Our “teenage” mutt Meadow has been completely bored for about a month, particularly since Pippi, a mosh pit regular, was adopted.
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Can you find the ten-pound, ten-week-old puppy in this redwood tree on Howland Hills Road outside Crescent City, CA? These otherworldly trees can make a person believe elves really do exist.
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We got home from vacation on the Northern Pacific Coast last night around midnight. The two pups, Livia and Adriana, were so overjoyed to see each other that they wrestled, straight up smack-down style, until 3:00 AM. I was so tired I wanted to kill them, but it was too cute to stop so Mace and I just dealt with it until they played themselves out.
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Hi y’all. I have to apologize. I promised a photo essay of Meadow and the pups last week, but because I’m a bonehead and because I was so excited about vacation I forgot to upload the pictures and my zip drive is 2,557 miles away, it’s been officially postponed.
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As I mentioned in a previous post, during the first few weeks The Magic 8 came to live at the Farnival, I treated them with a detached almost clinical attitude. I picked up their poop, wiped up their pee, bathed, fed, and medicated them, but I didn’t spend a whole lot of time cuddling with the M8 and I didn’t spend – or at least I thought I didn’t – one second thinking about adopting one.
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Last Saturday, July 19th, Donna, Charlotte and I stood on a dirt road next to the communal cabin at the Cumberland Campground in Woodlawn, TN, waiting for two truckloads of children, ages seven to sixteen to arrive. Donna, the humanitarian that runs ICHBA, and I agreed to supervise the dogs, while my sidekick Charlotte volunteered to snap pictures.
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On Monday, June 30th, exactly eleven days after we euthanized Joe Poop, Mason and I took our first and eldest dog, Miss Annie Daisy, a six-pound fifteen-year-old Yorkshire Terrier for an evening stroll, which she always set the pace for because her short legs had to prance ten times the speed of our slowest pace.
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Six years ago, Mason and I took our shaggy mutt Joe Poop to Centennial Park for Nashville’s annual “Dog Day Festival.” We entered him in the kissing contest, thinking we didn’t have a shot in hell of winning the gold. Besides the fact that twenty-eight contestants entered the event, the competition was stiff; pretty women in flowing skirts carried fluffy, panting pocket dogs that delicately flicked their tiny pink tongues on their human’s noses. Or ginormous Great Danes and Mastiffs – with names like Czar and Goliath – strutted next to little kids, kissing their child companion’s small faces with one swipe of their massive tongues.
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2001-2014
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Today, Joe Poop has been watching me make the preparations for his impending death with a composed almost stoic expression. He loves me as much as I love him. He had a good life. He wants to die. These are the things I tell myself as my favorite memories of Joe flick through my mind as quickly as scenes in an action movie: Joe running on the beach at St. George Island, swimming in the Sulphur Fork Creek, digging sweet potatoes straight out of the garden, or winning the best kissing contest at a dog festival in Centennial Park.
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On Monday evening, Mason and I were walking on the Springfield Greenway with eight dogs. Needless to say, our pack attracted a lot of attention. Plus, the greenway was busier than normal because fishing season on the Sulphur Fork Creek kicked off with a free fishing day last weekend, meaning no license necessary. We literally got stopped every fifteen minutes or so.
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Joe Poop has been having a pretty good week, meaning he’s been able to walk onto the deck and get a drink of water on his own. He still can’t control his bowels, and often poops wherever he’s resting, standing, or sleeping. He’s even started to lose his bladder once in a while, and we’ve had to ditch two dog beds because they were saturated with urine. But his mobility has been so good that I haven’t had to think about euthanizing him very much, and yesterday he did something that assured me I’ve made the right decision thus far. That it isn’t time, not yet.
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I’ve debated doing this because it means all you folks that read my stuff (and with all my heart, thank you so much for doing it) will have to put up with my tears, but I’ve decided to write about Joe Poop, our thirteen-year-old shaggy mutt, as he dies, or more appropriately as I wrestle with the decision to euthanize him.
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Sorry all y’all for not posting anything this am, but Nancy, Charlotte, Floyd, Sara, Miss Annie, and I are in the Smoky Mountains.
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In fostering circles, if a family adopts one of the homeless animals they care for, they are called “foster failures.” It’s literally a term. By that definition, Mason and I have failed because we adopted Meadow. It happened at the end of last month, and I wanted to compose an essay to announce it, but I got busy with the fundraiser, and then we had a few ICHBA emergencies, which I’ll tell you about later in the week. It’s getting to the point where my delay feels like a lie, and I hate deceiving all y’all. One day, I will write an essay about why we made the choice we did, but for now, drum roll, please: It’s official. Meadow is staying here.
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On the last day of March I realized that I needed to buy a gun.
Up until this week I took a lot of pride in the fact that I don’t own a gun, nor have I ever, even though I’ve lived for the past ten years in rural Tennessee on a road remote enough that they don’t even bother to plow it when it snows. But that all changed four days ago and owning a firearm has become a priority.
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I dug this picture of Harriet out of some forgotten file on Mason’s old computer. It’s not the best shot, but it’s all I have. About seven years ago, Harriet moved into our house, staying in the basement for a total of six months, appearing in a sweltering southern summer and disappearing again sometime that winter, but she left us with a story that I tell over and over again because it was such an unusual experience, at least for Mace and me. If anyone out there has stories of feral cats or stray dogs moving in, uninvited, please write to me. I’d love to read or post your stories.
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For details on Meadow and Bentley’s love story and background, click here.
Meadow sulked for a few days after Bentley left. She spent an inordinate amount of time at my feet or roaming the fence line in the backyard. Her spark, the one that Bentley’s adoration ignited, had definitely dulled.
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