I think when John and I added dog writing to our travel writing specialty in late 2008, it caught a lot of people by surprise. It definitely didn’t take my parents by surprise, though; they’d seen my love of dogs from the very beginning. Just the other day, they gave me some photos they’d located:
Holding puppies with my mom at my grandmother's house.
Just a few years later, I had my own first dog, a beagle named Henry:
Paris & Henry
Sadly, Henry ran away that year. My next dog was a dachshund named Peanut:
Paris & Peanut
In later life, Peanut developed serious back problems, became paralyzed, and had an operation after which we needed to teach him to walk again. Fortunately for us, Peanut had become best friends with our duck named Daisy; Daisy loved Peanut’s water therapy in a tub in our back yard and, motivated by his buddy, Peanut learned to walk again and enjoyed a full life. Years later the story of that unique friendship later became the subject for my first big magazine sale, a memoir article in Reader’s Digest!
In high school, we got our first rescue dog, sweet Pepsi! Pepsi grew into a shepherd-sized dog and his memory has inspired me to adopt (and adopt, and adopt) only rescues since those days!
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