If you’d told me three years ago that Linus and I would one day be dog people, I would have laughed. Not just chuckled—laughed. It wasn’t that we disliked animals; we just didn’t see ourselves as the kind of people who could manage the chaos of a pet. Our lives were neat and organized—work, dinner, Netflix, bed. Rinse and repeat.
Then, the world shut down.
The pandemic turned our tidy routines into something else entirely. Days bled into each other, and even Linus, the most pragmatic and grounded person I know, admitted to feeling untethered. One gray April morning, after too many hours of scrolling through social media, Linus turned to me and said, “What if we got a dog?”
I stared at him, certain I’d misheard. “We’ve never even owned a plant.”
“Plants don’t bark,” he replied with a shrug. “And they definitely don’t wag their tails when you come home.”
I don’t know what possessed me to say yes. Maybe it was boredom, or maybe it was the faint hope that something—anything—could bring some life back into our home. Two weeks later, we brought Iris home.
Iris wasn’t exactly what we expected. The adoption site had described her as “calm and sweet-natured.” What they failed to mention was that she was also a whirlwind in fur. A shaggy mutt with mismatched ears and a boundless enthusiasm for absolutely everything, Iris turned our lives upside down within minutes of arriving.
She bolted straight into the living room, grabbed one of Linus’s slippers, and dashed in circles like she’d just discovered the joy of freedom. Linus tried to catch her, slipping and landing in a heap on the rug while I doubled over laughing. For the first time in weeks, the heaviness in the air seemed to lift.
That first month was chaos. Iris chewed through half the cords in our home office, shredded a pair of my sneakers, and managed to get stuck under the couch not once, but twice. Training her felt like trying to teach a tornado to sit. And yet, every time she plopped her head on my knee or curled up beside Linus with a contented sigh, we’d exchange a look that said, Maybe this was a good idea after all.
It wasn’t long before Iris started teaching us things we didn’t even know we needed to learn.
Linus has always been the planner, the kind of person who schedules his free time and sets weekly goals for relaxation. But Iris doesn’t care about plans. She lives entirely in the moment. A patch of sunlight on the carpet? Pure joy. A walk in the rain? The greatest adventure. Watching Linus get swept up in her world was like seeing him unspool, shedding layers of stress I hadn’t even realized he was carrying.
And then there was me. I’ve always been a worrier, the kind of person who lies awake at night rehashing awkward conversations from three years ago. Iris doesn’t let me live in my head for long. She nudges me out of bed when I’d rather wallow, insists on playing tug-of-war when I’m spiraling, and rests her head on my chest when I can’t stop crying over a news headline.
Somewhere along the way, Iris became more than just a dog. She became a mirror, reflecting back the parts of ourselves we’d forgotten to nurture. She showed us how to laugh at the absurd, how to let go of the small stuff, and how to savor the simple joys—like the smell of freshly baked bread or the sound of her paws padding across the floor.
Our friends like to joke that we’re obsessed with her. They’re not wrong. We’ve started planning weekend hikes just to watch her bound through the trees like she’s discovering a whole new universe. We throw her birthday parties. Linus even made her a custom “Iris’s Walks” playlist on Spotify, which she clearly doesn’t care about, but we love.
Iris didn’t just change our lives; she expanded them. Before her, our world felt contained—safe, yes, but limited. She brought us out of ourselves, taught us to see the beauty in messiness, and reminded us what unconditional love really looks like.
Last night, as we sat on the couch watching her chase dreams in her sleep, Linus turned to me with a quiet smile. “We didn’t rescue her, did we?” he said softly.
I shook my head. “No. She rescued us.”
And she continues to rescue us, every single day.