This, I think, was about 1998 or 99.  Here’s the odd thing.  As I was going through these, I was shocked to realize that Skye had only entered our circle two years before Cam left for England.  If you’d have asked me, I would have said five years, or maybe seven.  Can Cam have been home that long?

I love this shot – boy and puppy, mirror images.

Two kids, two dogs.  2003

Skye’s best move: ear kisses.  His greatest show of affection: to charge between your legs, using you like a tunnel.  He’d obligingly stop in the middle, in case you were inclined to scratch him .

This wasn’t that long ago.

Dog in motion.

Big dog in motion.

Delicately disemboweling a squirrel. An Eddie Bauer edition dog toy.  Bought at Shopko.

As I went through the pictures, I found that I loved to shoot him best in October, in the front here, under the delicate gold of our old farmer trees, with pumpkins that brought out the orange in his own coat.  Our dogs are never well groomed, but Skye had that elegant, feathery collie-ness that made him beautiful.

But best of all was the sweetness of his face.  Impassive, but gentle and calm.  Unless the trash truck should show up.  Skye had very, very big white teeth.

Two healthy dogs.  In the primes of their lives.  Maybe in the prime of ours.

A thing about Skye: he was a connoisseur of fine things.  He loved lovely smells.  Every morning, just before the kids left for school on any one of two thousand days, we’d all kneel at the couch for family prayer, eyes closed. Suddenly, another body hits the edge of the couch: a collie, in love with the smell of all that lovely soap and shampoo and conditioner.  Not to mention boy-cologne.  Skye had to roll in the glory of it.  On us.  He literally rolled right over the top of the row of us, like some kind of mosh-pit action—groaning dog moans of transported delight and smashing all that carefully done hair.  Our prayers devolved into helpless yelps and laughter.  Which, I think, also count in the heavens.

And music.  When the children went out into the studio to practice on the grand piano out there, Skye followed.  We’d find him lying in the middle of the studio floor, basking in the stuttering sound of child piano, happy as a clam and peaceful as a summer’s day.  I saw it so many times, the collie drawn to the music.  Once, he even came in to listen to me.

He loved to mess around with Murphy.  They had a lot in common.

Again, the most delicate of attentions paid.

I have another of these; it’s another ear kiss shot.  Look at that ruff.  Nothing like that lovely ruff.

He wasn’t fond of Sully, the grand-dog, at first.  But he came around after a while.  Shooting these two together gives the exposure meter in my head a pain.

Three very big dogs playing in a pretty much civilized, although scary to watch, manner.

Skye, mostly kibitzing.

Being fierce with the missionary puppy.  This is 08.

Look at that coat – all feathers and flying fringe.

Now—when Piper was a puppy, he actually smiled when he was asleep.  Skye never did. But here, he is sort of smiling.  He’s happy as any dog every has been.  Even though we’ve brought in the interlopers.  In all of creation there is little that is quite so perfect as a happy dog.

In every season, lying on the front deck just like this – that was his place.  And it kind of made our place for us, the house with that big, dignified, beautiful dog sitting right there.  Guardian at the gates.

Playing with Emma.  Two years ago.  It was a good summer.  Good for Emma and Hannah.  Good for the dogs.  Good for us.

But here is our good friend last week.  We didn’t realize.  We knew some things were wrong, but figured they were just like human glitches.  That they’d go away.  We didn’t notice how pinched his face had gotten.  He’d lost twelve pounds in a couple of months, and we didn’t see it, not through that coat.

Still, note the delicate movement, the careful placing of paw.

Lying in the sun on Thursday.  The short little hour of sun in the afternoon.  When I bent to kiss his head, he smelled like warm collie.  Like young Skye.  But by then, I knew otherwise.  We’d had blood tests done.  Urine tests.  The fluids had been full of tumor cells.  All the stiffness, all the difficulty of motion – all the other problems.  They weren’t going away.  They were going to change our lives, like it or not.

We had hoped for, maybe another six months.  Just till Murphy could get back.

I know that life changes.  I know that I’m changing.  G is as salt and pepper as these dogs now.  There are parts of my body that aren’t working right.  And I think it’s finally coming clear to me that life is real, that time is a serious deal.  That we are coming to the place where things that go wrong, maybe don’t ever get fixed.  I am about to say, “I’m not ready for this,” but it doesn’t matter.  There are whole multitudes of us – people who, because they were young in the sixties, figured they had a Peter Pan free pass on the realities of life – and we are all saying, “Wait.  Wait.”  Which is what I wanted to say to Skye.  But a day later, it was over.  We couldn’t ask him for more.  We had to send him home.

My father assures me that Skye is glad we did it.  That he’s gamboling about somewhere, legs all working – leaping and dancing and chasing rude, heavenly squirrels.  Because my father told me it is so, I believe him.

This is a private thing I want to share with you.  A private pleasure that I waited for every year.  It is about three weeks into May.  The Sweet William is a drift of white against the damp, deep green of the velvet grass.  The lilies of the valley come up in banks under the shadow of that tree.  And as you stand there, breathing in air that is warm and soft with promise, a gorgeous blue collie comes running, flying around that corner, out of the leaves and mottled shadow—flags flying, ruff like feathers, eyes bright with health and love and adventure, tail whipping around like a propeller.

Every time I saw that, I knew.  I knew I was home.