Before there were words, there was Puppy. Before memory, Puppy. My first word: “Puppy.”

Puppy: a gift from Grandma at our first meeting, a fuzzy stuffed friend half my infant size. White and brown with soft floppy ears, little red tongue, and sleepy eyes. 

I’d lost my first and second families by then: mother, foster. I was absorbed into my new family: Mom, Dad, Puppy. 

We’d been a family for a year when I was eclipsed by the baby they’d wanted, but had given up on producing. Flesh of their flesh. I became extra, a false start. But I had Puppy. He didn’t even notice the baby. 

Puppy, ever in my arms or hanging by one satin-lined ear from my grubby toddler fist. Ear clasped between my fingers and face, thumb suckling, pointer finger hooked over my nose. Puppy, Puppy. My world.

The summer I was three, we rented a house on the beach for a week with Mom’s parents, her cousins, and their two sons.

Breakers and undertow, wind and sand, pails and shovels, castles and moats. Me toddling full speed, laughing after the boys running up and down the beach on their long school-aged legs, trying to catch them, Puppy in tow.

“Let’s play wiggleworms!” one of them shouted. “You go first!” the other said, pointing at me. This was my favorite game. I loved being packed into the sand and slowly wriggling my way out. Every movement cracked the sand, cracks fanning and webbing out like worms on the move. Once the worms were out, you had to run or they’d get you!

I lay on my back as the boys heaped sand on me all the way from my toes to my chin, all three of us shouting and giggling. They patted the sand down to make a firm loaf of me. 

GO! one of them shouted, and I wiggled one toe, then another. The sand moved with me, away from me, crackled lines spreading as we shrieked with delight. Here come the wiggleworms! Look out! Everybody run! 

Each of us was buried in turn until the mothers called us for sandwiches on the blanket. Cream cheese and jelly on mom’s dense homemade bread with the impenetrable crust. You’d have to bend the sandwich down the middle, back and forth until it broke to get a bite out of it. Start in the middle, gnaw the crusts from the end. If you were lucky there’d be milk to dip it in to soften it up.

After lunch, the boys ran off to do boy things and I took Puppy down where the sand was almost wet. Puppy could do wiggleworms, too! I buried him up to his chin, ears tucked into the sand. Silly Puppy! 

The boys came back and scooped me up to make sand castles until the grownups called us back to the blanket. I splashed duckfooted in the waves as I went, sand pulling out from beneath my undertoes. The beach shrank and the ocean grew as we walked. 

Time to carry our toys back to the house, to Grandma’s homemade clam chowder. The blanket had moved so close to the water! 

We packed everything up and headed for the house—but where was Puppy? WHERE WAS PUPPY????  PUPPYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!

“Where did you have him last?” asked a grownup.

“We were playing wiggleworms,” I said. “Down the beach, there.” I pointed to where I’d buried him up to his chin. But there was no there left, just water. The entire Atlantic Ocean.