Gary Lloyd.
The new year has always been a time to look ahead and, for me, a time to reflect. For the last 10 years, I’ve celebrated the new year with the birthday of my miracle dog, Sonny.
If you don’t know Sonny by now, let me introduce you. He’s my lab-hound mix, a 75-pounder who as a 1-year-old beat surefire megaesophagus — a disorder that makes it hard for food to get to the stomach — and who barks at anything that moves. He was also my nonfiction protagonist in a 2020 book.
Every Jan. 1, his birthday, we go for a sunrise hike. A new year does not get off to the right start for me without hiking some Trussville-area hills with Sonny. We had the opportunity to sneak in another one of those hikes back in the fall, and like every time we go, it was tiring yet refreshing. It’s quiet, secluded. The patter of squirrel and chipmunk feet on fallen leaves are loud enough to make you think deer are nearby. Traffic is reduced to a faded hum, and the birds, especially the crows, are loud.
Orange leaves have scattered the ground, covering the pine needles and mud, giving the wooded trail a lava-like appearance. We found a new path that Saturday morning in October, and we were eager to follow it. Something about feeling slightly lost and finding your way back without Google Maps can make you feel alive.
Mostly, we just noticed. We lunged up hills and crept down slick rocks. I carefully stepped across thick tree roots while Sonny hopped over them. We — OK, just me — cursed the uninterrupted call of the crow, which is downright annoying. We avoided poison ivy and holes in the ground. A fallen silt fence that lets you know, especially these days, that you’re never too far from where whatever folks deem “progress” is encroaching, threatening. I despise coming across those silt fences, or any manmade trash.
Sonny has reached that double-digit age now, no small feat for a large dog who, according to a brash veterinarian, had his days numbered as a 1-year-old with megaesophagus. So, yes, I’m cognizant of these hikes now, and I guess my own also-increasing age. We don’t take the most mountainous trail at DeSoto State Park anymore. Our hourlong hikes, by my choice, have been reduced to 45 minutes, with several water breaks.
But Sonny, like he always has, surprises me. He surprised me by living. He surprises me by winking back at me from the couch. He surprises me by how long he can bark at literally no one without stopping. He surprises me that, after 45 minutes, he longs to continue deeper into the woods. On that October morning, he pulled me along as if he was 3 years old again, his red leash turning my knuckles white. Who is walking who?
At one point on the hike, as we descended a relatively steep hill, he abruptly stopped and looked back at me.
He just gazed. How sweet, I thought, that he was allowing me the time I needed to ease down the hill without falling, that he was concerned so much about my wellbeing.
I’m not, however, that naïve. I knew he was eager just to keep going.
Gary Lloyd is the author of six books and a contributing writer to the Cahaba Sun.
