Thinning Season

She was one of fourteen. So, in a manner of speaking, am I.

Friends,

It was August 16 and twilight, our final walk of the day. Our Rosie stumbled twice in the grass, but kept wagging, just as she had wagged during every one of our thousands of hikes for fourteen and a half years.

She walked as if being together on this summer evening were her entire reason. As if failing hindquarters and kidneys and ears and eyes and bladder were of no concern at all.

We hadn’t gone far before she sniffed the cooling air, then nosed a vole’s tunnel in the fence line—and me. Though clouded with age, her kind brown eyes were asking.

“Okay, old girl,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

We did, on the last walk not just of the day, but of her life. She died later that night, a year and a week after her sister Mamba passed.

I wrote about Rosie’s birth years ago. About how Mama Lu (and my veterinarian husband, Blake) spent 21 hours delivering fourteen potato-sized Gordon setters—evenly split between boys and girls.

And all of them lived.

Above: Tired mama Lucy with her seven newborn girls. Rosie’s there among them. Mamba, too.

Below, Lu’s with her sons—another seven.

I know. Fourteen’s a lot. More than a mama with only eight teats can feed.

So, while half of them nursed every few hours, Blake and I bottle-fed the other half, rotating sets of pups around the clock. For the first month, I left the house a total of three hours. Our sleep allotment proved equally slim.

But the joy was all ours. For weeks and weeks, we tended and loved puppies that grew at the speed of light. Introduced them to the outside world (and fended off hungry eagles circling overhead).

Until, in a flurry of arrivals and shipments, twelve pups left for wonderful homes with strangers who have since become golden friends.

Two pups, Rosie (below in the green collar) and Mamba (red), stayed with us. We’d only planned on one, but couldn’t for the life of us part with either.

From then on, those two did everything upland game bird dogs do—together.

Until they couldn’t.

Thereafter, Rose lived for both of them—teaching our new pup Doozy, among a zillion other things, to . . .

pluck those blackberries

and to catch those voles. When her hindquarters failed, she’d lie on her belly to dig.

Fourteen and a half years is a long life for a dog. Even so, that’s nowhere near long enough to contain all she meant to us.

She’s buried in the orchard now, with another fourteen who preceded her—horse, pony, goat, cats, canaries. (Even goldfish our kids won at the fair are out there.)

And, of course, dogs. We remember their names. Loved them all. Will miss them forever.

Our generation’s a litter of sorts, too. Though we may last another decade or three, the people who anchored the soil of our lives are reaching the ends of theirs. They're leaving faster than ever.

How good that dogs offer us a practice run. Our animals’ abbreviated days have enabled Blake and me to watch their full-life arcs while still in the midst of our own. And because we can view their lives and the outcomes of how they lived, we have learned.

To eat more blackberries.

To relish the digging, the hunt.

To wag (we hope), regardless—and even in our dying.

Rose was the eleventh pup of fourteen to depart for paradise. No telling where Blake and I are in the exit line, but one thing’s certain: every time we raise our eyes from whatever rope we’re tugging at the moment, we count a shorter queue than the week before.

I say this with great peace—and without nostalgia. For me, nostalgia tips reality out of kilter. It elbows out contentment and replaces it with a longing for what’s past and can never be reclaimed. Nostalgia renders a dog who wrecked furniture with mud and toenails one-dimensional, and therefore less.

I refuse to blur our Rosie by revising her life with sentimentality, by deleting the swamp-water feet, skunk spray, and a bloody dog-fight she started. The beauty of her was never in a saccharine set of altered memories. It was in all of her. Rosie herself—with us, doing life.

And now she isn’t. We knew from the get-go that we wouldn’t enjoy all those hikes in our fields without a final one. We knew that grief is love’s bedfellow, and that the more we loved her, the more we would hurt when she left us.

It helps to trust that our Creator does not abandon his creatures to orchard graveyards. That he promises to heal his creation and make it new again, and that Rosie belongs inside that promise.

Likewise, I trust him with the people I love—wherever they are in that line with me.

And until my turn comes, I will make those people my reason—just as Rosie made us hers.

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📙 Now, from my BOOKERY, a WINNER of last month’s giveaway:

CONGRATULATIONS, MARLYS TAYLOR! You’ve won my library’s copy of Jaime Jo Wright’s Tempest at Annabel’s Lighthouse . Reply with your mailing address, and I’ll send the book right off to you!

In keeping with the thinning theme, this month’s giveaway is for a copy of Jen Wilkin’s new #1 bestseller—Dust to Dust: Aging Wisely in an Anti-Aging World.

Interested? Here’s the online gist:

The world tells us at every turn that aging is a steep descent into irrelevance, one to be avoided at any cost. This false story diminishes not only us but our elders and the time God gives us. But Scripture reveals a markedly different pattern of life, one of increasing value, that calls us to embrace our age and number our days rightly.

In this extended exploration of aging, Jen Wilkin draws poetic parallels between the first half of life and the second. Exploring the changing realities of caregiving, abilities, and potentiality, she helps us to trace God’s give-and-take design at every stage. Wilkin offers practical insights on body image, honoring the elderly, the essential value of family, and more. She urges us to trade an anti-aging mindset for the pursuit of biblical wisdom, encouraging believers to lean into―not fight―their place in the true story of the arc of life.

***

I’m reading it now—and am already finding the book to be encouraging, thought-provoking, and wise. If you’d like to win my copy, reply with DUST in your subject line by September 30, and I’ll drop your name in my hat. We’ll draw a winner and announce who won in my October 3 post.

What did you read this summer? Any classics? A friend told me that returning to Charlotte Brontë’s works after decades away was a breath of fresh Eyre.

Love,

Cheryl