The dog’s agenda is simple, fathomable, overt: I want. “I want to go out, come in, eat something, lie here, play with that, kiss you. There are no ulterior motives with a dog, no mind games, no second-guessing, no complicated negotiations or bargains, and no guilt trips or grudges if a request is denied.
Caroline KnappMe, I walk along and feel quietly defensive, a recluse in the Land of We. That's quite the loaded word, 'we.
Caroline KnappIt happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.
Caroline KnappBefore you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way.
Caroline KnappBut then the wine came, one glass and then a second glass. And somewhere during that second drink, the switch was flipped. The wine gave me a melting feeling, a warm light sensation in my head, and I felt like safety itself had arrived in that glass, poured out from the bottle and allowed to spill out between us.
Caroline KnappI've always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms.
Caroline KnappAmerican companies spend more than $200 billion each year hacking women's bodies into bits and pieces, urging comparisons between self and other, linking value to air-brushed ideals, and as the girls in my seventh-grade class graduated to high school and beyond, the imagery around us would only grow more specific, more pummeling, more insidious.
Caroline Knapp