This Month's Story
I woke up last night and, finding myself wide awake, began listening to the sounds of the night. It’s an odd thing, but there are many noises around us that we become so accustomed to that we don’t really hear them. The house shifts, the air conditioning goes on and then off, the clock ticks in the hall, its chimes go off on the hour with loud bongs. But mostly the sounds I heard last night were those made by Jennie, our gray German hound.
She was snoring.
As I lay there, I realized that, like the motor of an old refrigerator, her snoring was unobtrusive. Like the clock and the air conditioning, it was there and yet not there. I could if I wished have fallen back to sleep without it bothering me. Yet as I lay there, I realized that it was loud. In a way, however, the sound was comforting. Its presence meant to me, that Jennie was there and that when I awoke in the morning, she would still be there.
During the day, Jennie follows me around everywhere and at night she usually sleeps at the foot of our bed on her own pad. Every now and then, she wanders a bit during the night, sleeping sometimes on the small rug on Stella’s side of the bed and sometimes on mine. When I awoke last night, she was on my side and I remember reaching down and touching her flank, listening to her snore.
We first started letting Jennie sleep in the bedroom after she had an accident a number of years ago. Before that she slept in the garage on a pad in an old plastic barrel with blankets added for the cold during winter. Then one week she had started chasing pickup trucks passing the house on the side street. Within that week, she was hit by one truck and lay on the street, screaming in pain and terror.
When I picked her up, her front left leg was pointed awkwardly at midpoint to one side. With the help of the pickup’s driver, I managed to get her in the back of our car and with Stella rushed her to the small emergency animal clinic in Orange Grove.
The clinic was understaffed at the time and I had to hold the sedated Jennie while the vet drilled holes in her leg. These were for stainless steel bolts that secured the two steel rods that would keep the leg in traction and provide support while the shattered bones healed.
The trip home was slower. Stella drove and I sat in the back with Jennie. That night, Jennie slept for the first time on the floor in the bedroom. I slept beside her as she came out of the anesthetic. The vet warned me that it would be rough and it was.
When we got Jennie originally, it was a trial sort of thing. A friend sent a woman to us with a Weimaraner. The woman was not home enough to adequately take care of the large dog and was looking for someone to adopt it. It was a nice-looking dog, about two years old. We said we would keep her on a trial basis for a week. The woman agreed and left.
The next morning I woke up and turned to Stella in the bed beside me, “What do you think?” She knew right away what I was talking about, “Call the woman,” she said, “and tell her we want to give her back her dog.”
The problem was that the dog was extremely active. The evening before, the dog had worn us out. And she would be just one of three dogs! We still had Lillie and Heron at that time, two very active Weimaraners. Three dogs would be a lot of dogs. And when one of them is as active as the new dog, that’s more than a lot of dogs.
We decided we would keep Jennie (her new name) one more day and see how things worked out. That ‘one more day’ was extended to another day and that day to another and then another…
Heron and Lillie are both gone and all we have left is Jennie. We are glad we kept her. She really is a wonderful dog, tall, rather handsome, with a tail that’s been docked on the long side. When Jennie does act up, we tell her that she had better start behaving because it’s getting near the end of the week. For some reason, she never seems to be worried.
She loves to go with me on the beach. When she was younger, she loved the exulting feeling of freedom presented by its open spaces. She would race ahead of me on the sand, moving at tremendous speed in broad, ranging circles, shedding some of the excess of energy that seemingly was always cooped up within her. If I had a frisbee, she would leap impossible heights to pluck it from the sky. To watch Jennie then was to watch the essence of the joy of life.
Now time is with us and our walks on the beach are more sedate. Jennie still moves about eagerly, sniffing and checking the sharp smells of the shoreline, but the full roar of endless circles of shedding energy is gone. A friend asked to take her with him as company on his three-mile walk the other day. He brought her back after less than a mile. She was walking slow and shaking at the hip. Arthritis and age have taken their toll. At thirteen years, she is not the blurred whirlwind of movement she was when, a decade ago, the women left her with us for a one-week trial.
So, last night when I touched her lying beside the bed and listened to her snore, I felt and heard a warm presence of many years of deep love and company. It had felt good and, knowing she was there, I slipped easily back into a sound sleep.
