Heavy Hearts And (Nearly) Forgotten Footwear

I wore a pair of socks today. There’s a picture of them below. Right now I’m not having much luck remembering why I picked them out of the drawer this morning. Truth is, yesterday’s post was a bit disingenuous on my part.  I knew there was a good chance Maddie would be leaving us today and waiting at the Rainbow Bridge, even if I conveniently left that part out yesterday. Point is, though, losing her today is making it difficult to bring myself to care much about my sock choices.

Humans have a tendency to romanticize our pets, and I’m certainly guilty there. But Maddie, for us, was a little special. The Puddinette and I had a pair of dogs when we started having kids, and as most people will tell you, when you have infants and young children, your dogs go from being babied to being, well, dogs. And sometimes it doesn’t all work out.

It didn’t for us, and by late 2007, we were pet-less.

I’d pretty much always had a dog as a kid, though, and I wanted my kids to know what joys of having one too. So it wasn’t but a few years before I began to nag the Puddinette that it was time to get the kids (and me!) a dog.

But the Puddinette, as I’ve eluded a hundred times before, is smarter than I am. She knew that in order to have a dog again, things needed to be just about perfect. That we had to make sure that both the time was right, and the dog was right.

It took us almost two years to find the right match for our family.

Maddie was that perfect fit. She helped us remember that a it was be possible to live in household with a dog, one grown=up kid, four actual kids, and still somehow have things not go all to hell on a daily basis. She was a little dog, but you’d never know it by the amount of space she took up in our lives…and in our hearts.

She’ll always take up that same space in our hearts, but now she’s no longer taking up her usual space in her favorite dog beds, and our home is a little less colorful for it.

Pud’n

*So, that’s not the same Rainbow Bridge the Vikings have…right? I mean, I kinda like the idea of Maddie trotting up into Valhalla and putting all the other dogs there in their places, but still