I was with my ex the first time I tasted a peanut butter pie crust sundae. At that time he was not my ex, of course—he was my very new boyfriend. I was the perfect age to shout-sing Taylor Swift (when you’re fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you’re gonna believe them) and mold my identity around everyone I liked, pushing against their boundaries in lieu of forming any of my own.

It was a delicious sundae. I’d been to my hometown’s local ice cream chain many times before—I still carry golden memories of using the uneven exterior beneath the walk-up window as a little kid rock climbing wall—but I’d never ordered anything except vanilla soft serve with krunch kote. The peanut butter pie crust was a revelation.

It was his revelation.

My ex knew about this delicious thing—hot fudge, peanut butter, graham cracker crumble perfection—first, and he shared it with me, and I felt that bonded us more deeply. Even when I ordered our favorite sundae without him present on the increasingly rare occasions I hung out with my high school best friend or sister, I thought about Matt. Peanut butter pie crusts were ours. Everything we did together, even just a single time, was ours. My world existed in shades of him.

But then I left.

I mean, it wasn’t that simple, my departure. Those months, after so many years, were a snotty-teared mess. But finally I came out of “us” as “just me”, and even though we weren’t yet married (I had to cancel the DJ and photographer, deposits lost) I found myself internally battling for custody.

We didn’t have property or pets or children. But we had our own version of a life, the kind college students can easily build: favorite restaurants and TV shows and memories. Prom photographs. Mutual friends. Peanut butter pie crust sundaes. We were too young when we started dating. (I was too young.) I’d yet to build my own sense of self, and he was too willing to act as my backstop, and so I became his shadow, his shape, his image—“Matt’s girlfriend”, not “Haley as a person”.

What was ours and what was his and what was mine?

I wish I could tell you I ordered the damn sundaes and stopped thinking about him. That I still played “On My Way” by Phil Collins just because I liked it. That I said “these preferences are pretty tiny and trivial, anyway, and they don’t have to have anything to do with him”. In reality? My stamina improved, and I jogged faster over time, but the memories stayed on my heels.

When I started dating Sean, we went to our my beloved ice cream chain before I was ready. “We passed a soft serve place that sells one pound cones!” my new boyfriend announced when I arrived to stay with him and a few other friends at an up-north cabin. “We have to go!”

“I grew up in Wausau! Of course I know Briq’s,” I said. It still makes me think of Matt, I didn’t.

I told Sean to order the peanut butter pie crust. The employees made it wrong—no hot fudge—which was a disappointing introduction to the deliciousness. But I realized, sitting there with our friends as Sophie joked about how Sean can “do bad things to ice cream” (he did indeed order the one pound version), that to them peanut butter pie crust sundaes were Haley’s recommendation. They were my preference. Just mine.

It was a start.

Still, over the years when we visited my hometown and ordered Briq’s, stubborn and unwelcome recollections sometimes insisted on tagging along. You build new memories on top of old ones, you round out your life, but there’s no rewrite button. Reclamation is a slow process.

Until finally… the old foundation just crumbles. And you get in there to chuck out the debris and realize you breathe so much better without the moldy stench you’d somehow grown used to and erroneously accepted as a fact of life. You shout-sing from a later Taylor Swift album, now: I think I am finally clean.

This past summer Sean and I started making homemade peanut butter pie crust sundaes. The recipe: Melt peanut butter and dark chocolate chips in a mug, stirring to a smooth consistency. Scoop a hearty amount of Häagen-Dazs vanilla bean (vanilla bean, not just vanilla) ice cream on top. Sprinkle crushed pie crust (we like to buy the miniature premade ones in a six pack) over the whole thing. Then savor, passing back and forth after every spoonful, sharing the joy.

These sundaes are a new ours. They are not just an experience we happened to share once, to which I assigned unreasonable importance—they are an intentional creation inspired by old tastes and made even better. A tiny thing, to be sure, but a thing we built together.

One of many, many things we built together.

First drafted in Everglades National Park, after a week of mesmerizing nature experiences.

Paddling a designated mangrove trail, I cringe as our inflatable kayak rubs the bottom of the pond. “We’re stirring up the mud,” I worry aloud. “How many organisms call this mud home?” Sean shakes his head.

We turn around shortly after. By this point we’ve already seen five alligators (one swimming parallel to us, disquieting agility on full display) and a dozen birds and too many fish to count. I’m in awe that this has been our Monday morning activity.

I’m also wondering if it should have been.

So often close creature encounters fill us with wonder—they allow us to more fully appreciate our fellow animals. But they are also, so often, one sided. What does the cardinal get from me peering closely except a modicum of discomfort? The Florida tree snails are dormant for the winter so my photography (in theory) doesn’t stir their slumber, but still—I am here, in their world, leaning in. And I am clumsy and species-centric and unable to coexist without inadvertent harm.

“Oh no, you scared him,” Sean said of the small toad I tried so carefully to step around on yesterday’s trail. “Shoot, she ran away,” I echoed about the anole I paused too long to observe.

How much of these reactions is normal? Creatures move toward and away from each other all the time. Perhaps I am not adding to their stress (the alligators certainly seem unbothered by my presence in their swamp); perhaps it’s self-aggrandizing to think so. But perhaps I am. Perhaps I am layering harm upon small harm, weaving fear deeper into their nervous systems, making their already fraught existence harder, all out of a desire to love them.

Love can hurt. Especially when it comes from a person.

Little Me developed so much respect for the natural world by engaging with the natural world. That’s the justification for practices—some worse than others, certainly—at organizations from SeaWorld to the tiny elephant sanctuary I called home after graduating college. Where do we draw the line? On our guided night hike in the Everglades, I was thrilled to see a nightjar illuminated by the ranger’s flashlight—but guilt pinged within me, too, at the creature’s small form huddled in the beam. Would we, me and Sean and five middle-aged couples, have felt less inspired if we hadn’t gotten to see up close? Would the bird have felt less scared?

Whose experience is more important, and do they have to interfere with each other, and how can we ever understand costs and benefits?

These questions are top of mind thanks in part to Nerdy About Nature’s recent post on whether outdoor recreation is a form of resource extraction. He thinks it is, and I largely agree. I also agree with the article’s top comment: “outdoor recreation is a gateway to caring about the planet,” writes Nick Costelloe. “The more people engage with natural spaces, the more they’ll care about them—and the more willing they’ll be to advocate for climate solutions.”

I’m just not sure what, exactly, ethical engagement with nature spaces ought to look like.

This past fall we drove up a steep, bumpy road to the most beautiful dispersed campsite we’ve ever seen overlooking the Great Tetons. We carefully followed every National Forest Service guideline. No campfires. Don’t stay more than five nights. Drive on previously used roads. Pack in what you pack out; leave no trace.

I grinned almost every minute we were there. I threw wide my arms and teared up at the sunrise and leashed Scout the second we saw another animal or person. But afterward, despite being a perfect stickler for the rules, I still had to ask: Is it truly possible to leave no trace?

One morning a fox trotted along the edge of our site. They paused, head raised, before darting away down the mountain. Neither we nor our dog pursued this breathtaking creature—but the canid knew, unmistakably, that we were there. Every living thing nearby knew we were there. How much of my own joy (and make no mistake: I experienced bright, bursting, overwhelming joy) is worth native flora and fauna’s discomfort? How much do NFS restrictions, even when meticulously observed, actually mitigate human impact?

How much could I love that mountain—that view, those creatures—if I hadn’t breathed their same air?

I don’t know. It’s easy to preach platitudes about respecting the environment. (Pick up trash, be bear aware, don’t bend the rules, do what the organizations in charge tell you to.) It’s harder to trust that these actions are good enough. And everything is exacerbated by the crisis facing American public lands under our current administration, worsening, it seems, by the day: staffing cuts, hiring freezes, harrowing sound bites to “drill, baby, drill”.

Never has holding great wonder—the kind that inspires us to care, that doesn’t allow us not to give a damn—about natural spaces been more important. Never has asking how we skew the ratio toward much more awe than harm.

Sean and I don’t regularly wear wedding rings. (The ones we do have are cheap nontraditional bands.) Our ceremony was short and, to be candid, kind of not a big deal. He did not only see me in my dress before our vows—he actually found my dress in the first place. I kept my last name. We rarely celebrate anniversaries beyond a “hey, look at the date!” nod.

I am unduly proud of the ways we eschew marriage norms—and I think I’m finally able to name why.

I worried for a while that my feelings were some sort of petty self righteousness or a “look how I’m not like other girls!” desire to be special. (Which... ew.) But that doesn't track with the fact that I’ve felt truly, properly happy for all the people in my life who do embrace western relationship norms in their own ways. Like, I have never once wondered if my best friend’s relationship is any less fulfilling or progressive or meaningful than mine because her ring is fancy gorgeous. I would never dream of telling my badass feminist colleague that taking her husband’s last name makes her a slave to the patriarchy. Still, though: I loved that I wasn’t doing these things.

What gives?

In my serious relationship before Sean, I relied on any and every surface-level signal that we were a couple. I needed evidence—traditional, obvious evidence—that our love was real. It wasn’t just the big things like my fancy engagement ring (come to think of it, my ex spent more time talking about how he chose the diamond on the day he proposed than why he loved me) or our over-the-top anniversary presents. We also needed constant nicknames and good morning texts and social media posts. (We once had a huge fight after a road trip because I captioned an Instagram of us—just one of many from those two weeks—something simple instead of using it to profess my love.) We were that couple. You’d hate seeing us on your feed, using public posts to insist things we didn’t even truly feel in a flawed attempt to grease the wheels of a squeaking, falling-apart relationship. (Sidebar: This habit made our breakup even harder because I’d spent so long convincing casual acquaintances we were great!! that they couldn't believe we’d actually had a billion problems. Ugh.)

Anyway: I needed so much “evidence” of our love precisely because there wasn’t, in reality, all that much love. I thought I could cover our failings with the right decor. What do you mean there’s a massive gap in the floorboards? No no, it’s nothing; we can hide it with a super fancy sofa!

It’s the exact opposite with Sean. I don’t crave external signals or classic traditions to reinforce our commitment because I already know we’re real. I believe in our love more than anything else—I have never doubted it, never felt the urge to mental-gymnastics something out of nothing.

Saying no thanks to nice rings and elaborate rituals isn’t a larger statement about how I think things “should” be done. (I do not believe there’s one “right” way in basically any area of life. And obviously not everyone uses traditions to mask massive relationship problems, in which case… more power to you. My past self is jealous.) No, my pride in this regard is about me, as an individual, emphasizing the juxtaposition between where I used to be and where I am now.

It’s funny that the excuse I gave some family members for why our nuptials were so small (I already planned a big wedding and we didn’t work out, I want my real one to feel as different as possible) turned out to be so centrally true. I love not doing these traditional things because I love not needing these traditional things.

If you want them, though? That’s a whole different story.

Sean and I recorded this on December 14th, three days after my eye surgery. Now I'm finally able to look at screens here and there to share it!

Mostly a (somewhat silly) story of trying to make my drops suck less... but as usual the experience did make me think of some real dog connections too.

'Tis the season for holiday family time! We talk about how it can be (counterintuitively) harder to advocate for our dogs around loved ones than strangers, that it's okay to focus on humans-only activities sometimes, what our visits have looked like lately, and my very best advice for anyone who gets overwhelmed at social gatherings 🚐😉

Related links:

• How We Handle Traveling to See Family With Our Dog — older blog post about our logistics before we lived in a van


• Why I’m Risk Averse With Family Dog-Dog Interactions — recent reflections on separating Scout from my parents' pets


• Why I Love to “Leave The Dog Behind” — sometimes it's best for everyone!


• Leaving Our Dog Alone in Our Van: Safety & Temperature Control — how we keep Scout safe if we do stuff without her

Sean and I sit down to talk about the ways I've struggled with ego, self-righteousness, and external opinions in life with Scout, including where I think the pressure came from initially. I feel more confident about our life together today than ever before — but wow, has it been a journey to get here.

Some blog posts that address similar topics:

• What Level of Obedience is "Good Enough" For My Dog?


• Is My Dog My Mirror? Yes and No


• Worst Moments in My Dog Ownership


• Working Through My Biggest Dog Ownership Flaw


• Why Does Your Dog Need To Do… Well, Anything?

Our "What's Right for YOU" Instagram guide compiles related posts, too.

Probably one of our least organized episodes to date (yes, that says something haha...) BUT Sean and I finally recorded another podcast!

We reflect on our recent visit to New York City with Scout. Urban dogs & their people face so many challenges every day — it made me think about how adaptable our companions can be, how much work goes into taking good care of a canine in a city, how our environments affect our training goals & choices, and how different our life with Scout might have looked if we lived in a place like that full time.

Related links:

• I summed some of these high level thoughts up in a blog post called "An Ode to Big City Dogs"


• This article shares overall reflections on navigating NYC with our van


• My friend Karoline (Dog Mom Mentality) did a podcast series not too long ago interviewing dog owners who live in a range of different environments — she & her guests provide some much more organized insights!

Haley and Sean sit down to talk about fulfillment, a topic inspired by a very kind listener in a podcast review. We discuss what biological fulfillment means to us, what it does for us & Scout, how we try to find activities that fulfill our cattle dog, and a bit on how we conceptualize our human fulfillment too.

Related blog links:

• Fulfillment checklist article


• Reasons We Play "Just" to Play


• Our Play blog category


• Q&A From New Cattle Dog Owner on Fulfillment

Sean and Haley sit down to record a podcast for the first time in a while after several weeks of transition. We're officially living full time in our converted van, Hermes! We talk about our first impressions of van life (we absolutely love it so far); how the small space has changed (and not changed) certain parts of our lives; Scout's fulfillment, confidence, and overall routine being on the road; what it's like to leave her alone in the van when we go somewhere that isn't dog-friendly; and a final summary "pros and cons" list.

More about our van life plans and experience so far:

• The Van Life category of our blog


• Van Dog Logistics Instagram guide

Haley and Sean run through a (not comprehensive) list of phrases I've heard often in the dog world — particularly in online training communities — that I think have merit (I see where they're coming from and agree in some contexts) but can also be reductionist (too sweeping of a generalization, misconstrued in unproductive ways, otherwise taken too far). So much depends on our personal connotations with different terms!

We talk about:

• “Let dogs be dogs”


• “Let them sniff”


• “Dogs crave structure”


• “Be a good leader”


• “Don’t coddle your dog"


• “Dogs aren’t humans”


• “This is how it’s done in the wild / this is what’s natural"


• “Dogs do what has been reinforced"

We also roast B.F. Skinner a little at the end. All in good fun, we promise.