My dog Pita and I walk every day.

At least once and always first thing. Well, first thing after coffee. And I mean every single day. Rain, snow, sleet, mud, fog, wildfire smoke, sunshine, and the great Nothing so common in Columbia River Gorge winters. We walk.

I’ve come to understand that the walk is Pita’s main goal for the day. Between the time my feet hit the floor and the moment I grab the leash, Pita is quietly pressuring me toward the door. I swear she wakes up and thinks about it in the middle of the night. Her wet snout snuffles near my face in the dark. She sighs and circles up in her bed again. As I drink my coffee, she watches me, alert for the signals she’s learned to associate with our near departure—donning of socks and shoes, searching for hat and sunglasses. She’s even noticed that I chew gum when I walk and perks up when I unwrap a stick of Trident. Her excitement builds throughout all this and when she sees me grab the leash, she erupts with joy—wiggling, wagging, whimpering joy.

The walk itself is both the same and different every day. We follow a regular route but it’s never routine for her. I know she’s experiencing something outside my capacity to understand. For one thing, it’s said that dogs smell up to 100,000 times better than humans. She’s searching for things, appreciating the novel, not sure what’s going to be there, but thrilled by whatever she discovers—the footprints of last night’s racoon; toast crumbs dropped by the neighbor boy; the scent of a dog she loves or a dog she hates on a fencepost.

In her book Animals Make Us Human, Temple Grandin uses the scientific theory of core emotions to explain how dogs operate.

This system is made up of four so-called “blue ribbon emotions” — seeking, panic, fear, and rage—that are inborn and can consistently be evoked by localized brain stimulation. Grandin says that to give dogs the best lives possible, we must protect them from three of those four—panic, fear, and rage. Panic comes from separation anxiety, fear from actual threat, and rage from of being physically constrained. The fourth key emotion, seeking, is essential for dog happiness. As Grandin explains it, the joy in seeking comes from the adventure of looking for something, not in finding it. Seeking is all about anticipation, the what-if, the could-be.

These core emotions apply to humans too. We need protection from panic, fear, and rage. We need the experience of seeking. Happily for me, for Pita, for other dog people and their dogs, we have this symbiosis. Pita’s joyful anticipation reminds me how important it is to look forward to things, to imagine anew, to take pleasure in the planning of things yet to come.

February is the perfect season for anticipation.

Perfect for dreaming, scheming, and preparing for the spring and summer. For me that means seasons of gardening and gathering and traveling and exploring my own home ground afresh. I’m also looking forward to many live events this spring (See below). If you live in one of these towns, I hope to see you. I also continue to Zoom into book clubs. If that sounds like fun to you, drop me a line from my contact page. Happy days of anticipation!