Man's Best Friend

I had never lived with a dog before I moved here to live with Paul.   Oh, we always had dogs when I was growing up on the farm but those dogs lived outside and never came in the house.  They were farm dogs.  I was only really attached to one of them, Buddy.  Unfortunately, Buddy had a roving eye and a yen for the female dog across the highway.  Late one night, it became his undoing. He was hit by a car and killed.  It took me days of crying to get over it.  I think I was about 12 at the time.

However, part of the Paul package was Gracie, his border collie.  I was a bit apprehensive about living with a dog that came indoors.  Would she be in the way, leave dog hair everywhere, be a nuisance?  Well, she was all those things but she was also an amazingly well-trained and intelligent dog.  She grew on me.

Gracie was smart enough to know what certain words meant and so we had to either spell things or use alternative words when we didn't want her to get excited...like perambulate instead of walk, flying disc instead of frisbee, or European football instead of soccer.  But she still had ways of figuring things out that we couldn't understand.  She seemed to know before we did that we were planning a walk down the road.  She would start to get excited if she heard my noisy sock drawer upstairs (where she wasn't allowed to go) assuming I was putting on socks and shoes for a walk.  Even the times she was disappointed because I was only going out to work outside, her enthusiasm for my putting on my socks and shoes never waned.  She was always hopeful. 

As you may have guessed by my using the past tense, Gracie died about two months ago.  She was getting to be a bit of an old dog.  She had blown out her knee last year and limped a little now and then.  She didn't always move as fast as she once had.  However, she seemed to be doing okay for a dog of a certain age.  Until one day, after one of her beloved walks down the road, she just didn't seem to have too much energy.  As the day wore on, she seemed less like herself, not wanting to come inside from the rain, panting and just lying around.  We knew something was really wrong when she didn't even wag her tail when Paul talked to her and petted her in her "den" behind the couch that night.  We decided we would have to take her to the vet the next morning.  She died in her sleep that night.  Blessedly, it was fast and relatively painless.  She was home with her pack and in her den.  A good place to be.  

That was two months ago and we all still miss her.  It's often at funny times like driving in the driveway and not seeing her run down to meet us.  I notice it most when I come downstairs in the morning.  Gracie had decided some time ago that I was the person who would let her outside in the morning and she would greet me, excitedly, at the bottom of the stairs and do her little jumpy run ahead of me to the front door.  I still expect to see her there sometimes.  

Gracie is buried out in our prairie.  This spring we will plant a Ponderosa pine over her.  Gracie was a good dog.