11:55 on a Monday night and I think again of Lily...

Through bare tree limbs jutting upward I can see Lake Zoar. Far away and across dips and hills is water throwing sunlight skyward.

My own path through fallen leaves. My own repeated footfalls zig-zagging around stones. My own daydreams.

Rather than crushed leaves and hints of stone I look not at the ground but inward for just a little while. My mind is cluttered with crumpled up ideas clogging doorways and blocking windows. My daydreams are having trouble pushing through. They are laughing children, barefoot and stumbling across spring grass, refusing to answer me. Yet.

I have not seen those kids up close in awhile. Where the hell are they?

Lily had me far into the woods on Sunday, where I lost sight of her bright orange vest streaking. Up a hillside, past a deerstand fortified with fresh lumber since the summer, across a stone-filled stream, and leveling off where I find what I had thought was a vernal pool, but the water has lasted far past spring.

It's a year-round splotch of moisture deep enough to outrank the puddles, but not ready to measure up as a pond. Trees sink their roots near its edges and fallen limbs and dead wood criss cross its surface.

Bandit and Hershey splash and I eventually wind my way homeward where I ask Jerry: has Lily come back?

Nope.

I go back out with Hershey and we roam. I follow my path again, knowing that at any second I'll see the points of her ears peek over the rise, and like spilling water Lily will follow.

Tonight as we celebrated my mother's birthday, I gave her an angel figurine holding a puppy. It's like my mom, who spent the past year caring for Lily when I was too worried to leave a sick dog alone.

December 26 will be one year with my German Shepherd. To tell this tale in Lily time makes the year a stretching, elastic thing that whips out in long strands or shrinks back to cheat days of their hours as Lily was sick, then better.