Hey there 🐾,

Just a quick bark from Spencerville, where I, Moxie, reign as the philosopher-pup in a fur-tinted tale. Thinker, dreamer, and tail-wagger extraordinaire, I weave through the drama of our edible operas and feline riddles with the grace of a street-wise ballerina. Lost in a reverie of Ms. Hattie’s stories and the scent of beef biscuits, I’m writing life’s next chapter with paws dipped in whimsy. Stay tuned, friend. The next great adventure is just a sunrise away.

Tail wags and dreamy blinks,
Moxie 🐕✨

Listen to the story here

And so here we are in Spencerville, where the streets are paved with a thousand welcomes and the lampposts are forever bathed in a warm glow that never knows the harshness of a high noon sun. It’s a place just shy of heaven, but a heaven nonetheless, especially tailored for paws and claws and things that flutter and squawk in the soft light of dusk.

I’m Moxie, by the way. Yes, you know me. Tan and white, expressive alert eyes, coat like a patchwork of consummate autumns. I’m the one usually lounging by the Golden Gate Gardens; tail thumping, ears perked like little sentinels awaiting the gossip of sparrows. I’m a thinker; I am.

There’s no typical day in Spencerville, thank heavens—routine is the enemy of mischief, and mischief is what sparkles in these eyes, twinkle-twinkle. My friends are a motley assortment, a real casserole of characters. There’s Buster, forever trapped in the body of a Jack Russell but with the heart of a dragon, and Whiskers, wise beyond any of his nine lives, a Maine Coon who speaks in riddles wrapped in enigmas smothered in fur.

Breakfast at Bark Burgers is never just sustenance, it’s philosophy—a sort of communion, if you will. We sit, savoring every bite as if decoding the secrets of the universe through beef and bun, pontificating on the transient nature of things—like that navy-blue frisbee from another life; looped in the air and snagged by fate.

Before Ms. Hattie, life was a canvas unpainted; a book unread. Ms. Hattie, bless her soul, had fingers that danced on my fur like a maestro at a piano, whispering Dickens and Austen and Hemingway, as if every scratch behind the ear carried the weight of cathartic revelation. Through her, I knew Beethoven, albeit not hearing him, you understand, I saw him in the rise and fall of her chest as she hummed tunes between the pages; I knew the comforting scent of well-worn tales and fresh ink.

Then, Spencerville; this miraculous layover between was and will be. But, oh, the drama. This family—one by choice, not blood—is an opera of love, secrets, and expectations. Look at Buster, who chases butterflies with the ferocity of a general, and Whiskers, ever the aristocrat surveying his kingdom from beneath the willows of Golden Gate Gardens.

The days unfold here in streams, like consciousness let loose from the confines of linearity—flashes of moments lived, memories cherished and premonitions faintly felt—a carousel of existence, moving not forward, but outward.

Take this morning, for instance. The sun boasted a ferocious yawn, and Spencerville stirred. I watched, sipped from the Silver Lake (more of a pond, but go explain that to a frog), the bounty of scents layering the air in an orgy of remembrance and speculation. Was Ms. Hattie baking those beef biscuits now, her spectacles catching the golden light? The thought is enough to stir a pang—a disinclined notion to dwell on citrus, ugh, which sends a ripple of distaste across my being.

And here they come, my family, Buster with his perpetual question marks bouncing over his head; Whisker’s rhetorical answers trailing like the tail he so often chases. We are the actors in this unstaged play, the notes in a symphony of tail-wags and purrs, interconnected stories unfurling with the unruliness of dreams, in the stream of thought without anchor or intent other than to simply be.

The shops, the restaurants, the castles and palaces—they are but backgrounds to our foregrounds of togetherness, of drama played not for audiences but for each other—my family. Reunions are bittersweet, the seams of loss and love undeniably interwoven.

The new siblings are an unexplored chapter—they could be anything, really. Perhaps they’ll be like that frisbee; a soaring enigma, a companion to my thoughts, untethered yet intimately joined.

Welcome to Spencerville. Make yourself at home. There’s plenty of drama, countless tails, and I, Moxie, amidst it all—a chapter mid-sentence, a tale mid-wag, a stream of consciousness eternally in love with the pause between sunrise… and the next great adventure.

The End.

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