I hadn’t thought I would write about this, but I have written about my dogs in posts before as metaphors for writing and life in general. So this is about Lacey who left us recently.
She was strong, energetic, cheerful, loving, and we thought she was going to be around for years yet. A perpetual puppy.
She left us last week. It was sudden.
Those words don’t cover the loss. Lacey ceased to be in our house. She doesn’t greet me each morning at the bottom of the stares. She doesn’t watch me from her bed look ridiculous going up and down the same two steps for five minutes. (Part of my exercise routine, separate from my walk in the backyard several times a day to keep the two girls out of trouble which she considered a perfectly normal and appropriate activity for me.)
We have a back hall in our old house. A narrow, nine feet of hallway to the back door. We make our girls wait on the rug there a few minutes when their feet are wet before they can come into the main house.
Sometimes we forget they’re waiting. Or they think we do.
Lacey has (sorry had) this crazy rumble in her throat, like she’s gargling, when she wanted to be released from the back hall, when she thought we might have forgotten after the first twenty seconds of her wait. She’d peek around the corner of the doorway and rumble/gargle, gurgle, what have you.
It always made me laugh and was far from getting me to release her because it was such a soft, grumbly sound, too enjoyable to listen to.
She didn’t like to bark. Strange, I know. A dog that is embarrassed to bark. But she didn’t like it. So when she wanted to go outside for, you know, the necessary stuff, she’d sort of dance and hop around in the back hall. My office is just past that hallway. I would hear her prancing and hopping.
She’s a Labrador, seriously. Cagney barks. Lacey would prance.
Of course, I would ask as if it was all a mystery to me, “Whatcha doing there?” She’d jump and prance some more.
So I’d head for the hall, stand there at the end and ask again. “Whatcha doing there?” And she’d do that chest to the floor thing and leap into the air. I’d ask, “Do you want to go out?” And she’d leap even higher.
She’s not here to do that anymore.
I don’t like that.
I miss her.
Lacey wasn’t the most confident dog. She tended to skate on linoleum floors like she was on ice, her toes curled so her nails were the only thing in contact with the smooth floor. Veterinary offices always have linoleum. Have you ever seen a Labrador sprawl, all four legs sliding out from under her, repeatedly, with no sense of why it is happening to her?
Cagney would look at her like she was too embarrassing to acknowledge they lived in the same house and trotted the same backyard.
Lacey had all the gumption she needed to take on a stranger or another big dog, but otherwise, she was always in need of attention. She would fall in love with a perfect stranger if they would just rub her ears. She once looked like she was going to take out the kennel lady. (We had to leave town, and the girls couldn’t join us.) I told the woman to rub her ears. They’d be fine.
I just had to say that I miss Lacey. I can’t hear her grumble/gurgle anymore.
I wish I could.
