It’s been 11 weeks now since we lost our longtime companion, Honey the Wonderdog. Readers of this blog know her story and know how devastated Annie and I were when we had to put her down.
We’ve been in mourning since then, and pained by the empty house. You don’t realize how important those seemingly mundane things are — the greeting at the door, the nudge in the morning to get me out of bed, the way she’d watch me as I cooked or would jump up and sit on Annie like she was her personal throne. We feel that loss and the gap that it has created in our lives every day.
I think we always will, on some level.
We’ve known from the moment the horrible decision had to be made that we planned on getting another dog. We wanted to wait, to give ourselves a chance to grieve and also to get past the holidays, to allow our house to return to its normal state.
Annie started looking at Petfinder.com a few weeks ago, checking out the pictures and beginning the process of finding the right rescue group from which we could adopt a new dog. While surfing the site, she came upon a group called Puppies and More in Marlton, which is run by a friend of ours. (Carol used to live across the street from us, but moved to Marlton about a dozen years ago and we’ve kept in touch the way people do — sporadically.)
Puppies and More rescues dogs from what are known as “high-kill” shelters down south — Kentucky, North Carolina, Georgia — fosters them in local homes and then places them. She e-mailed us last week to tell us she had a group of dogs coming in and we arranged to visit her house on Sunday. There were about eight to 10 dogs there — not including her four. Several were too small for our taste (meaning they wouldn’t likely grow very large), but several were likely to grow to between 50 and 80 pounds.
She brought us over to a 10-week-old dog she called Rose and there was an immediate connection — not to mention a bit of Kismet, as they say. We’d been out to dinner the night before and we were talking about our impending trip to South Jersey, comparing pictures that Annie printed from Carol’s Web site — one of the dogs, with perky ears and piercing eyes caught our attention — and tossing around potential names. Our friend Myra suggested Rosalita — we are huge Bruce Springsteen fans, after all — and we laughed.
That night, Annie was checking Carol’s site and found a picture of the dog we’d grown partial to and called me into the office.
“Take a look at this,” she said. “It’s that puppy — and look at the name.”
Carol had named the pup Rose — which seemed a sign.
When we got to Marlton the next morning, we met several of the dogs before being presented with Rose. Annie picked her up and the pup promptly fell asleep on her shoulder. A second dog from the same litter was in the pen Carol had set up in her kitchen, a dog she named Lola. I went over to Lola, who rolled onto her back seeking a belly-rub. And there you have it; we were sold. After a couple of hours of watching them play together (see above video), we made it offical.
Annie had been asking me all week how we’d choose. My answer was that we wouldn’t be choosing. The dogs would. And they did.
So Rose, now Rosalita, and Lola, who we have renamed Sophia, will be coming home on Friday. And the house won’t be so empty any longer.
And we can’t wait.
Hank Kalet 