I Don’t Need a Dog

This is Ragnar, our furbaby (although my family thinks I focus a little more on the baby than the fur.) 

We didn’t set out to get a dog. Given the area we live in, a dog might not be the best addition to the livestock.  The chickens might not survive some breeds (previous experience) and smaller dogs might not survive the pasture. (At the time we had a donkey as well and he DID NOT like anything with four legs that was not him.) I had a conversation with a customer at work who was trying to rehome a cute little poodle. She really was cute but I’m not a poodle kind of girl. When I explained our circumstances she fully agreed that this was not the dog for us but we should still have one. Of course I reassured her that a dog of any kind was not in our future, just because... 

Literally, the next morning, I hear a sound like someone loudly “hooting” in our yard. We live very close to an industrial building with people and trucks coming in at 5 or 6 in the morning so this isn’t to be unexpected… Other than the proximity to our yard.   Now at this point of the morning, I am trying to get some sleep… and this “hooting” has woken me up. I’m not an angry person when I am woken up (but my husband tells a story of me slapping him when he once tried to wake me. Personally I don’t believe it but…) Anyway, I calmly walk to the door and open it prepared to inform whomever has deemed it necessary to make such a ruckus at that hour that they need to go home and rethink their life. Well, there was no one there, in fact the industrial yard was still dark, but sitting on the top step at our front door was a shivering, wet puppy making the most awful, pitiful sound. I ran and got an old towel and scooped him up, carried him to where my husband was getting ready to go to work and said something to the effect of “You are not going to believe what I found on the front step.”

The rest is history. Spoiled by me or not, for the record, I am not the one who fed him a hamburger for lunch that first day. Just saying…

But that hamburger patty smells so good.

God sends us what we need when we need it if we know how to see it. This little dog has fit so perfectly into our family and tendencies that we jokingly say he was created just for us. The last couple of years have been tough but dogs offer us comfort, support and unconditional love in response to somehow knowing when we hurt, when we are sick, when things are stressed, sometimes before we even see it ourselves. So yes, I may have thought we didn’t need a dog but I think someone else thought otherwise.

I wonder if he has had his treat yet tonight…