It’s a quiet house. An empty house. You don’t hear the rat-a-tat-tat of toenails on the hardwood floors. Or feel hot breath on your kneecaps at dinner. There’s no need for spastic, acrobatic leaps when you turn around at the fridge, realizing an instant too late there’s a dog sitting at your feet. She would scramble out of the way when she saw I was about to topple on her.
What foulness seeps from the kitchen? Ah … homemade dog food!
“It’s the most beautiful day outside,” my wife said this past weekend. The windows to the house were open and she was on the porch eating ice cream and doing things Floridians love to do in January when the rest of the country is shoveling snow. No wonder people hate us. “You can even start to smell spring,” she continued, “which is why I feel especially bad that we’re stinking up the street with the stench of that dog food.” Homemade dog food, thank you. “Can you really smell it outside?” I asked, standing over my special concoction, a clothespin pinching off my nostrils. “Well, I could right before I passed out. Some of the trees have started wilting.”
Every Moment Now Precious for a Dog with Cancer
This was supposed to be a very different column. One about how dogs mean so much to us. How those four-legged critters — with their dirty feet and ability to eat three-week-old shrimp shells, only to cough them up on the rug — can woo us over and become irreplaceable parts of our lives. And I guess it’s still about that. But it was supposed to be about my brother’s dog, Oreo — a member of his band of rabble-rousing K-9s that I call the “country cousins.” She was an old girl — 17, for goodness sake — and had been part of our family for so long that the loss was felt by all when her body gave out and she had to be put to sleep. Oreo was a big, dopey bear — you half expected to see her lugging around a honey pot and breaking into song. She had a permanent grin stretched across her face … like the one a child gets after walking into Disney World for the first time. It screamed, “WOWWWWW!” and Oreo would have that grin staring at a moth. She enjoyed life, even just sitting on the porch doing nothing, and there’s a lot to be said for that.