I hear breathing…

I managed to make my own overlay photo, all by myself, sort of.  At our class today we got our very patient teacher, Alice, to go over the steps from the last class.  This is light years beyond anything I ever thought I could do in photography so I’m quite pleased with myself.  Photoshop is amazing, and we’ve only touched the surface I’m sure.

But in choosing a subject for the photo dogs were the obvious choice.  Because for one thing I have a lot of photos of them, but more importantly because I have come to realize that they just might be what’s keeping me content living alone at this stage of life.  They are helping at the very least.

The dogs weren’t here with me when my husband died.  They were with my son, who helpfully took them home with him to give me one less thing to stress about when my husband was sick.  And he kept them to give me time to adjust.  I wandered the rooms, and tried to tell myself how nice it was that they were perfectly clean, no mussed up bed from Ozzie jumping up on it.  No dogs barking out the back door at nothing, or nothing I could see anyhow.  It was quiet, and I love the quiet.  That’s what I told myself.  Turns out it was too quiet.  The house was dead.

Not that I realized it at that point.  It was when I brought the dogs back home that I heard it.  The breathing.  They breathed and it seemed as if the house came back to life and breathed with them.  And they breathed life back into me too.  They aren’t just dogs, they really are family.

I especially like when I walk into the room and they start thumping their tails.  I think of it as applause…