The dog’s ears lift as I cinch the garbage bag closed and lift it out of the kitchen bin. She raises her head off the carpet and unfolds her body, giving herself a big stretch.

I am not. I still have some work to do. The dog paces behind me as I open the fridge, inspecting it for leftovers abandoned by their owners, and now need to join the other cast-offs in the bag.

As I sniff the container to see if what’s inside has gone off, she can sense it’s time for her chance to go off, too.

She follows me closely as I place the empties in the sink and tie the bag. Her head arrow straight below her shoulders.

She darts past me as I open the door. Unleashed.

I am taking a calculated risk: a main truck route lies about 100 feet to the left, and the garbage collection site is about a thousand feet to the right.

“Hurry, hurry,” says the tags on her collar as she bounces on her front legs. She looks back at me while i heft the bag over my shoulder and start walking.

I nonchalantly watch her as she runs the perimeters of our yard. She sniffs the ghost-scents of the various wildlife that crosses from one neighbor to the next. Occasionally, she disappears into the trees for a few moments.

If it takes longer she usually comes back with a treasure … often smelly and ground into a paste under her collar. Her secret life amounts to this, and the seasonal ability to enter the fenced-in yard whenever she likes now that we have a fly-weight screen tacked to the door, which opens and closes using the magic of magnets.

Any worry I have is fleeting and usually allayed by a two-fingered whistle; the one I’d practiced it for an entire summer when I was twelve.

The dog we had back then used to come when I whisted, too.

But that dog lived her life on her own schedule. A Saint Bernard-mix, she was anxious in the house, preferring to live outside where the weather suited her fur. Now, we had assumed she’d wandered a bit; she’d walk us kids to the bus stop and then she’d wandered right back home afterward. She always seemed to be around, waiting for our return.

It wasn’t until after she passed away, having reached the ripe old of 91 in dog years, that we learned she had a schedule not unlike the friendly, neighborhood postal carrier: neither rain, nor sleet, nor dark of night could keep her from her appointed rounds.

Of course her rounds mostly involved a three-mile loop on back roads and farmland to check in on all her favorite folks … People we hadn’t introduced her to because we only got to meet them when they sent condolences, telling us our loss was, in a way, their loss, too.

I miss that dog as much as I marvel at her life.

But I’m not sad that we’ve made progress. Our dog is happy and healthy and out of harms’ way. She may lead a boring existence … waiting for us to enliven it with our ball-throwing, and our property perimeter perambulations … but all she really wants in life is us and a scruff full of deer poo on occasion.

She thinks a bath is a small price to pay for the luxury of a few moments of abandon. I do, too.

Siobhan Connally is a writer and photographer living in the Hudson Valley. Her column about family life appears weekly in print and online.

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