I’M NOT ALONE. I thought I was. I certainly felt as though it was just me. I was wrong. Do you do as I do? Read on.

It turns out that there are many more pet owners than I ever realized who do as I do, and cook for their animals.

Did you see this piece? If not, read up on the growing sisterhood and brotherhood of those of us who cook for our fur-faced friends

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HE IS FOUR. And for those of you who have followed along with our tale know that is mighty news, indeed. Just this time last year we worried, and fretted, and learned to cook for him, and fretted some more. And now he is four. Who is the he in this sentence? Only our favorite boy.

He turned four on November 23, and we rejoiced. What a difference a year makes, and our thanks go out to everyone who read along and helped, and sent recipes and their good wishes to one of the great loves of my life, Otter the dog.

Celebrate with us.

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THERE WAS A time when our dogs divided us. It happens in neighborhoods, and it did, in ours. Each of us lived behind our own invisible electric fence, keeping our dogs in our own territories, allowing for no mixing of our pedigreed charges. The humans walked, we waved, but we knew little of one another’s lives, except, perhaps, that it was the woman in each home who walked the dog. That much was clear. And for a while that’s how it was: Not much contact, little to say, we walked our dogs along the perimeter of each other’s lives.

We became aware of changes in our homes only via a husband’s obituary in the newspaper, the absence of the truck in another’s driveway, the vision of one of us walking without a dog, but crying. Small inquiries at the hem of the yard, nods exchanged, solace offered, we edged closer. A new dog appeared; there is always something to say about a puppy.  Always.

Then, as that puppy grew and neared his third birthday, he got very sick, and nearly died from something, it seemed, another of our dogs had only the week before, from which she, too, had nearly died, and the exchanges, and the information, cards, a bouquet, a note, and longer conversations ensued.

What we talked about when we talked about our dogs, of course, was love.

And then last week came a pounding on my front door.

“Marion! Marion!” I heard, as I was reclining upstairs in the cool evening.

“Marion!”

My dog and I went running to find my neighbor. Smeared with dirt and tears, having come in from hours of gardening, she had just found her beloved dog motionless on the kitchen floor.

Oh no, I thought. Oh no.

Soon we two were standing over the peaceful body of her hulking animal, all 140 pounds of him. He seemed asleep. He was not. And as we knelt and stroked him, a car door slammed outside and I went out to see our other woman in our dog-friend-triangle, coming up the driveway. But something was odd. My, I thought, how thin she is. How thin. Or something. Maybe that’s not it. But there is some aspect of the equation of her body size that’s off. Just one of those snatched thoughts you get under pressure, the very thinking collapsing as I saw that she, too, was in tears.

And then there were three of us standing over the 10-year-old body of the dog we had known since he was all ears and paws.

Others arrived to help. There were plans made, and calls made, and for 30 minutes or so there was a lot of action, and then for an instant, it was again just us three in the kitchen.

We were going to take the body to the local animal hospital for cremation. Not even we could dig a hole this big, though I know that for an instant we considered it. Keeping him close. Keeping him home. But no.

And then, as we began to pile into cars, came the question.

“Do I look like shit?” This, from the woman whose dog had just died.

Only a woman would ask.

And only two such friends would think before they replied. She had been gardening most of the day, on her knees, in the dirt. She had been crying. It was hot. We all looked like shit. But what do you say to move forward a woman who needs to go say goodbye to her dog? How do you not lie, and yet get her onward into the place she needs to go? How to be tender, yet prodding?

I hadn’t needed to debate this, as the other of us had this clearly covered, gently touching the voluminous shorts I now saw that had been the reason she looked so thin, so fragile, at first.

And then came the gift.

“I’m wearing my dead husband’s swimming trunks. I think we’re good.”

And I snorted. And the woman who just lost her dog belted out a laugh, as did I, a laugh so big that it propelled us where we needed to go next.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

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THE DOGS LIVES ON. Now, two months after his harrowing and lengthy hospital stay, Otter is still alive. And he appears to be well. His blood-test numbers fluctuate a bit, giving me a scare here and there, but to see him is to know that he is much better. And while the doctors agree, they also agree that he is still sick, and must stay on a special diet, designed to not stress his greatly weakened kidneys. Which would be fine, except that he is also allergic to everything. And so we consulted a nutritionist.

Oh, yes. These days vet consults can be done by email, which is how it went for us, when the internal-medicine specialist who saved Otter’s life suggested that he send the records, accompanied by Otter’s allergy profile, to a Cornell nutritionist for some diet suggestions. Hoping that this expert would find a commercial diet for Otter that would no longer require that I cook three dog meals daily, I waited by the email.

And then came the email ping, the contents of the message reading that the diet of sweet potatoes and chicken thighs that I had cooked up (after much online research) was, in fact, a very good call. I preened like a proud mother. That is until I read the next line, stating that it would be what Otter must stay on indefinitely, since there is no single commercial dog food that will do the trick.

Reading this email on Christmas Eve, I admit I read only that first line, and closed the message, overwhelmed at a time of year when things can appear overwhelming. I waited, cooking on as I had, and then after the new year passed, I reopened the file, hoping to find some better news further on.

Nope.

Ugh, I thought. The lovely cast-iron skillet in which I poached the chicken thighs was laden in cooled fat, waiting to be cleaned again; the sweet potatoes that either could be microwaved one at a time for 15 minutes, or peeled and boiled in batches, lay awaiting attention. On this diet he gets a chicken thigh and three potatoes a day. Batches? Ugh. Freezing. Hmmm. What to do?

And that’s when the sister savior thing kicked in again. Standing in my kitchen, gearing up for a lifetime of cooking and cleaning and storing, I spied my slow cooker, given to me last Christmas by Margaret. Aha!

And what an aha! it has been. One pot, it goes in the fridge, in the dishwasher; hell, if Otter ate at the table, it could also be his dish. (He doesn’t, I promise, really, despite the fact that I consider him a relative). Now this is what I call a gift that keeps on giving.

Here at TSP, we’ve always loved our slow cookers. Paige is a master at it, and I am getting there, having previously offered up some human fare, and delighting in your suggestions of what else to cook in mine. So, I tell you this: Cooking for your dog? Slow cook it, and reap the rewards.

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THERE ARE SOME PHRASES we hope never to utter. We all have them, and since they are inutterable I won’t list them, nope, except this one, which I can now say aloud, head raised, even making eye contact with another human, after a sister-stranger saved me, liberated me, and made me hold my red head up high and say: I cook for my dog.

I do. At least I do now.

You might have noticed that things were a little quiet and not at all funny recently for me. That in part was the Thanksgiving rush, of course, but a major contributor to the hush was that somewhere around the beginning of November my dog got sick and entered the hospital, where he stayed for 12 days, during which time I actually signed the papers to put him down, including the receipt for cremation, only now to have him safely back home.

You’ve seen Otter. He is 3, having just successfully celebrated that very big birthday here at home, after nearly not celebrating it at all. None of this was Otter’s fault. He didn’t get a chicken bone. It wasn’t my fault. He didn’t get a chocolate or a piece of sugarless gum.

Climate change has brought along so very many alterations to our lives that the list of those things is too long to type, though high among those changes are pools of standing water in northern New York State that now harbor Leptospirosis where it was never seen before; ticks that carry Anaplasmosis; and dogs who get both illnesses and simply die.

Four dogs in my neighborhood keeled over in the same week with Anaplasmosis. I live in a place where we had no ticks until a few years ago. Now they blow in the wind and just yesterday, in the early part of December, I found one in my house.

As you may have read, I am a fool for my dogs, believing that they provide a sisterhood of sorts, no matter what their sex may be. I sing to my dog, consult with him on every aspect of our days together.

The first morning after his first night in the hospital, at home, I whipped off my nightgown, stuffed it into my purse and took it with me to visit him, sticking it under the head he could barely raise. My daughter’s shirt came too, making a pillow we hoped might remind him of what he had to live for. I crawled in the cage, cried on him as he refused to eat for 10 dreadful days, read him The New York Times, and promised to teach him to swim, all if he’d come back. And then his blood-test numbers were so bad that everyone agreed it was time to let him go. Except Otter. He did not agree, and even though the syringe was filled and the papers were signed, he leapt up from his spot on the floor and began to bark, and I called the whole thing off.

Slowly he got better, enough at least that the very good internal-medicine specialist at the hospital recommended I bring him home, and get him to eat, and we see where all this might go.

Cut to: A scared, tired, weepy woman in the aisles of a lovely, upscale cooking store.

Another woman comes out from behind the counter and approaches with something more on her mind than the usual “Can I help you?” attitude. I cannot imagine what I look like at this point. On my mind is the fact that Otter has lost 8 of his 77 pounds, and that his recovery will be in my hands.

I’ve read up. He needs a very special diet owing both to a remarkable panel of food allergies he has always possessed, and now, nearly failed kidneys. He will now need to eat small meals, many times each day. Oh, the things I’ve read.

I’m looking at kitchen scales, but the weight of this assignment is whirling in my tired head, and the lovely woman asks me simply, “What do you need to do with this?”

She explains that the high-priced scale has a digital readout that will allow me to assess the total calorie count of what’s being weighed.

“No, no. I don’t need to do that; no,” I say.

“What do you need?” she repeats.

And I don’t want to say it. It’s too weird or obsessive, though somehow it is now something I’ll do. And even though I’ve agreed to do it, I cannot say it, and I stumble, saying, “I never thought I’d say these words aloud. Never.”

“Yes?”

“I have to cook for my dog.”

“Oh,” she says. “Is he sick?”

And the story tumbles out, after which she simply touches my forearm and offers: “I have a dog. I’d do the same thing.”

What a kindness. What a great big sisterhood there is out there in the world, if only we can get out the words.

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SISTERHOOD, WE CAN ALL AGREE, come in all shapes and sizes, ranges across continents, and some day may go into space and, as anyone who lives with an animal will tell you, crosses species, as well. Right now I live with a male dog, the 12th dog of my life, Otter (above), who was himself preceded by another male dog, who was preceded by what I call the sisterhood of the dogs.

Twenty years ago I met a man who had never lived with a dog. Neither had his father nor his father before him. So I married the man and set about to change all that.

Softening his resolve began by auditioning names for the incipient dog. After a few weeks, the options narrowed to bird breeds, the logic being that for a honeymoon period, anyway, my new spouse deserved to believe that his dog might actually do something. Much as expectant parents mouth children’s names, I would call them out to no one in particular. And then one summer afternoon I looked up from my gardening to see a filthy, yellow and white, plume-tailed young dog trot into our yard. She was wearing a red ribbon around her neck.

“Mallard!” I yelled, dropping my trowel.

“Oh no,” my husband replied into the topsoil.

She loped right up to me and licked my face. Mallard was with us for two unsteady years, during which time she would occasionally walk out of the yard just as unabashedly as she had walked in, staying away for weeks. She always returned with a red ribbon tied neatly around her neck. Never with us on holidays, we figured that we shared her with someone, and became grateful for the time she chose to spend with us. After all, her affection for us was lavish.

She sat primly in the canoe for paddles of any duration, and never ran away from anywhere but home. Then one day she left and didn’t return. We never figured it out. My belief is that being blonde predetermined such infidelity, but my husband will tell anyone who will listen that if I hadn’t renamed her for a migrating bird she would not have taken to behaving like one. At the time he would also tell you that the only thing dogs do is break your heart.

We waited, dogless, for a year, and then got a call from a friend in Mexico whose aunt had just died, leaving behind her three-year-old Weimaraner. If the family paid the transit, our friend wanted to know, would we accept the dog into our home? European-bred, this dog was the biggest Weimaraner I have ever seen. She weighed in at 80 pounds and stood tall enough to fall asleep with her head leveled on the dining room table.

Her name was Coqueta, Coca for short, and unfortunately she only understood Spanish. This proved humiliating for us both at a rural firehouse during obedience school, when all around were mutts of eager discipline awaiting the response of a fancy dog laid flat on the floor, her owner pleading softly but urgently en Espanol for her to sit up.

Coca had been raised in a walled garden, the precious companion of a well-to-do eccentric woman. And at first that limited the things she wanted to do in any language. She’d sit near the fireplace, her paws crossed below her breast, and look at us in a purebred Katharine Hepburn demeanor, as if awaiting the conversation to become engaging enough for her to participate. My husband’s theory was that no one had ever asked her to do anything. He may have been right, because in our nine years together she learned to run all day beside a cross-country skier, climb the high peaks of the Adirondacks, and selflessly listen to the world of problems that this woman regularly emptied into her vast heart.

When we became parents, Coca, like many nannies before her, rose to the new occasion and ballooned to nearly 100 pounds, sitting pretty under the high chair’s continuous stream of flotsam and jetsam. Outside, she guarded the playpen with her great head over the demurely folded paws, snapping her jaws at flies that threatened to attack the sweet-smelling child napping in the shade.

But all too soon it seemed that everyone in our household was either male or young, except me and Coca. We started going for slower walks, bonded in a war against aging, or at least so it seemed to me. Then we went less frequently, and then I merely looked in on her when I went walking alone. Then I carried her outside–the dwindling 70 pounds of her sustaining dignity–and, toward the end, cleaned up after her. Finally, I didn’t have to do any of that, after I took her to the vet for the last appointment of the day and cradled her against my heart as she died.

I loved that dog more than I love most of my friends, and I am not ashamed to say that I also found her more intelligent than some. It seems to me that while I rarely meet a dog I do not like, I frequently come across people I cannot bear.

But I am an easy mark. The real test was my husband, whose loss I thought I’d have to look hard to see. Then I remembered that Coca did a little dance every night when he walked through the door, and that once or twice I had caught him doing it right along with her. He had bought her the orange T-shirt in hunting season so no one would mistake her for a deer. And there is that snapshot of them napping together, her paw resting on his shoulder.

I realized that what Coca did best was reach my husband in ways that Mallard never could, teaching him that dogs are good to the end, and that even after death, they can remain steadfast parts of what we are proud to call home. She did what all dogs can do, if we don’t mess with them too much: Converting him to a person who can love almost any dog.

This is what the sisterhood of the dog can do, and has done forever, reaching back to that first human who threw that first stick, and to that first dog who took a chance on love.

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