Spring-time Puppy

We went to the dog park yesterday and hit the jack-pot.... five dogs were in there, all very friendly and playful and Savannah couldn't decide which one to play with so she ran around with all of them. It just still amazes me how fearless she can be when approaching another dog but Savannah is totally lacking in confidence when the owners of those dogs get too close to her. At those times, Savannah will literally back away and not take her eyes off the person wanting to pet her... she will not let them touch her, and after 20 or 30 seconds of eye contact, she will run off to play with the dogs.

All but one of yesterday's dogs were rescues, the Chocolate Lab being the only pedigree there in the park. Thinking back on all of our visits to that park, I would guess that 95% of all the dogs have been mixed-breed rescues, with very few of them being full-blooded breeds. And all the dogs have their stories, told by their owners as we all sit in the shade of the gazebo as the dogs run and play. Some of the dogs were found in parking lots of shopping centers, others were abandoned on country roads, still others were rounded up by the animal control officer and brought to the local shelters. And nearly all of the owners have given the same conclusion to their dog's story--- after nearly a year of learning how to trust, their dogs are the light of their lives and they couldn't remember how they got along without them.

I recently put a CD player in the kitchen so I could listen to my Manilow music, and one night this past week, a song featuring a duet with Barry Manilow and Louis Armstrong started playing and my husband and I started to dance in the center of the kitchen. Within ten seconds of that dance, Savannah walked up to us and put one paw on my husband and one paw on me and she stood there at her full (and considerable) height and just looked at us and smiled.

The title of the song was "It's A Wonderful World," which was one of Armstrong's trademark tunes, and my all-time favorite song of his. My husband and I looked at Savannah as she tried to join us in the dance, and we thought of our dog Gracie, who would also jump up when we were dancing in our other house years ago. Gracie, however, was trying to 'cut in' on our dance because she got very jealous if she saw me getting too close to her favorite person in her universe-- my husband. Savannah, with her one front paw on my arm and her other paw on my husband's, was clearly not showing favorites. I believe that Savannah loves both of us, she knows we are both 'her people,' and had she been able to twirl and dance with us, she would have done just that until the music stopped.

For this first week of March, Spring has truly arrived and some of the days have been more like Summer than Spring. The breezes are blowing around the fields, some of the bluebonnets are popping up here and there, and Savannah walks up the road with her head high into the breeze and her fan-like tail blowing in the wind. Quite a difference from that five-month-old puppy who kept her tail between her legs for the first two months of her life here.