Taking Care of Yourself: Autumn After Autumn

Happy Thursday, Positive Animal Caregivers! ♡🐾

Some Sundays blur into each other. I arrive at the cat shelter at 1pm, scoop the litter boxes, then sit with whoever wants company. The same cats curl in the same corners. The same ones dash toward the door. Weeks pass this way — useful, I think, but hard to measure. When I leave, I rarely feel like I can point to anything and say: that changed.

Once a year, I go back to Korea. And once a year, the blur lifts.

The shelter where I used to walk dogs is an hour ride from the city center. I have been coming here long enough that the staff greet me like a seasonal fixture — someone who disappears and reappears, like a migratory bird with a carry-on bag. I went there to find Autumn this past week.

She is an easy dog to pass by. White, mid-sized, long-snouted Jindo that filled the shelter. She has been overlooked — year after year, passed by adopters who always preferred dogs smaller, or younger. When I stepped into her kennel, she pressed herself against me and spent the next ten minutes kissing my face, as though she had been keeping count of the days and wanted me to know it. 

Her tear stains had darkened. Her snout looked longer, the way faces do when weight slips away quietly. None of it was dramatic. If I had seen her every week, I might never have noticed. But I hadn't watched it happen. I saw a year's worth of aging arrive all at once.

"She's still healthy," a staff member told me. "Still barks at strangers." I vented to a fellow volunteer — How can people walk by a loyal dog like her? Why won't anyone take a chance on a mid-size dog? — and found, the answers were the same ones we had been giving each other for years. Strangely, I found comfort in that. The frustration had not faded. Neither had the affection. We were still here, still rooting for the same dogs, still baffled by the same unfairness. 

But much had changed too. Autumn's old kennel-mate, Elliot, was gone — adopted while I was away, living somewhere with his own bed and a name tag on his collar. The volunteers spoke about his transformation the way people talk about a child who has grown up: with pride, and a little amazement, and the particular tenderness reserved for things you once worried about. I had not seen any of it in-person. I missed the whole arc. And yet, hearing it told back to me, I felt it completely — perhaps more so than if I had watched it week by week, increment by increment, too close to notice the shape of it.

It made me think about the cats back home. The ones who arrived shy and now tolerate a hand on their back. The one who used to hide behind the litter box and now sits confidently in the middle of their space, blinking slowly at people who walk by. I see them every Sunday, which means I almost never see them — not the way you see something when you've been away long enough for the change to accumulate into a fact.

Progress, it turns out, is not always best observed from inside it. Sometimes you have to leave, and come back, and let the distance do what closeness cannot: show you the shape of what has quietly, stubbornly, continued without you.

Small acts of care often look ordinary until someone pauses long enough to notice them. This week, a few things worth noticing:

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Thanks for spending part of your day with me and the rest of the Positive Animal Caregivers Club. Take care of yourself this week. Remember - even superheroes need naps. 

– Philip