We came home from vacation and gave our dog away

How do you become a person who owns 3 dogs?

If you are like me, its starts with just one.
One you chose, on purpose.

You decide on one.

Years go by and after awhile a thought pops into your head:
Maybe your dog needs a friend.

Or circumstances change.
Kids come along

And your dog is your dog and the kids want their own dog
which will also becomes your dog,
(if you are a grown-up and realize all pets are your responsibility)

Then your dog
the one you chose
Gets old, or too sick
And you are back to one dog.

Things feel emptier. Sadder.

One day you see your one dog (because, there is always one dog)
playing alone in the yard with a ball
and you think:

My dog needs a friend.

And, so it goes.

But, there is always only two.
Sometimes there’s one again, but soon there are two.
Because two feels right.
Two is the right number.

Until, one day you are driving
in the middle of a forest.
You catch a glimpse of a dog running along side the road
as you drive by.

In an instant you think:

What can be done?

Should you stop and see this lost soul
who has been out on the road far too long
Matted and very, very thin?

You pull over

Open the door

And become the kind of person who owns three dogs.

This was an email that I wrote one year ago

almost to the day.

this year when we came home from vacation
we gave our dog away.

It was not something I had even considered
when we left her behind 5 weeks ago.

She hopped into the back seat of one of our closest relatives
and as I waved goodbye I thought:

She doesn’t know if she’s ever coming back
but I knew she was.

I don’t know when it happened
it could have been after the first week
or maybe it was the second.

It could have happened the moment she got into the car.

All I can say is that when she came home this Sunday
something had changed.

She happily came when I called
and sat next to me when I asked
but something had shifted in her.

I could see it in her eyes and the way she looked at him.

She had fallen in love with someone else.

And there was nothing I could do to change it.