Perpetual Ruminations

Friday

Just about time for bed -- well, actually, past time for bed. When a person gets up at 3:00 a.m. bedtime comes pretty early. Or, at least it should come pretty early. Unfortunately, I tend to be more a night person, so this is the time I get to waking up and rearing to go. Not tonight, though. Tonight I'm beat.

I haven't been sleeping the best which has left me pretty tired. Add to that the bitter cold we are in, with stiff winds and windchill temperatures down around thirty below and it's easy to see why I'm so tired. But it's more than physical, I'm zapped emotionally, too.

My wonderful Golden Retriever, Klarissa, passed away after twelve faithful years of taking care of me. She was born in December, to my daughter's dog, and she was the greatest gift I had ever been given.

She didn't quite end up with me by Christmas, but shortly after. I had my eye on a couple of other pups, but wasn't quite sure I wanted another dog. I had divorced a few years before, after twenty years of being married. I was raising three teenage children, two boys and one girl, and was trying to find myself someplace in the spare time between being a father, mother, and working in a sawmill about fifty hours a week.

I had a couple of girlfriends, but that had not worked out worth a damn, so I had decided to give up on romance and focus on raising children and finding myself, lost some twenty years before.

This is the time when a very determined puppy decided she did not want to be with the other puppies or her mom, but instead with me. She climbed out of the closure and tried to make it up the steps, but was just too small to scale them; she cried and cried until I woke up and got out of bed to investigate.

I put her back in her pen and went back to bed, but I no more than got into bed than it started all over. I went back downstairs and put her back, again. This time I stopped on the step and watched. She waited till a few minutes, then with great effort climbed the fence panel and with a mighty leap, launched from the top onto the hardwood floor three feet below.

She was so tiny, I could hold her entire body in one hand, and to free fall that far was suicide for her. Well, there was no way I could put her back and let her risk broken bones or worse. So, I took this four week old puppy to my room and tried to get her settled into a kitty kennel for the night.

She would have none of it. So, in desperation for sleep, I put her on the bed and told her if she had to pee, to wake me. "If you pee on my bed, you will never get out of your pen again. Wake me up and I'll take care of you, but don't pee on the bed!"
About three hours later she was chewing on my nose. I woke up, put her on a puppy pad, she peed and then tried to climb back onto the bed. I lifted her up, and she  snuggled up to my hair, on my pillow, and was sound asleep.

She didn't wake me again, and we had been almost inseparable ever since that night. a year ago she began to show signs of aging. Not normal aging, but of getting old. She began to be unable to do many of the things that had been a part of our life. I took that last year to try and give back to her some of what she had given me for twelve years.

I now have another young dog, a Black Lab mix, who shows me many of the same things I shared with Klarissa. She is learning fast she does her best to help me overcome the grief and loneliness. She has a big void to fill in my heart, but she has done a great job of filling it already, and she hasn't been here for even a week. Now, along with grieving, I find myself giving thanks for this wonderful opportunity. Klarissa was one of a kind, and I never thought another could compare, but Hannah could be her sister, only she's black instead of yellow.