A Big Little Life

engine, Trixie scrambled out ofthe cargo area, into the backseat, across the console, and onto Gerda’s lap. Weighing sixty-two pounds at that time and given the appearance of greater bulk by her thick golden coat, she looked bigger than her mom. She curled up on Gerda, propped her chin on the curve of the door that might be called the windowsill, and sighed with contentment.
    This is where I belong , the sigh clearly said, and it so touched Gerda that she would make no effort to dislodge her furry daughter. As we drove home, Trixie began to snore, her breath lightly steaming the side window, safe in loving arms.
    Dogs might love a place, as people do, but the only place they love beyond all others is the place where you are. When we left the house on the hill, in Harbor Ridge, home would become wherever we took her.
    Once the walls of our new house were framed and the windows set in place, Trixie padded room to room with tail continuously wagging. Visit after visit, her delight was obvious as she capered through the structure, as though she had developed a deep appreciation for the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, which inspired the project.
    After months of watching her react with enthusiasm to the place, we suddenly realized what most appealed to her. Our Harbor Ridge house was Victorian, with French windows set well above her head. In the new house, windows in many rooms were instead five feet wide and extended ceiling to floor. When the view mattered, thatentire wall of a room was one large-paned window beside another, expansive sweeps of wood-framed glass that brought the outer world into the house. In Harbor Ridge, she could glimpse the outside only through a few French doors. In the new place, she could see nature wherever she went, and this sent her spirit soaring.

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please don’t send my sweet dog to jail
    ON OUR FIRST Christmas together as a married couple, six weeks after the wedding, Gerda and I had too little money to decorate our tree as grandly as we would have liked. Two sets of colored lights, two boxes of cheap ornaments, and a package of aluminum-foil icicles stretched our budget to the breaking point.
    We had furnished our entire rented house for a hundredfifty dollars by seeking bargains at country auctions. This proved to be an effective strategy, but only after we realized we were both raising our hands, bidding against each other, and stopped competing for items we wanted. A sofa bought for three bucks looked handsome after we restrung the springs and reupholstered it with a cheap, attractive material. We attached short legs to an old door, painted it black, and employed it as a Japanese-style dining table. Instead of chairs at the table, we had plump pillows that Gerda stitched together with her sewing machine. They were stuffed with shredded plastic bags—mostly bread bags of soft plastic, so they wouldn’t crackle—that our families and their neighbors saved for us, and when we dined, we sat cross-legged on them. We slept on a bizarre combination sofa bed and trundle bed, no more than a foot off the floor.
    When she visited us, my mother wept at our poverty. “You’re eating on the floor ,” she said with great distress, emphasizing the last word of each sentence, as though reciting an official litany of misery. “You’re sleeping on the floor . You don’t have an oven . You don’t have a TV . You’re eating on the FLOOR. ” She loved us. She wanted the best for us. My mother had lived her entire married life not knowing if she would have a roof over her head tomorrow, yet she reacted to our humble but happy home as if we were festering in a cardboard shanty in the slums of Calcutta.
    Our first Christmas tree did not dazzle. There were not piles of gifts stacked beneath it. But we were together,we no longer stood separate and alone in the world, we owned a nice electric hot plate, we didn’t waste time watching TV because we didn’t have one to watch, and if we fell out of bed in the night, we couldn’t drop far enough to hurt ourselves. At twilight on Christmas Eve, snow began to spiral down in silver-dollar flakes, and we went for a walk in an evening as magical as any in Narnia.
    Thirty-two years later, as our first Christmas with Trixie approached, we anticipated the holiday with as much pleasure as we felt in that distant December. With the success of my books, Gerda and I had long been purchasing art and antiques that we both admired; we thought of those things as gifts