Carla and I got in the routine of running several mornings a week. She was an enthusiastic companion. As she emerged from her time of mourning, her energy increased. She continued to challenge me to run faster than my well-worn knees would have liked.¶ On steeper parts of my regular run when I might normally be tempted to slow to a walk, I couldn’t bear to ask it of Carla and pushed on through, sometimes letting her steady pull propel me forward.
There was a time when men in trucks would slow and note my progress, sometimes even chatting me up. Those days were past now and the only man in a truck who stopped to chat me up on my runs was my hay-guy, Kevin, and we usually just talked about hay. With Carla by my side, pretty much every pickup truck and mud-splattered four-wheel drive slowed as it passed me. I knew they weren’t checking out the middle-aged woman on my end of the leash, they were ogling the gorgeous coonhound on the other end.
In terms of coonhounds, Carla was supermodel-pretty. She looked good when she arrived with us, but the coconut oil and probiotics had given her coat a glossy sheen, while the steady exercise had toned up her top line. She stood taller now, the sadness that was weighing her down beginning to lift. She was beautiful. I understood why those good ole boys were gawking. I stared at her too.
She was talking more too. Sometimes I knew what she was trying to say, but several times a day, she just seemed to need to sing. When that happened, I let her out on the deck and she barked for a good ten minutes or so. It echoed down the hollow and bounced off the hill across the creek. It was good that we lived on a rural street. No one minded. But I could understand that in close quarters she might fray a few nerves.
One night, we finished up dinner and Carla joined us on the deck. After checking to be certain we’d cleaned up every bite, she positioned herself at the edge of the deck, her nose poked out over the railing toward the woods across the valley. She began her song.
“What do you think she’s saying?” I asked Nick.
He watched her. “Probably nothing important, she’s like the local twitter feed for dogs on our hollow.”
“I wonder if she’s calling for her old owners, telling them to come get her.”
He shrugged. “She seems happy here.”
I rolled my eyes at him. He’d been dropping plenty of hints about keeping Carla.
“We aren’t keeping her.”
“So you say.”
Gracie wandered outside and watched Carla silently for few minutes. Then she sighed and lay down behind her, perhaps in hound solidarity, or maybe she was thinking of Lucy.
The next Saturday I took Carla to our local Pet Valu for an OPH adoption event. She behaved beautifully, allowing everyone to pet her and accepting all treats offered. Small children were drawn to her and one little boy hugged her so long his mom had to pry him off. The next day I took her to a soccer game where she watched enthusiastically, barking along every time the crowds cheered. When she sat on the ground beside me in my folding chair, her head was level with mine. I fingered her velvety ears as we watched Ian’s team struggle.
They’d had a tough season, losing every game. Ian was frustrated, but not discouraged. Each week he’d explain how they could have won if they’d just done one thing differently. I loved that my son was such an optimist. That day as we walked off the field after a particularly painful loss, Ian smiled. “I could hear Carla cheering for me!”
Day by day, Carla was healing. Her appetite returned with gusto. I discovered she knew how to sit and lie down for treats. One afternoon, I took her and Gracie for a walk down the hollow to the creek so Carla could splash. On the trip home, she bounded about like a puppy, nearly slipping her collar and towing me across the grass. A pickup truck rolled by and the guy inside smiled and yelled, “Looks like the dogs are walking you!” They surely were, but watching Carla bound around happily, I was glad for it.
A very wise horse-whisperer friend of mine, a cowboy named Brad who lives just over the hill from us, once told me that when training any animal, you need to set them up to succeed. You had to make the right choice the easy choice. Brad showed me how to apply this concept when he helped me with my four-year-old quarter horse, True. At four, most horses have at least been broken, if not schooled, but True was neither, having spent his last few years babysitting yearling colts.# With Brad’s help I finally managed to ride True and stay on his back most days. I learned to think ahead and did my best to set True up to succeed—making sure the right option was the easy one.
I found that the same methods applied nicely to teenage children. For example, if a person sorts their laundry into the hampers in the laundry room, their laundry is done in a timely manner. If that person instead leaves their dirty clothes to molder on the floor of their room, they will soon be wearing the stuff on the bottom of their drawers that they got last Christmas and never intended to wear. No need to yell or scream about putting laundry in the laundry room. Instead make the right choice the easy one. It didn’t take long to see that it was also an excellent strategy with Carla.
Carla had earned the nickname Goldilocks at our house because she liked to try out all the chairs, sofas, and beds in search of the best spot. We’d allowed both Galina and Wheat Penny on the furniture, but with Carla, Nick insisted we return to our house rule—no pets on the furniture. I hadn’t always been a proponent of this rule. It was an allowance I gave when we first moved in together. I loved to snuggle with little furry creatures, but Nick had this little teeny, tiny, annoying habit of being allergic to animal fur. In possibly the most definitive demonstration of his love for me, he had suffered through the adjustment of living in close proximity to multiple furry creatures for almost twenty years.
When I first met Nick, I had a cat named Shamu who slept every night snuggled against my belly. There was much I adored about Nicholas (and still do). In fact, there was so much I adored that when my animal-allergic guy moved in, I kicked Shamu out of my bed. You can imagine how she felt about this. But I was in love and didn’t consider the capacity of her anger.
That first evening that she slept in her new cat bed, she got up during the night and pooped in Nick’s shoes. Cats are nothing if not clear about their feelings. There is none of the whining or pining of a dog. Cats take action.
When we picked out Lucy at the shelter and brought her home, Nick was firm—no dogs on the furniture. Through Gracie and three more cats, the rule had more or less remained in place.
Sweet little Galina wormed her way onto the couch while Gracie watched in jealous shock. And Wheat Penny had been on the furniture from the moment she arrived. But both of those precious pups were lap-sized babes. Carla was decidedly not lap-sized.
Training her to stay off the furniture became an ongoing task, but applying Brad’s rule helped. Another neighbor loaned me a dog bed with a PVC pipe frame which at least gave the illusion of being off the floor—kind of like a dog hammock. I loaded it with blankets and a soft comforter to make it extra inviting. Carla tested it out gingerly and spent one afternoon napping on it, always thumping her tail when I came in to check that she was still on her bed. Problem solved, I thought. But just in case, I explained to everyone that they needed to keep their bedroom doors closed and I positioned empty boxes on the couch and futon.
The next day, I finished a new post for the blog about Carla’s big weekend at the adoption event and the soccer game, and then went to check that she was on her bed where I’d left her and hadn’t pushed the boxes aside to climb on the couch (as she’d tried to the night before). She was nowhere to be found. I searched the first floor—no Carla. I went upstairs and checked that yes, all three kids had remembered to close their doors. Where was she?
It’s pretty hard to lose a seventy-five-pound coonhound indoors. Gracie was tailing me on my search, like a younger sibling trying to point out that she wasn’t on the furniture. I was just starting down the stairs when I realized my own bedroom door was ajar. And there was Carla sprawled out on our queen-sized bed, with her head on Nic
k’s pillow.
“Carla!” I cried.
She didn’t even lift her head, only thumped her tail, but I was pretty sure I saw a smirk. I dragged her off the bed and closed the door and she slunk back downstairs and lay beside her PVC bed, a doleful look on her face.
Finally, the perfect adopters (and I mean perfect like I’d made them up myself) were approved to adopt Carla. I had a lovely conversation with her future adopting mama. We made plans for the family to meet and adopt Carla on Thursday. Hooray! So, as if I hadn’t already learned this lesson from Galina’s adoption, I assumed Carla was leaving and made the bold move of agreeing to take a new dog from Saturday’s transport.
Symphony was adorable—short black and white fur with a big black patch over each eye and a broad smile. She was listed as border collie, but she more closely resembled a large Boston terrier. She even came with a story—a street dog picked up by paramedics and living at the firehouse in Greenville, South Carolina. She reminded me of the dog on The Little Rascals, and looked to be the perfect size playmate for Gracie. Carla was too big, Wheat Penny was too small, but Symphony looked just right. All was well with our dog world. Wednesday night, I took Carla for one last swim in the creek and we said our goodbyes.
And then Thursday morning I received an email from the potential adopters saying there had been a drastic shift in their situation. The husband had lost his high-paying job early that morning, arriving at his office to discover security guards clearing out his things. They would sadly be unable to adopt Carla at this time. Whoosh!**
In a panic, I checked Carla’s page on the OPH site. There was only one other application and that one didn’t look like a good fit. The potential adopters were elderly and lived in the city. I glanced at Carla, creeping around the living room, sniffing the boxes on the couch and chairs. I scanned my calendar, wondering how I was going to have time for two foster dogs when I had an important deadline looming for my second book.
I called Nick and told him what happened.
“Guess we have to keep her,” he said.
Ian’s reaction was similar when he arrived home from school.
“What’s Carla doing here?” he asked.
“Her adopters bailed.”
“Yay! That’s a sign. It means we should keep her,” he told me as he scratched her head and combed the cabinets for snacks.
What to do about Symphony? I couldn’t renege on my plans to foster her. She’d already been spayed, vaccinated, and microchipped in preparation for her transport on Saturday. Besides, foster dogs had too many abandonments in their lives already; I wouldn’t be another. I could do this. Somehow.
For her part, Carla stepped up her behavior, sleeping on her own bed (most of the time) and running like a champ with me in the mornings, steadily improving my times. It was almost as if she was petitioning to stay. In the morning instead of circling me in the kitchen as had been her habit, she waited patiently at the bottom of the stairs for the kids to get up. She obviously knew who was working on her campaign and who was looking for an exit strategy.
The dog I picked up on Saturday morning was much smaller than we anticipated. Forty pounds sounded big, but Symphony packed it on a sturdy little frame. She was nervous, unsure, and peed pretty much every few minutes everywhere she went as if she were marking her territory.†† She growled at Gracie and threatened the cats. She pulled on the leash when I walked her and escaped out of the house twice (she was a door opener which meant she was no dumb cookie). She refused her dinner, was silent, wary, watching us. I never saw her sit down—not once—the whole day. She walked from room to room keeping track of everyone. Although she looked more like a Boston terrier than a border collie, it seemed likely there was some kind of herding dog in there somewhere.
The first night I went to bed exhausted from taking Symphony outside to pee every fifteen minutes, walking Carla, supervising all the interactions between the dogs, and cleaning up after Symphony’s accidents. I lay in bed thinking, I can’t do this. What have I gotten myself into? Two foster dogs are too much for me. How the heck do other fosters have three and four dogs? They must be nuts. I must be nuts. This is the last dog. Ever.
Twenty-four hours later Symphony was a new dog. A happy, friendly, sweet little girl. She slept contently in her crate surrounded by the collection of shoes that she had piled beneath her. She played with Gracie, gobbled her food in mere seconds, and was delightfully more or less housebroken. She wanted very much to play with the cats, but they were not the least bit receptive to her overtures. Crash did play one short game of chase which ended when he climbed to the tippy top of the big pine tree in the front yard.
The kids loved Symphony and laughed at her funny smiley face. We renamed her “Stitch” because her resemblance to the cartoon character was so strong. Symphony didn’t suit her; she wasn’t a fancy dog. She was an I’ll-be-your-faithful-friend-to-the-end kind of dog.
She proved to be a merry soul and excellent company. The week flew by. I walked Carla and Symphony together and this worked beautifully as they had some kind of one-up thing going in terms of claiming territory. First one peed, then the other peed on top of it. Back and forth. It made for quick potty walks. They got along wonderfully, wrestling in the kitchen and lying side by side to watch television in the evening. Stitch spent her days collecting items to hoard in her crate and Carla continued to prowl the premises in search of a soft place to sleep.
I felt distinctly more in control of the dogs than the kids. They were all busy with their lives—Ian with sports, Addie with the spring musical, and Brady enjoying the last moments of high school. Increasingly, I felt like I needed to make an appointment to talk to them. Mornings seemed to be my best opportunity. And yet I always regretted sending them out the door once again, annoyed with their mother.
After arguing with Addie about the pile of things she left on the counter, the notice we’d gotten about a failing grade, and her inability to follow the no-food-in-your-bedroom rule, I cringed as the door slammed behind the kids heading out to school. Yes, they were quite definitely out of my control. Okay, maybe I never had control in the first place, but I sure thought I had it. Now I felt like a passenger in a car being driven much too fast over the kind of hills that make your stomach drop. My opinion was not one they welcomed, and on a good day it was barely tolerated. When had that happened? We used to bake cookies together, go on hikes in the woods, and read books at bedtime snuggled side by side. They used to smile when they saw me arrive to pick them up from practice.
Maybe this was one of the reasons I liked fostering dogs so much. I could decide what they ate and how they spent their time, two things I had decidedly less control over anymore with my kids. Plus, the dogs were always happy for my attention.
It’s not like I didn’t know this was coming. Nick and I joked about when our kids would be teenagers, right up until the point where they actually became teenagers, and now we stumbled through our days of empty cupboards, stinky laundry, unset alarm clocks, music we didn’t understand, and the daily reminder that we knew NOTHING and all I could think was—how did this happen?
Stitch and Carla swirled around me as the car disappeared down the driveway with all three of my kids inside. The middle school and the high school stood side by side, so conveniently they could all ride to school together. On the days Ian decided to ride the bus, I was always oddly relieved, figuring I was splitting the risk. I watched the clock nervously until it struck 8:00 A.M.‡‡ The kitchen looked like a war zone—papers, dishes, wrappers, jackets, and books everywhere I looked. Jelly dripping down the side of the jar and over the edge of the counter. The peanut butter knife was stuck to the newspaper left open to the comics. I followed a bread-crumb-like trail of dirty socks out of the kitchen through the living room and up the stairs, gathering them as I went and depositing them in the laundry room. The light was on in the bathroom and a radio blasted from a back bedroom. I couldn’t lay a finger on the point at which the kids stopped d
oing all the things I worked so hard to teach them when they were small. Things like turning off their lights, placing cast-off clothing in hampers, and hanging up their wet towels.
I don’t recall the day when they stopped smiling at Gracie and me when we opened their door to wake them up in the morning. Now they yelled, “I KNOW!” in a voice that clearly placed me on the rung between being lectured by a hall monitor and a new flare-up of acne.§§ And what happened to the earnest children who wanted to save the earth and ran through the house turning off lights? I was certain I had raised nicer, more considerate kids than this.
Okay, God’s honest truth, they’d never been so great at utilizing the hampers, preferring to leave piles of clothing on the floor until I threatened never to do their laundry again or they suddenly realized they needed that uniform piece or favorite shirt. They’d long ago given up helping out in the kitchen, but I could still picture my smiling three-year-old darling carrying his dishes to the sink.
Maybe I was feeling that way because I’d gone apple picking with a borrowed three-year-old the day before. His excitement at our adventure was refreshing. We had a sword fight with the plastic weapons he’d brought along, and then his mom and I filled three baskets and the bottom of his stroller with apples. As I stirred homemade applesauce that afternoon, I told my kids about my fun day picking apples with Roran. They smiled kindly without even turning down their music as if I were some sad, desperate street person asking for a handout.
I really did miss those kids—the ones who thought I was cool and played Go Fish for hours. I missed the kids who would sing “The Wheels on the Bus” and make up silly new verses. I even missed the kids who had tantrums in the grocery store. (Well, maybe not those kids.)
Now I had to beg them to tell me about their days, stay at the dinner table longer than ten minutes, or go apple picking with me. I took Carla and Stitch for a walk and lamented that I hadn’t taught my kids enough and now it was too late. Now they couldn’t hear me. I wished they ate kale and sweet potatoes. I wished they turned their clothing right-side out before they put it in the hamper. I wished they were better at calling their grandparents, writing thank-you notes, and opening the doors for others. I wished I could get them to feed the animals, help in the garden or stack wood without threatening and then overpaying their minimal labor.
Another Good Dog Page 5