It seems like a lot of people have moved on from Game of Thrones*, so having a direwolf is not as chic as I thought it was going to be when I first started wanting one, and dying my hair blonde and eating stallions’ hearts.

But our Freddie is 95 pounds of fur and love. She’s a little bit of a biter, if you count her feisty on-leash behavior, and both Tom and I have some sweet little teeth marks to show where she loved on us harder than she meant to when we couldn’t let her cross the street to lick a Yorkipoo.

It’s emotional for me to be away from her for a couple of weeks while she’s at obedience camp, since our souls are linked for eternity, and every morning I find myself going over to her bowl and filling it with water out of habit, and every night I find myself instinctively hunting down my siblings’ enemies, since she’s not here to do that sort of thing. I think it’s good that we’re sending her though, even if it changes her personality a little bit, which is Tom’s big fear. If she comes back in a couple of weeks able to control her impulses on a grade school level, and still able to relish ripping the squeaker out of her monthly shipment of plush flamingos and then flop over for a belly scratch, I will call it a success.

*another casualty of the global pandemic