Some lives are kept pristine. Mine is dog-eared.
A porch on the east side of the house. A dog on the boards before the sun gets there. Coffee that is too hot to drink, that you drink anyway, because it is what you have to offer the morning. A hymn stuck in your head from a church you do not attend anymore, and the prayer underneath it that is just one word.
This is where I write from.
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The Dog-Eared Life is a weekly essay newsletter about the pages I keep coming back to. Hope. Faith. Marriage. Being a Mom. Appalachia. The Midwest. Recovery. Three dogs. The ordinary griefs and ordinary joys that nobody writes about because they are not dramatic enough.
I write about the middle of things. The part where you already know the lesson, and you are learning it again anyway.
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When I say recovery, I do not mean it the way most people hear it.
Recovery is not just for the twelve-step rooms, though it is for them too. It is for anyone rebuilding after something. Grief. Losses you never imagined you’d experience. Burnout. A marriage that had to get harder before it got honest. A faith that got complicated. Motherhood. A body that stopped cooperating. A family story you had to set down in order to carry your own.
Recovery is the long work of becoming yourself again after life interrupted. It is the fire you did not ask for, shaping you into something you could not have forged on your own. It does not end. It softens. It changes shape. Sometimes it looks like feeding the dogs while you wait for the hard part to pass.
If you are recovering from somethingm, and most of us are, you are in the right place.
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Living with dogs is responsibility, frustration, comfort, loss, and something harder to name. Most of the time, all at once.
Some pieces here are stories. Some are reflections. Some begin with something practical and end somewhere else. The goal is not to explain dogs. The goal is to catch what it feels like to live with them, to care for them, and eventually, to let them go.
If you are here, you likely already know what that means.
Here you will find:
Thoughts on hope, faith, family, and the long work of being a person
Occasional pieces on holistic nutrition, Appalachian heritage, and what I have learned the slow way
Writing that does not try to wrap up neatly, because my life does not either
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I am Trina. Married to the man I would pick again. Mom of two sons, each of them my favorite in a different way. Three rescue dogs named Miley, Leonard, and Zoey. Appalachian and Midwestern, and I have stopped trying to decide. A faith that is mine.
Forged, not fabricated. Dog-eared on purpose.
Welcome to the dog-eared life.
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