Hello. It is Salem. I have been thinking about what is needed, which is my main job, and I have concluded that what is needed, upstairs, is gifts. So I have been bringing them. This is the list.
First, some background. A spaniel is always needed. This is not a thing I decide day to day; it is simply true, in the way that the garden is true, and I have organised my whole life around it. Lately the needing has been upstairs, in the room where everyone has gathered, and so that is where I have directed the gifts. I go out, I investigate the bushes thoroughly, I locate the best available thing, and I carry it up. Softly. Nothing arrives harmed. That is the entire method.
Gift one: a sock. I found it. I will not say where. It was an excellent sock and I delivered it whole and set it down by the bed, and there was laughing, which I have learned is one of the good sounds, so I went and got another sock.
Gift two: a leaf — a very good one, large, only slightly chewed, and chewed strictly for carrying purposes. Gift three: a stick I had been developing a relationship with for some weeks. It was a hard thing to give away. I gave it away. That, it turned out, was what the stick had been for all along.
Gift four: the tennis ball. My tennis ball. I brought it up and placed it on the bed and did not immediately take it back, which, if you have ever met a spaniel and a tennis ball, you will understand to be the largest thing I have ever done. It stayed up there a whole afternoon. I checked on it. I let it stay.
Not all of it was wanted, exactly. Some of it was damp. I understand this. But I have come to find that the bringing is the thing — that a gift is really only a way of going upstairs and saying, without any of the hard words, that I am here, and that I looked, all day, for the best thing, and that the best thing was always only ever going to be for her.
The list will get longer. There are more bushes. There is more day. A spaniel is always needed, and I intend to keep being one, one gift at a time. Best friends? Best friends. — Salem