On a tired Sunday

On this sleepy Sunday, I have a bunch of things rattling around in my head.

On Friday night, after dinner, we drove down to Iowa for the Prairie Beach event that Heartland Greyhound Adoption puts on each year.  I haven’t been a vendor at a greyhound event in something like 3 years, and I was really looking forward to this.  It was the first time we had attempted it since having the 2-leggeds.

Unfortunately, it POURED the entire day.  I mean, sheets of water, thunder, the whole shebang.  Was hoping to raise some $$ for MNGR, but we barely made enough to cover the trip.  Plus, everything is now wet.  We have yet to muster the energy to unload the trailer, but we’ll need to air everything out.  Hopefully nothing much is ruined.

But yesterday’s weather was about on par with my mood today.  We were rushing to get set up, and so I was still hanging necklaces when the “blessing of the hounds” began – the opening to the day’s events.  Since  I was a kid, I have gone out of my way to avoid hearing the Rainbow Bridge poem.  It has always made me cry.  But with the losses of the past year and a half, it hit me in the gut yesterday morning.  Untangling necklaces and sobbing.  Had to stop and hold onto Lloyd until it was finished.

Damn, I miss them.  I wish I could believe the Rainbow Bridge story.  I really do.  But I’ve also been an atheist since I was a kid.  My best hope is that each of them went peacefully, without pain, and knowing that they were loved and safe and cherished.

But my boy Sly didn’t get that.  This coming Tuesday, the 21st, is one year since Sly died.  One year since probably the worst day of my life so far.  I was lying on the beanbag chair with Crisco that day, in my jammies, because I had just been told that Crisco had osteo in his spine and had weeks to live.  Sly came up and did his silly waggle dance to go outside.  So I let him.  When I went to get him a couple minutes later, instead of careening back to me with his ridiculous sideways run, he was there struggling on the ground.  I was alone.  I couldn’t lift him.  Pried open his jaws as he fought for breath, tried in vain to find something to remove from his throat.  Then I dragged him across the yard to the van.  I dragged him, as he struggled and flailed.  As I flew down the road, not caring if cops caught me or I wrecked the car, as long as I got to the vet, he died there in my back seat.  Alone, without me to comfort him.

The cuts on my hands from trying to lift him off the wood chips in the yard remained for a couple weeks, dirt ground into them.

That one gutted me.  I couldn’t sleep at night without replaying it.  Took to lying down on the couch at night and watching reruns of Star Trek Next Generation to turn off my brain until it ultimately would shut down completely.

Crisco died a week later, my heart and soul. I had been having occasional nightmares about his death for years, because it was simply the worst thing I could imagine.

Those are the associations I now have with this time of year.  The cool air and falling leaves, and the reading of the Rainbow Bridge poem, have made me ache for them all.  If only I really could see them all again someday.

Right now, I have a houseful of 6 healthy dogs, and it is strange.  No one takes any medications.  No one has wounds that need tending.  There is no one who is frail, and needs me to clear a path for them as they move through the house.  No one who hops on 3.  My oldest dog is Tobey — 11!

Now, when I do turnouts, they race around the yard and chase each other like my Founding Hounds used to, back in Atlanta, and even when we first moved here.  When they were young 10-year-olds and spry.  One of the hardest things is to remember my Original Six Hounds that way, instead of the way they were at the end.  I try to picture Tanner doing his “where’s-the-bathroom” dance routine in the yard, and then his “I-did-a-good-job” sprint to me when he was finished.  And Crisco chasing down and pouncing on a mad and snarling Abby Schnauzer, just for the fun of messing with her head.

I miss them.

It feels like a lifetime ago that we were this family:

Now we are this family:

I love this family too, but it sure doesn’t make me miss the others any less.