Drown Me in Slobbery Kisses
Drown Me in Slobbery Kisses
A letter from the ranch.
It’s always the silence that gets me.
Not when they leave, not yet —
but the day after.
When the bowl’s still where it always was.
When the house still smells like them.
When your body still does the motion of calling their name before your brain catches up.
That’s the silence this song came from.
It wasn’t written about one dog.
It was written after a lifetime of them.
Dogs that came into our home, into our barn, into our bed.
Dogs who guarded our gate, raised our children, watched the hills while we worked the late hours.
Dogs who never asked for anything but to be near us — and who gave everything in return.
Some of them we lost too soon.
Some we held as they took their last breath.
Some are still buried here on this land, in the same dirt they walked every day.
And all of them — every single one — still live inside us.
Toby’s still here.
He’s old now. Our Pyrenees–Newfoundland mix.
Not a Leonberger, but he’s raised every one of them like a soldier watching his post.
He’s the General of this place.
Nine years of watching the fence line, keeping coyotes out, never letting a pup wander far.
His body’s slowing, but his eyes haven’t missed a thing.
We know the time is coming.
You pretend not to count the days.
But your soul does anyway.
So one night —
after the gate was locked,
after the bottle pups were fed,
after the welders were off and the fire was lit —
I picked up a guitar.
And this came out.
I didn’t write it to go viral.
I didn’t write it to be clever.
I wrote it because I couldn’t carry the ache anymore without giving it a melody.
If you’ve ever loved a dog like that —
the kind that rearranges your soul,
the kind you’d take just one more day with, even if it ruined you —
this song is yours too.
You don’t need to be a rancher to understand it.
You just need to have loved deeply.
And lost deeply.
And still left a little space beside your bed, just in case they come back in a dream.
I’m Valentina Talor.
I am The DogMother.
And this is the sound of what I couldn’t say any other way.
🎧 “Drown Me in Slobbery Kisses”
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