*Lily ate the corner of the quilt on the guest bed in honor of the g-parents’ arrival.
†And Allison’s cats are still not happy about it.
FOURTEEN
Trust
Our newest foster, Meredith, was due to arrive on a transport van at 7:00 A.M. on Saturday. Another foster mom, Deb, graciously offered to grab Meredith when she picked up her new foster. Thanks to Deb, instead of trooping down to the bowling alley at the crack of dawn, I was able to roll over and hit the snooze button. As I was having my morning tea, Deb texted that they’d had some difficulty with Meredith. She didn’t want to come out of her crate when they’d unloaded her from the transport van. She was terrified and snapped at them. They’d had to dump her out, slip a leash around her collar-less neck and deposit her in their backseat where she was now cowering, fur raised, as they drove toward my house.
The idea of a snapping, terrified dog terrified me. I paced the kitchen and watched Lily as I waited for them to arrive. Lily was still resting from her surgery. What if this new dog was mean to Lily? Or bit me? Or one of the kids? Then what? This was bound to happen eventually, right? I mean, every dog can’t be a good dog, can it? I hadn’t considered that one might bite me.
When Deb and her husband, Scott, arrived with Meredith, I went out to meet them. We all peered in the window at Meredith. None of us wanted to touch her (and clearly she didn’t want to be touched). We debated a few approaches, and finally Scott used treats to distract her and slipped a collar on. He pulled on the leash and she hopped out of the car, glancing around, hair raised, tail tucked between her legs, terrified. He handed me the leash and I thanked them. Meredith stood next to me, growling quietly as we watched them head out the driveway. I looked down at her. Now what?
My only other experience with a traumatized dog like this was Hadley, and she’d taken hours that turned into weeks of patience. But she’d never growled at anyone. I suppose it was surprising that more dogs didn’t arrive like Meredith. Considering they’d just spent the last month or two in a noisy shelter all alone after wandering lost or being abandoned, then they’d been spayed or neutered, vaccinated, and a few days later loaded into crates stacked three or more high in a van and trucked north for ten hours or more. On Saturday, it was barely dawn when strangers reached in to drag Meredith out of the crate to take her to what she could only assume would be another scary place. So sure, I’d be reluctant to come out too. I might snap at a few hands myself.
I led Meredith to the Frank bed. She stood next to it like a statue. I sat down on the bed and patted the spot next to me. She took a tentative step forward, but retreated as soon as I reached for her, the hair on the back of her neck standing in a ridge.
OPH says the best plan for handling dogs like this is to do a “shut-down.” Bathe her, feed her, water her, potty her, and leave her alone in a comfy, quiet, safe crate. No stimulation, no forced contact, just consistent calm, kind touches, and good food. This can take days, even weeks. I followed protocol, giving her a careful bath, taking her for an unproductive walk, and feeding her a watered-down mix of food (she refused water). Lily was lying in front of the woodstove watching all of this, so I put Meredith in a crate in the living room to let her decompress. Then, I went outside to prune the fruit trees in the day’s unseasonably warm weather.
I clipped branches and hauled them to the woods and tried not to think about Meredith. Instead I thought about my next novel, Girls’ Weekend, which was to come out in May. I wasn’t happy with it, but I couldn’t really say why. I’d edited it to death, perhaps cutting too much of the heart out of it. My editor, copy editor, beta readers, and proofreaders all loved it. “Stop moving furniture around,” one of them said to me. I’d have to trust them on this, but I still felt like the book wasn’t saying what I wanted it to say. Mostly I didn’t want people to think the book was a lot of whining about first-world problems from overprivileged women. But maybe it was. And maybe a lot of readers were dealing with first-world problems. That didn’t change the fact that they were still problems, right?
I waved to Addie as she pulled out of the driveway. She was headed to her first meeting for the York County Distinguished Young Women program. She’d recently been selected to participate in the program, formerly known as the Junior Miss Pageant. Addie was decidedly not the typical Junior Miss participant, what with her head nearly shaved on one side with a long swatch of red-dyed hair on the other side. Add to that her eclectic wardrobe, liberal attitudes, and passion for fringe issues, and one doesn’t picture the typical Junior Miss participant. Still, I was proud of her for stepping out of her comfort zone. There was a lot of scholarship money on the line, and I knew that’s what was behind her decision to apply. I hated that everything did seem to be about money lately. And I hoped it wasn’t the only reason she’d applied.
When I returned to the house a few hours later there was an all-out nerf war being waged between middle-school boys in the living room—over, around, and occasionally, inside Meredith’s crate. Great, I thought. We’re so good at this shut-down thing. I shooed the boys away and carefully coaxed Meredith out of the crate. To my surprise, she’d perked up. It seemed the entertainment worked some kind of magic.
By dinnertime she was wagging her tail, and by the next morning, she was happily sauntering along next to me on a walk. Her happiness level and energy quotient grew with every passing hour. The next morning when I opened her crate, she tumbled out. And when I reach out to pet her, she fainted to the ground in ecstasy and whined out her happiness as I scratched her belly. Who was this dog?
Her attachment and affection became comical. When I would return to the room after any kind of absence (like when I went upstairs to change the laundry or out the door to grab a log for the fire) she leapt in the air with joy and threw herself on me. Never had a dog been so happy to see me. We made a short film of it for my blog. All week, I watched it when I needed a laugh.
Lily was restricted to leash-walking and supervised play sessions with Meredith, many of which involved Meredith stealing Lily’s toys and then Lily sitting on her until she dropped them. Meredith was a mini-me of Lily. She had the same shiny black coat and white markings on her chest. She had the same wide head and floppy ears. If you glanced in the kitchen quickly, it was easy to mistake one for the other. They shared the Frank bed, sleeping in a large black lump.
The snow finally began to melt and it was almost time for Lily to go home. Lily had been AP for the past month with us. In a wine-induced moment of weakness, I had agreed with Nick if for some crazy reason the adoption fell through, we would adopt Lily. It was easy to make this promise because I was confident her adopters would love her, and they did. Upon introduction, they fell instantly in love. We stood in the driveway and watched as they threw tennis ball after tennis ball for her. She raced up over the mounds of plowed snow and leapt back down to return the balls. The kids’ big smiles and the parents’ smart questions made it very clear Lily was headed for a good life.
The next weekend, after four months in OPH care, in which she gave birth to ten puppies, overcame health issues, weaned her puppies, discovered her love for tennis balls, showered her devoted and vocal love on everyone in her path, was spayed, and regained her svelte figure, Lily left with her forever family. Gulp. The Frank bed seemed much bigger without Lily.*
My heart felt a little bruised. This one was tough. Her adopter sent an email soon after they’d arrived at their home in Virginia telling me how well Lily was doing and how much they already felt she was part of the family. I was sure that in the coming week Lily would chew up something important and her energy level might be over the top, even for this ultramarathon-running dad. But I was equally certain that Lily had already stolen their hearts. An email from them earlier in the week confirming the details of picking up Lily said it all, “We feel a little guilty getting such a special dog in our family!”
*Not long after she was adopted, her adopter set up a Facebook page, Trail Runn
ing Dad and Lils (her adoptive dad called her “Lils,” the same nick name I’d used on her). It was great to follow their adventures and inspiring to read how they were encouraging other runners to adopt rescue dogs and run with them.
FIFTEEN
In the Groove
When a purse-sized Chi-weinie* popped up on the foster list, I couldn’t resist. We named him Okieriete.† He was a tiny ball of unending happy who resembled a very small Doberman, with big round eyes and one crooked ear that folded sideways. I picked him up on a chilly Friday night and carried him to our car; he was only three months old and per the quarantine rules his little baby feet couldn’t touch the ground. He felt like he weighed nothing.
The next morning when I opened the door to the puppy pen, Okieriete began to bounce at the sight of me. He jumped up and down in place nonstop, sometimes bouncing so high his head cleared the side of the pen, not unlike a Mexican jumping bean. I closed the door quickly and yelled for Ian, who was the only other person awake. “Come see this!”
Once he stood beside me, I opened the door, Okieriete immediately began his Mexican jumping bean impersonation. We laughed as we started him up again and again—closing the door and then opening it. Okieriete bounced so long, I grabbed my phone and made a YouTube video of it for the blog.
When I tried our smallest collar on him it was like a reenactment of the scene in How the Grinch Stole Christmas when the Grinch ties the antlers on his dog and the dog tips over from the weight. The collar weighed as much as he did. As it turned out, Okieriete didn’t need a collar anyway; we carried him everywhere. At four pounds, he wasn’t a heavy load.
Later that same week, I took a quick trip to Florida to meet with a book club near Tampa to discuss my debut novel, I’m Not Her. I was happy to forget about Girls’ Weekend and dive back into the characters I loved from I’m Not Her. It was like visiting old friends; I trusted those characters and the message of that story. The women I met were smart and had excellent questions, but somehow we still ended up talking about my foster dogs. They asked what everyone asked, “How can you give them up?”
“Sometimes it is terribly hard,” I told them, and then tried to change the subject. When we started fostering, I never thought about the giving-up part. I was in it to find an animal to keep. But now I had loved and lost over two dozen dogs, what did that say about me? Maybe there is more of my suck-it-up-and-do-what-you-have-to-do mother in me than I realized. My mom grew up poor, the oldest of ten children, in coal-mining country. Even at eighty, she still worked tirelessly to fix, mend, help, and lift up others; always finding a way to make a difference.
“It’s terribly hard,” didn’t begin to explain the giving-up part of fostering, but it was simpler than telling them about the sick feeling I always got in my stomach and how much I wished I could keep each one. And yet, in reality, my pain seemed like such a small price to pay to save another dog. If my mother taught me anything it’s that making any kind of difference in this world always requires a sacrifice.
Mahatma Gandhi said, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
When I read of animals saved by our rescue and others like it, who have been starved, neglected, beaten, abandoned in unsafe places like dumpsters or highways, or worse, I simply don’t understand. What kind of person could treat an animal like that? I understand being financially or physically unable to care for an animal, but to intentionally cause it to suffer? Who does that? Why do we stand for it? And what does it say about us as a society?
On several occasions, I’ve been asked why I don’t foster children instead. I know this is a loaded question. It wreaks of judgment. Usually I say, “I couldn’t handle it,” and leave it at that, but I do know the point the questioner is trying to make. Don’t people matter more than these animals? Sure they do, but that doesn’t mean these animals don’t matter. They absolutely matter. And this is something I can do. I can’t foster children for a multitude of reasons that we’d have to discuss over a few hours and a few bottles of wine. But dogs? I can do this.
So, yeah, it does hurt to say goodbye. A lot. But that’s nothing compared to the pain of doing nothing. I can’t do nothing.
I don’t think that there was ever a dog happier to see me come home than Meredith when I returned from Florida. She nearly lost her mind—leaping through the air, yelping with joy, only to throw herself on the ground and wriggle around before tearing around the house and repeating the process ad infinitum.
Even when Okieriete’s quarantine was over, I hesitated to put the two of them together because I worried Meredith would squish four-pound Okieriete. The energy level alone with the two in one room could power a football stadium. They were the perfect antidote to the winter that wouldn’t end.
When he arrived, Oak was frighteningly skinny and had a croupy sounding cough. We kept him sequestered in the puppy room with the baby plants and the humidifier to breathe in healthy air and gain weight. The cough cleared up and he gained enough weight to cover his ribs, but was in desperate need of more stimulation and rearranged his blanket, pee pads, toys, and food/water bowls pretty much hourly. Nick pointed out that the steady micro-activity coming from that room sounded like there was a mouse in the wall. A week into his confinement he began a sad wail that was painful to hear. He wanted out of his prison. There was a whole big world to explore.
When the sun finally peeked out, I fitted Oak with a tiny kitten harness.‡ Outside, he took his jumping enthusiasm horizontal! It was a very good thing he only weighed four pounds—I couldn’t imagine holding on to the leash of a full-sized dog with his enthusiasm!
Oak’s history was another mystery to be solved. Thanks to some kind of glitch in his records, I’d been exchanging comical emails with Gina, who was in charge of records, trying to sort out whether Oak had been neutered. I explained that he had no tattoo,§ no scars, and no visible “peanuts.” It remained to be seen how we would determine if a vet appointment should be made, but Oak quickly grew tired of my investigations.
Not long after Oak arrived, I had a call from Chuggy Alabaster’s mom. “He’s a little hero,” she told me. Chuggy had a fursister named Sail, a rescued greyhound who was elderly and prone to seizures. Apparently, late in the night Chuggy sensed one of Sail’s seizures coming on and rushed to Rosie and Jim, jumping on their bed and barking to wake them so they could help Sail. In a teary voice, Rosie told me, “We were meant to have Chuggy.”
Chuggy’s story was not the first story I’d heard of dogs who had some kind of super power, for lack of a better word (or maybe that’s the right word). My best friend Linda’s teenage daughter was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes the year before and I’d been hounding her¶ to look into the diabetes-detecting dogs I’d read about. Samantha would leave for college in a year and having a dog with her who could detect drops in her blood sugar could save her life. Plus, how cool would college be if you got to bring a dog along?
We were nearing our one-year anniversary of this fostering adventure, and fostering had so become our way of life that visitors didn’t bat an eye at the keys hanging out of the front door lock (on the outside) because they knew that some of our fosters (Meredith, Tennessee, John Coffey, and Frank) knew how to work a lever handle door. Even if we were only going out for a piece of wood for the fire or to throw some scraps to the chickens, we locked the door behind us.
The stacks of towels, bags of food, and random collars that littered the landscape of our house didn’t look so out of place to me anymore. I just dusted around them (if I were to dust).
Best of all, there was no need to explain the random crates, assorted dogs, or that funny smell to anyone who stopped by because they knew all about my dog habit. Fostering began to feel second nature as multiple dogs came and went that spring.
Meredith took off for her forever home and with the help of Chris, an RN, we determined that Oak was indeed intact. In preparation for him to go to his forever home, I t
ook him to the vet for his neuter operation. It was a much simpler process than with the girls and he was back to his bean-dancing in only a few hours. Oak went home later that week to a local family who surprised their excited little boy by meeting him when he got off the school bus with his very own puppy!
Berneen was next to arrive. She was billed as a border collie, but other than her black-and-white coloring she didn’t resemble one. She had obviously given birth recently and was still carrying swollen teats and a few extra pounds. She was medium-sized, round, and your basic dog: semi-pointy nose, curving tail, soft brown eyes. There was something about mama dogs. It was as if they knew something other dogs didn’t.
I remember a similar feeling after giving birth to my own first born—like I’d entered some kind of secret club. The world seemed a little more complicated, while at the same time what really mattered was much clearer to me. I’d gained perspective. Berneen# had clearly been a mama. Her body would testify to that, but so would her heart.
She spent the first two days with us on the Frank bed unmoving. She lay with her legs tucked under her so that she resembled a furry black-and-white seal. She seemed exhausted, not even raising her head when we moved about the kitchen. I wondered if she was mourning something or someone, or if the last months of being a stray and giving birth and then living in a shelter were very hard, and finally she was in a safe place where she could sleep.
Bernie perked up a little more every day. When I took her outside I caught glimpses of the playful dog buried beneath her solemn demeanor. She’d dash about on the leash, but her excitement never lasted long, ending as suddenly as it started, as if she were embarrassed for her outburst. Bernie landed in a stellar forever home that very next Sunday. Her new family sent me pictures later in the day that showed Bernie (now Zora) making herself right at home.
Another Good Dog Page 17