My Story — Michelle
Michelle Dog lover & trainer. Cat servant. Chicken mama. Beekeeper. Steward of an old stone house & its land. Occasional overthinker.
Twenty years with dogs teaches you a lot about dogs and people
I've spent two decades as a professional relationship-based dog trainer, working with dogs of every temperament, size, and backstory, and with the humans who love them. What I've learned in that time would fill a book. Actually, it's going to.
But the short version is this: dogs are honest. They don't perform or pretend. They tell you what they need, how they feel and when something is wrong, if you know how to listen. Twenty years of listening has taught me more about patience, trust, and the art of being present than anything else in my life.
When I decided to open The Little Dog Retreat, it wasn't a business plan. It was a natural next step. I had the house. I had the land. I had the knowledge. And I had a very specific vision of what dog boarding could be, and almost never is.
What I’ve learned
Modern life asks a lot of dogs. Stress accumulates, from the environment and from the pace of life. Dogs are also exquisitely sensitive readers of human emotion. They carry what we carry.
Some dogs arrive wound tight: overstimulated, anxious, carrying the pace of their daily life in their bodies. They need time and patience and quiet to decompress. Others arrive tail up, ready for adventure, perfectly happy and just in need of somewhere wonderful to spend some time while their people are away or to visit for the fresh air, the grass, the open space, and the lake. All are welcome and thrive here.
I’ve learned what happens when dogs are given space, predictability, and genuine quiet, with real grass under their paws, open sky above them, and no noise, no rush, no uncertainty about what comes next.
They settle in. They relax and make new friends. They sniff every inch of an acre. They find a sunny patch and stretch out in it. They head down to the lake together, discover that chickens are extremely interesting, and sleep the way they probably haven't slept in a while.
That's what the Little Dog Retreat is for.
Avicii & Marty Feldman
I share Stillwater Acre with my husband and our two dogs, who are as different from each other as two dogs can be.
Avicii is an Italian Greyhound, elegant, slightly dramatic, deeply committed to being warm at all times. He is wrapped in something soft in approximately every photo ever taken of him from September to May. He is the ultimate host and loves to greet and make feel welcome new guests staying here.
Marty Feldman came to us by way of the Upper West Side, a Puerto Rican street dog whose rescue placement didn't quite take, which is how he ended up here as a foster and, inevitably, stayed. He is somewhere around 40 pounds of pure sweetness, well outside our guest limit, and has been known to make even the most anxious small dog feel immediately at ease. He is proof that the right energy matters more than anything else. And with this face, what else could we name him?
Between Avicii and Marty Feldman, they set the tone of the house. Calm, warm, inviting, and a little ridiculous. Guests tend to follow their lead and join in the fun.
The Rest of the Acre
When I'm not looking after the animals, I'm slowly and lovingly restoring the house itself, returning this old sandstone structure to something worthy of its history. The gardens and grounds were in need of just as much attention; so much of my time is spent outdoors, coaxing this acre back into something it always wanted to be. It's a labor of love and reverence and nowhere near finished, which is fine, because neither are we.
