good grief

I don't think the wife and I were willing to admit it to ourselves, but I think we have been in mourning for our Scout. We had been avoiding doing some things with the other three like clipping nails and brushings. Even walks have been somewhat scarce since the "incident".

We have guests coming over, and so we decided that it was time for a full on grooming of the beasts. We haven't even bathed them yet, and we are WORN OUT. The brushings and nail trimmings alone are enough to induce a nap. It feels good to get back into the swing of things with the dogs again though.

Last night we finally got around to watching "Marley and Me." As promised, it was a tear jerker. What dog movie isn't? Kristi and I had read the book to each other several years ago on a road trip. We cried then too.

In the end though, watching the movie seemed to hit much closer to home than the book did. The scenes at the end where the dog is not doing well, and the owner has to make the tough decision to let the animal go hit a little closer to home after the ordeal several months ago.

We really miss Scout. She was in many ways, the runt of our pack. We saw her the least because she would hide out in the corner most of the time, and when she did come out, we were always scolding her because she growled a lot, putting the other dogs on edge. But when she was herself, she was the optimist in the group. She scampered all over the place, asked politely for pettings, and had a general spirit of adventure about her that only we probably could see.

Not long after we got her, she got lost. We were letting them out to go potty. At the time we didn't have a fence, but there were several untended lots around our house, so we would take the dogs on leashes and let them do their business where no man dared to walk anyways. The wind was howling that night on our little neighborhood hill. The leash got away from Kristi and both Scout and Duffy made a break for it. Duffy, always the wiser one, made it back but he was as stressed out as we were when he couldn't find Scout.

Kristi and I searched for Scout for three straight days. We put signs up all over town. We walked all over different neighborhoods in the freezing weather, desperately calling her name. At the time, her name was Trinity, a name that wasn't given to her by us.

We had nearly given her up for dead when Kristi got a call in the afternoon from one of our neighbors who said she was walking by our house and a dog matching Scout's description was sitting on our porch. We rushed home to find Scout had made her own way home, or at least half of her did. She had starved the entire time, and had lost a ton of weight.

She dined well that night on raw hamburger and she earned her new name. Scout, after the character in "To Kill a Mockingbird" seemed much more appropriate than her other name. She had braved the worst and still made it back to us.