Kirby is a medium dog. Thirty-five pounds, a figure currently under review, with the proportions of a serious working dog and the schedule of a part-time socialite. She is large enough to take up a real share of the couch and small enough to insist she still belongs in your lap.
She attends Dogtopia twice a week. There, between supervised play sessions and a snack she has decided is hers by inheritance, she sits — patiently, often quietly — for themed photographs. The themes are not her doing. The composure is. She turned four there this year, in a hat, and the occasion was filmed.
To date she has been a graduate, a Mean Girl, a Swiftie, a gym-goer, a winter woodland creature, a football fan, Irish for a day, a champion of something, a shark, a chef, a third-grader by association, and — once, memorably — a generic person at a salon. She has worn two wigs, one fin, and one chef's coat. She has worn exactly one tutu. She does not, as a matter of policy, comment on which she preferred.
What she likes: treats, bones, anything left unattended on the counter, roughhousing with her skin brother, a blanket to burrow into, her apartment (a crate, though no one calls it that), and a full-speed lap of the backyard. What she tolerates: the vacuum, the indignities of the photo shoot, and, as of this season, the diet kibble. She has not been told it is diet kibble. She has her suspicions. What she does not tolerate, under any terms, is the bath.
The household consists of three favorite people and one Kirby. Sarah is her mother — primary disciplinarian, supplier of belly rubs, the only voice that reliably brings her back from across a field. Jason is her father, and, by Kirby's own quiet accounting, the chief snack authority in the home. Alex, her brother, gets the closest thing she does to a full-body wag. She loves all three approximately equally, with the exact ranking subject to revision based on who is currently holding the bag of treats.
This website exists because the photographs deserved a frame, and because every era — graduation, Mean Girls, the snow — deserved to be archived properly. It is also, in a quieter way, a love letter. She would not read it. She cannot read. But she would, if asked, sit very still beside it.
