Renato Gandia

For the past few days I’ve been waking up at four in the morning.

Not because I’ve turned into one of those writers who swears by a 4 a.m. routine, coffee and meditation and a thousand words before the world stirs. It’s because two eleven-week-old Yorkie mixes, Lilly and Poppy, have their own ideas about when the day should start.

By the time I make it to the living room, they’re already awake, tumbling over each other, chasing something invisible across the floor, checking every corner of the house like it rearranged itself overnight. Then, just as I give up on going back to sleep, they crash. They climb onto my lap and within minutes they’re out cold, and I’m stuck there, trying to revise a chapter with two sleeping puppies pinning me to the couch.

It’s hard to edit anything when your lap has become the most comfortable mattress in the house.

Last October, a few days before Thanksgiving, Boyd and I said goodbye to Marley. He was almost eighteen.

We adopted Marley when he was nearly three, a Shih Tzu mix who’d already learned how to trust people before we ever met him. We missed the puppy years entirely; we got him mid-story. For almost fifteen years after that, he was part of ours.

By the end, he knew us better than we knew ourselves. He recognized the pantry door before it opened. He knew which cupboard held the treats. He could tell a weekend suitcase from one that meant we’d be gone longer, and he’d worked out how to ask for one more snack like the last one had been some kind of mistake.

Old dogs settle into a house. They stop needing to sniff every leaf or bark at every sound, because they already know the rhythm, mostly because they built it. After Marley died, the house didn’t feel quiet so much as unfinished. No bowl to fill. No evening walk. No small face checking on us from the hallway.

Then Lilly and Poppy showed up, and the order we’d built lasted about seven minutes.

Within days, one of my boots lost its shoelace and a book I’d left on the floor came back with tooth marks down the spine. They treat the whole house like it was set up for their entertainment, and somehow I’m laughing more than I expected to.

Not because they’ve replaced Marley. Nothing does that. Love just doesn’t work that way. Whatever room the heart has for one dog, it finds room for the next.

Every so often I catch myself comparing them to him, and I stop myself, because it isn’t fair. Marley earned that gentleness over eighteen years. Lilly and Poppy have been alive for eleven weeks. Their job isn’t to remind me of him. It’s to become whoever they’re going to be, and mine is to learn who that is.

Writers get told to guard their mornings, protect the blank page, defend the routine. There’s something to that. But there’s another truth I’m only starting to understand: life doesn’t wait for the chapter to end. It shows up muddy-pawed and half asleep, interrupts your sentence, curls up on your chest while you’re trying to fix a paragraph, and reminds you the manuscript isn’t the only story going.

By then the light’s coming up outside. These past few mornings wildfire smoke has turned Calgary’s sunrise a strange orange instead of its usual gold, the skyline soft behind the haze, like the morning’s taking its time showing up. Inside, two tiny dogs are asleep like they’ve just finished something important.

Maybe they have.

Tomorrow they’ll probably wake me at four again. I’ll grumble, make coffee one-handed while the other hand scratches a Yorkie ear, open the manuscript and tell myself I’ll actually get somewhere before work. And if this week is any guide, one of them will climb onto my lap, the other will stretch across my chest, and both will fall back asleep like I exist to keep them warm.

The chapter can wait twenty more minutes.

There was a time I believed the most important thing to do before sunrise was write. This week, before the orange morning fully takes over the sky, two puppies are reminding me that writing doesn’t stand apart from life. It comes out of it. Sometimes it starts with a sentence. Sometimes it starts with the weight of something small and trusting, asleep on your chest.

And sometimes, after saying goodbye to an old friend, the bravest thing a heart can do is learn to say hello again.