I’m watching the cold December sunrise. The days are short this month and sunrise means those precious hours of daylight have begun. Mostly, though, I’m thinking about my dog, Teddy, who delighted in the dawn.

I never knew why he loved sunrise so much. Maybe it spoke to him. Or maybe it was part of his past and part of the untold story of his early life.

Teddy loved the outdoors in the early morning and he’d watch and listen as the sun rose. He adored lying on the deck, absorbing the day as the sun came up. He would stretch his 94 pound body out on the planks with a small sigh. He would listen to the birds and small animals come awake. His ears would lift up and swivel to hear the cars on the road, the early joggers and walkers. Sometimes he would breathe in deeply the smells from the commercial bakery a few miles away, wafting to him in the early hours. He would inhale deeply with his nose and simply savor it.

Only when the sun was above the horizon did he ask to come back in. Most days, he would shut his eyes and lie on the deck in contentment for almost an hour, simply happy that he was alive. I might name it mindfulness or living in the moment. To him, it was simply bliss.

When it snowed, as it often does this time of year, he would stay outside even longer, the flakes piling on top of him, his black fur peeking through. Although I would open the slider and invite him inside every 10 minutes or so, he stayed put until he felt satiated. I worried that he looked like those pathetic dogs in commercials meant to solicit donations for abused animals. Maybe he did.

Sometimes when I posted his snow-covered pictures, I wondered if the animal cruelty squad would come knocking at my door.

I’d had dogs before – a lab mix as a teen and a pointer when my children were growing up. Since they came from shelters, I guess you could call them rescues. But they arrived as puppies, with most of their lives ahead of them and very little mystery about their past. Teddy’s past was unknown to everyone but him.

Teddy was a young dog when he became part of my life. I was sure he would enjoy toys, dog biscuits and other treats so I bought plenty in anticipation of his arrival. I was told that he loved stinky soft treats so I also stocked up on lots of those. The first time I offered him a biscuit, he took it politely and then let it fall out of his mouth. It lay on the floor. He looked at it then looked at me. I offered again and he did the same thing. Later, seeing I was disappointed, he began taking the biscuits outside, not to eat but to bury them.

But he liked those soft smelly treats and ate them with gusto. Once, when I baked a piece of salmon, it slipped as I took it from the oven and dropped on the kitchen floor. Teddy looked at me and I looked back at him. “I guess it’s yours,” I told him. He didn’t let one morsel fall out of his mouth.

He was a 3-year-old dog when he arrived in New England on a transport van from Lucky Lab Rescue. He’d been found in southern Indiana as a stray, they told me, eating out of trash barrels with another black dog. What they knew for sure was that he was a large, gentle and polite boy but not much else.

There were a few small clues to his life story. On our walks, he would try to jump in the back of pick-up trucks and tug me down front paths to large, covered porches while ignoring other models of cars and houses unadorned by porches. I wondered, of course, why he was drawn like a magnet to trucks and porches, but he wasn’t saying. I had other clues too. He would sometimes try to smash through the ice film on the outside water bowl with his front paw if it had frozen overnight. How does he know how to do that? I pondered. Had he lived his life as an outside dog? He also knew how to sit, give his paw and come running to a whistle. Someone had taken the time to teach him.

I hoped that meant that somebody had loved him. If they hadn’t, I vowed I would love him enough for the rest of his life to make up for it. Whether he told me his secrets or not.