Rants and Rambles (The Nonfiction Edition)

When I was eight years old, we adopted a dog named Rocky. He's a schnauzer-poodle mix, so he's about the size of a miniature schnauzer but he's white. We cut him like a schnauzer, so he basically looks like a white schnauzer, but if you let his fur grow out it gets super curly. We got Rocky from a shelter near Chicago when he was four years old. Before he lived in the shelter, he was with a different family. They had to give him up because they couldn't afford to pay the treatment for his heartworm. He went through the treatment at the shelter, but stayed there for a while. No one wanted to adopt him. But then my family came into the picture. We had to visit the shelter to make sure we were a good fit for him, but we had nothing to fear. He loved us immediately -- he ran to and fro between us, jumping up and licking our faces. We left with him that same day, and the shelter owner apparently announced that Rocky was getting adopted on social media because it was a ca...

My mom has always liked flowers. At our first house, we had a yard so massive that it felt like an endless sea of grass to my smaller-than-an-adult body -- and it had a garden. The garden wrapped around two entire sides of the backyard, ending in our play structure and massive, custom-built sandbox. On the west side, rows of plants I nestled toy dinosaurs within tumbled over each other leading to the black chainlink fence separating our backyard from our neighbors' strikingly barren yard. On the north side, towering pine trees climbed to the sky, heaps of daffodils surrounding their bases. A magnolia tree was placed perfectly at the corner of the west and north side of the garden, joining the two sides in a perfect transition. Running along the house were simple flower bushes and a hydrangea my mom dumped aluminum sulfate under every year to turn the flowers blue in vain. On the south side of the house grew lilacs, and a forsythia clambered up the brick chimney. Wrapped ar...