I've owned a lot of animals over the years. When I was a child, I viewed pet ownership as something done by my parents for my pleasure. Over the years that's developed into a sense of privilege. It's so worth it. Over the summer I wrote often, and with pride, about gardening and how it's so beautiful to have living things respond to my care. My early feelings about animals were similar, but now I have different sense of the relationship. We're a family. We live, grow, and die in a continuum of community. We depend on each other, and love each other. I don't think animals have the same sort of love for us that we do for them or each other, but then human beings express their love in a huge number of complex ways. It's not a stretch for me to call what Wiz feels or the puppies feel or Nikita feels as real love.
I wonder how my children feel deep-down about our pets. I know that they love them, but how is a mystery. How I love others in some ways is a mystery to myself as well. Maybe that's just the way love is. Like the magnificence of music or the intense glow of sunset, it is what it is.
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