Today, I made dog food for one dog for the first time.
I’ve been dreading it.
Actually, I’ve been avoiding it entirely, which is why Kylo has been eating Freshpet lately. And for that, I am an asshole, because Freshpet is gross and we all know I can do better.
But I just couldn’t do it.
For at least a year or more, making dog food meant two crockpots. Two dogs. Two sets of bowls. Blitz had her own little extras that went into hers because she was old and her body needed different things. Kylo had his.
It was just part of the routine.
And today, standing in my kitchen, I had to cut everything in half.
One crockpot.
One dog.
It sounds like such a stupid little thing to be sad about. Except grief, I’m learning, apparently lives in stupid little things.
It lives in dog-food recipes.
It lives in grocery lists.
It lives in automatically reaching for twice as much turkey or chicken.
It lives in realizing halfway through what you’re doing that you’ve started adding Blitz’s extra ingredients to Kylo’s food out of pure muscle memory.
And suddenly you’re standing over a pink crockpot trying not to lose your shit over sweet potatoes.
I didn’t even realize Kylo was there.
He was quietly watching me from one of the entrances to the kitchen while I chopped vegetables. I dropped a piece of carrot, and suddenly there he was, looking at the carrot, then looking at me.
Not taking it.
Just eyeballing the hell out of it, waiting for permission to snarf.
And I laughed.
An actual laugh.
Of course I told him he could have it, and off he went with his prize.
Then I stopped what I was doing for a little while and just watched him.
That sweet little mutt doing his sweet little muttly things.
Kylo is afraid of damn near everything. He came that way lol. I grew up with a dog kinda like him, named Jill, a true Catahoula Cur from the Louisiana swamps.
I have serious doubts that he will ever be the great protector of this household. If somebody breaks into this house, there is at least a reasonable possibility Kylo and I will be hiding behind the same piece of furniture.
But a constant source of joy?
That boy has the job locked down.
He is silly and loving, SUPER smart and adoringly strange, and without even knowing I needed rescuing today, he rescued me from a moment that had been weighing on me for days.
The crockpot is full now.
Just one.
And yeah, that still hurts.
Maybe it always will a little.
But there was also a stolen carrot today. There was a ridiculously adorable dog watching his mom cook. There was laughter in my kitchen again.
And then, as if the universe decided I had suffered enough bullshit for one week, my (highly trained lol) AI model informed me that the GitHub train wreck (ghPages and Actions went DOWN, baby) was finally over.
So naturally, the first thing I did when I could get my new code deployment to run was come here.
To Blitz’s new little corner that I lovingly created for her. (I’m an artist by nature, but a coder by default. Everything you see on this site was coded by yours truly. That’s why you see no ads unless i put them there.)
I decided I don’t want her posts buried among everything else under Reflections. Blitz gets her own place now. Her memorial.
Everything about her can live here.
The big memories and the tiny ones. The ones that make me laugh until I cry and the ones that just make me cry. The stories from fifteen years ago and the things that happen tomorrow because she’s gone. The beautiful moments, the unbearable ones, and apparently even the first time I make one lonely crockpot of dog food.
Because grief isn’t only the moment you lose someone.
It’s all the little moments afterward when you realize, again, that they’re missing.
But maybe healing lives in little moments, too.
Sometimes it’s a candle or a beautiful memory.
And sometimes it’s a goofy little mutt standing in the kitchen, patiently waiting for permission to eat a carrot off the floor.
Today, I’ll take the carrot. ❤️
P.S. I am also extremely grateful that I apparently live in the future, where my AI assistant Roland can monitor GitHub train-wreck statuses for me so I don’t have to repeatedly check whether the internet has finished shitting itself.
Technology does occasionally have its uses. 😹
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