From here on out

If you read the last two posts, you'd know that it was a very depressing day yesterday. We had a funeral service and buried Bonnie with Lou and Buffy on the hill, and we will plant an althea plant over her later on. Suprisingly, we've moved on already. It's going to be weird asking if Becca has fed the dog, instead of the dogs, or saying that we need someone to look after the dog and cat. I can't remember a time when we only had one dog - I can remember getting my older brother's tempermental dalmation, Loulabelle, which means that at anytime before that, we only had one dog - our basset hound buffy. But I don't remember when it was just buffy. Anyhow, I don't feel so rotten and depressed, even though I have one hell of a crying-hangover. Life is going to get better from here on out.

I thought I'd relate some funny anecdotes about all the dogs I can remember.

Buffy was a short little basset hound - she wasn't thin or little - she was kind of stocky - but her little legs weren't but a few inches long. One day, we had company over and we were eating some sort of grilled meat at the picnic table that we had placed in the front yard between the house and the pond. I think we had Lou at the time, and someone held up a bone really high up - perhaps five or more feet off the ground - to tease Lou and to see if she would jump for it. And then without warning, this stocky body goes flying through the air and Buffy's jaws locked around the bone! We didn't know Buffy had it in her to jump that high, and I don't think we ever saw her jump that high again.

Lou was the most tempermental dog you ever saw. When we used to douse the dogs in a flea dip solution, she would suffer through the dipping process, and then she'd go roll in the dirt - the real dirt, not the ground - just to spite us. When we'd go on vacation to my Grandma's in Florida for a week, she be so excited when we came back, but five minutes later she would refuse to have anything to do with us. She turned her back on us and would not look at us, wouldn't let us pet her. When Darren went away to college, every time he came home and tried to pet her, she'd walk away from him and then sit down ten feet away with her back to him. Then he would walk up to her, and she'd get up, walk ten feet, and sit down with her back to him. Apparently she did this for the longest time before she let Darren pet her. She was also terrified of loud noises, especially thunderstorms. Every single thunderstorm, we'd hear her scratching on the doors, whining to be let in. She tore all of our porch screen doors to shreds trying to get on the porch. She even jumped up on the air conditioning unit and tore the window screen to shreds. She also hated being confined. When we first got her, we put her in Darren's bathroom while we took her former owner's on a tour of the property. When we got back, she had ripped up every shred of carpet and carpet padding in the bathroom, and she had nearly torn the door to shreds. When she was accidentally locked in the shed, she tore those doors to pieces as well. One time a misguided kid stole her and locked her in someone else's house, and while there, she tore their blinds to ribbons trying to get out.

Bonnie is by far the best dog we have ever had. She was the best-snake killer ever. We don't know why she hated snakes with such a vengeance, but my Dad seems to think it has something to do with her breed - she was part Golden Retriever, part Labrador (which explained her need to go swimming in the pond almost every summer day!). But anytime we found a snake, all we had to do was to call her name and point at the ground. Bonnie would come running at full speed, her body on full alert as she sniffed around with cold determination for the dastardly snake. When she found it, she'd circle it, barking at it, and circle it some more, just to confuse it, and then quick-as-lightning, she'd strike, latching her jaws around it's body somewhere and then she'd snap her head back an forth with enough force that you could hear the snake's body breaking. And then, as if that wasn't enough, Bonnie would grab the snake with her front paws, holding it to the ground, and she'd then use her teeth to rip the snake to shreds. She didn't stop until the snake was in pieces smaller than cheerios. She got bit several times - once by a copperhead and once by a cottonmouth. She survived both times, even though she gave us a bit of a scare. She was hit by a car once - we could tell something bad had happened because She and Lou had gone running off into the woods and then Lou came back alone all guilty-looking. Dad took Rob, Becca, and me to drive around to find her, and we found her in the middle of a bunch of people parked alongside the road. We must have been a sight! My dad in his mud boots and big farmer's hat, us kids in our play clothes, all of us liberally sprinkled with mud from whatever yardwork we had been playing in. Surprisingly, Bonnie was still alive, and Dad told me later that he was going to give her some lead and let that be the end of it (i.e. lead bullet). But the people around her were not exactly country-folk and they started calling out the names of local vets that would be open. Either they were very convincing, or the presence of us kids had something to do with it, but Dad took her to the vet and the vet estimated how much it would cost to patch her back up - one of her hips was broken and she had some abrasions. When the vet said how much, my dad told him that a bullet for a 30.06 didn't cost more than a dollar, the vet real quick-like cut the cost and patched her up. Actually, the people who had given Bonnie to us came over that same day just after we brought Bonnie back from the scene of the accident, and recommended a vet. I don't think they would have understood the phrase "putting her out of her misery." That's probably why Dad took her to get fixed up. Bonnie was always the most loving dog - she always wanted you attention, and she got it by jumping on you. She'd sit when you told her, lay when you told her, stay when you told her, and she'd shake when you told her. We will miss her so much.

This weekend, we are going camping at the Cliff's of the Neuse state park. I don't know if we are going to celebrate Mother's day there or not, but we'll leave on Friday and get back on Sunday. If we are lucky, the wild blackberries will be ripe and abundant and we'll have a great dessert. If not, then we only have to wait a bit for the dew berries (which are exactly like blackberries) to ripen down the road. Last year we must have picked several gallons of them, and then we had several huge dew berry cobblers. Mmmm.