I love my dogs.

This is not to put my dogs above my family, above my children or even my friends. Some people do that, and I have sometimes had to balance my responsibilities to my dogs with spending time with my friends and family.

Not having someone to take care of them while I’m away has been agonizing. I’ve cut trips short or even skipped them entirely instead of leaving them unattended for longer than a night.

Never underestimate the value of a reliable dog sitter.

My dogs have been a constant in my life for nearly 15 years. Both of them were rescues.

Rudy, the black lab mix, was part of a litter that arrived on Christmas eve. His parents were a couple of neighborhood strays in the northern part of the county. The woman who took the mother and puppies in gave each of the dogs a Christmas name.

Rudy is short of Rudolph and he was meant to be a companion to my youngest son, Emmett. He wound up being the dog for Emmett and his brother. Rudy loved them right off. It took him the better part of a decade for him to warm up to me.

Rudy has a bum back leg, an old injury from when he was a puppy, but he’s also a terror to visitors. He’s not violent, but opportunistic. He’s been known to bolt past visitors and run out the door.

When he gets loose, he’ll sometimes stay gone for half a day –or he used to until he started getting some age on him.

These days, half an hour of being an outlaw is usually enough, and he’ll come trotting back to the front door like nothing happened.

Mostly, Rudy has grown into a respectfully lazy old dog who likes to spend his summer afternoons lazing in the front yard and hardly moves from the couch in winter.

He loves pizza and has been known to pull entire boxes off the top of the stove, which is not easy with his bum leg.

His favorite kind of pizza is ham and pineapple.

He also loves apple cores and barely knows what a stranger is. He’ll give a fair bark when a stranger comes in the house, but he wags his tail and gives up the noise as soon as the visitor is through the door.

Penny is my other dog –a high strung terrier-mix who hates other dogs but loves people.

My next-door neighbor has a Pomeranian. Penny would murder her if she could just get loose of the leash.

Penny is short of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus. Originally, she was a gift to a girlfriend who was still living with her parents and could not have a dog.

That’s a little to unpack. She had a master’s degree but worked at a library, so not a lot of money and she was nervous about that. She was afraid of giving up her comfortable life where most of her needs were met, even though going out on her own would have given her more freedom –including maybe having a dog.

I got the girlfriend the dog because I loved her and figured she just needed time to get brave enough to step out on her own –or maybe move in with me.

Since she coudn’t keep the dog at her parents’ house, Penny stayed at my house. I fed Penny, walked her, kept her clean and took her to the vet.

Penny was the smallest puppy and the only female in her litter. She was born on a farm Roane County. We picked her out of a box in the back of a car in the lot of feed store, one warm winter day.

Penny was a lot of work that first year. She was an aggressive chewer and destroyed two pair of my boots and two power cords for my laptop. She also ate a bar of soap, which bound her up something fierce.

We thought she’d poisoned herself at the time, but she just needed to throw it all up.

When the relationship with the girlfriend ended, Penny stayed with me. She’d always been mostly my dog anyway. I put all the time in. I did most of the work and Penny was the only thing from that relationship I kept.

As she was before that ending, Penny has been my constant companion. She follows me around the house and sleeps at the foot of my bed. She wakes me up just before my alarm goes off most mornings and defends me versus every neighborhood stray, every squirrel and every ATV that runs up and down the road in front of my house.

She suffers my television choices and watches me as I sing and cook dinner.

I talk to her and tell her things I’d never say to another living soul. It helps that she doesn’t speak or really understand more than a handful of words (and most of those are related to food).

I’d be lost without her.

I love my dogs.