Saturday, January 12, 2008

Awarded


I don't know how much more excitement I can take around here. Honestly.

As you can see by the badge at the top of the post, FurGirl and I have been awarded by Patience Renzulli (page down) with a "You Make my Day" award. I'm vah-klempt! (Tawk amongst yahselves.)

Ahem. Okay. Thank you, Patience!

As for FurGirl, she is seriously grooving on her new more rural (comparatively speaking) setting. The place where I live now is the same place that FurGirl came home to as a wee puppy of a mere eight weeks old. She was but a soft itsy ball of shy blonde fluff six years ago. It is here that she spent her first few weeks at night next to my bed in a clothes basket on a soft blankie and here that she cried on her first leash walk because she was afraid to leave the safety of her own familiar driveway.

We are within walking distance of a lovely park-like setting that includes a large reflecting pool with a fountain in the middle. It was there that FurGirl swam her very first strokes, finally unable to resist a stick the ex-man tossed in to lure her. I remember my heart aching with pride (and a little fear) as she flopped into the water and reflexively began paddling along after the stick, she as surprised as we were that she could swim all of a sudden, while I shouted from the bank,

"Look! She's RETRIEVING just like a RETRIEVER!"

I took FurGirl on this same walk to the pool on the one unseasonably warm and relatively dry day we had recently. I wish you could have seen her reaction when her old pool came into sight. She broke into a wild sprint and hurled herself in from the bank, all four feet played straight out in wild abandon, she was for a second suspended above the water with Michael Jordan like hang-time before breaking the surface like a cannon ball and swimming round and round, a big goofy grin on her face that said,

"I know this place, this is MY place!"

She would climb back out and hurl herself in again three more times with no less enthusiasm before she was ready to move on with the rest of the walk that day. Whoever said dogs have no long term memory should have been there. FurGirl is, by now, used to dips in the Ohio River and the library fountain, but it was crystal clear that day that THIS was her special pool and that it was every bit as grand and cool and refreshing as she had remembered.

2 comments:

keena said...

that is just wonderful-I miss that place too, david and matt and I had lots of dventures there, esp before it got built up. That's where Loki learned to swim too- he wouldn't get in, i plopped him in the water and he tried to walk in the wqater, pulling his paws way up and splashing them down. But he finally learned. It'll be interesting to take him back there and see if he remembers. March, late the first week, I should be there.

Suzanne said...

Looking forward to seeing you! We'll definitely take the fur-kids on the nostalgic walk!