I was going to write about my book-finishing process, but instead I’m going to write about a dog.

This morning I went over to the neighbors’ property to do some weeding. We share an alley sandwiched between their driveway and my fence. The alley is technically mine, and I don’t know why the original fence-builders didn’t put my fence on the property line, but they didn’t, so there it is. The alley isn’t paved, so weeds grow on it every year. The wind blows the weeds away from my land, onto the neighbors’. This is a problem because they’re hay farmers and don’t want to spend part of the season picking weeds out of their hayfields. Someone could say that they could run some fence along their hayfields to prevent this from happening, and someone has said this a few times in earshot of said neighbors, but they haven’t, and I’m told that well-maintained alleys make good neighbors, so I went out there with my trenching shovel this morning to, as we say in the tech industry, do the needful.

Despite how it sounds, chores like this can be good. The repetition is a kind of meditation, and the wiggle and pop of deep-rooted weeds coming free of the earth hits the same dopamine pathway in my brain as popping a good zit. At a time when my day job is demanding so much of my cognitive functioning, it can be good to spend a couple hours on a weekend hoeing up a garden bed or digging up some weeds or nailing shade cloth up for the baby animals.

That said, it was supposed to be 95 degrees today, and there was a promising sizzle in the air as I hiked down the quarter-mile drive between my neighbors’ gate and their house. When I saw Sharon walking out to feed her animals, I called hello and stopped to chat for a minute, but that minute turned into twenty minutes, and Sharon offered me a free riding mower because she had a new one, a better one, and the old one mostly worked and she knew a guy in town who would fix it up for us for a couple hundred bucks and we could borrow her flatbed if we would just take it off the property, it had sat idle for a year and…

Sharon can go on. She is a staunch denier of all modern mental health diagnoses, including ADHD, so making a suggestion to her about her own neurology would not be well received. Suffice it to say that I nod a lot and make a lot of curious noises at Sharon and speak up when she says something I agree with and, where possible, try to hammer in the parts where we agree that no, the government shouldn’t be able to tell someone what to do on their own land if they’re not hurting anybody and no, the media isn’t to be trusted, left or right, and yes, all politicians are corrupt, even the local ones, and absolutely fuck Flock cameras.

And as it often does, one thing led to another, and Sharon led me into her barn to show off her lambing stalls, and after a few minutes of oohing and ahhing I looked over her fence and said “That’s not one of your dogs, is it?”

It was not.

We walked out of the barn, me laying my shovel and water bottle down on the ground to present a less threatening silhouette, and greeted a smallish, gold-white dog, emaciated and wearing a battered black collar, who slinked into the yard on her belly, one back foot hovering off the ground. She greeted Sharon first, but when I said “Oh hi baby,” she got up, limped over to me, and fell down on my feet. When I sat down to pet her, she climbed into my lap.

We spent about an hour and a half on Sharon’s garage floor, using a combination of tweezers, hydrogen peroxide, neosporin, and Sharon’s husband Bob’s mustache trimming scissors to get what felt like half a pound of foxtails and sticker burrs out from between this poor dog’s toes. She has what we call little Grinch feet, soft and tufted with bonus fur, just like Beamer J. Border Collie. The skin on her feet was raw in places, the foxtails buried half an inch deep. She never growled. She never tried to bite.

About forty minutes into this process, Sharon said “Now, when you take her home with you, you’ll wanna—”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I don’t want any more pets.”

“Sure you do,” she said. “This is your dog. She loves you.”

“This dog is starving,” I said. “She would love anyone who spoke to her in a warm tone of voice.”

And one thing led to another and eventually my husband came over to meet the dog, and fortunately he brought the truck because probably she wouldn’t have liked to walk all the way back down that driveway and up mine, and, to make a long story short, there’s a third dog in the house now. Poppy is thrilled, Beamer is trying to keep his shit together but fundamentally a simp for lady dogs.

We may end up finding her people, but right now we’re assuming she was abandoned by someone. Rural area, Trump’s economy, it’s not unusual.

I’m gonna have to open an online store or sell more books or something, because I was already spending all my money on the house. But look at this face: