About a month ago, a new dog arrived. I wasn’t expecting the twist of fate that would bring us together. But, alas, I had been kanoodling over getting the fence finished and then going to a shelter to get one – even spending time on my Kindle viewing links to the pounds that abound.

It all happened out of order. Like our writing. Did you ever notice how are lines and our stories come in fits and spurts and it can wind up like a junkyard. Lines and commas and periods and images all stacked on top of each other with dangling participles, misplaced modifiers, an arcless plot of flat characters who have not a thing to say because our quotation marks are floating off on the wing of some errant seagull.

My friend, Steven, found “Sadie” on his way from Charleston to Richmond in late January.

She was discarded like rubbish in the woods near the I-95 corridor and has a host of problems, including an advancing stage of heartworms. I won’t discuss the trauma on her head and then the trauma of emaciation. Sadie is a mother. The vet said she’s had multiple litters in her short life.

Sadie survived her very long ordeal. While I work on editing books, she lies on the large dog bed behind me and sleeps. She eats roast chicken, Science Diet wet food, and all the kibble she wants. We wake up at 6:30, pee, eat, then go for a walk around the block. Then there is a large amount of healing through medicine, sleeping, and constant love by me, my partner, and various visitors. Since her arrival, the routine has put over five pounds on her and her ears are not flapping constantly from the infection that she’s gotten over. She hates those ear drops. So do I.

We still have the heart worms to contend with but I believe she will be just fine. Just like the lines in our junkyard. If we sift through the lines, the quotes, the bad grammar, the twistless plots, sometimes we find a gem. Like Sadie, it may not look like what you wanted but the end result of ritual and hard work and love can make all the difference in the world. Sadie came, the fence went up, a new journey began.

Good words. Good stories. Good girl.

“Come, Sadie, come,” I say. And, so she does. She is my new lovely dog making me, once again, believe that good triumphs over all the darkness any of us wallow in or go through.

In Hebrew, Sadie means “mercy.” Sometimes we need to bestow it on our animals, and each other, and our writerly selves.