Kringle found me when he was just 3 months old. He came in one frigid night in December 1984 while I brought in an armload of wood. He laid in front of the Christmas Tree undetected for some time only to be discovered like a present from Santa. Too cold and dark to find his home that night, we curled into the chair by the fire and napped on and off. The next day, I canvassed several blocks for his owner but to no avail. Al, my closest neighbor, said the little guy had been living under his porch for a week but he had no idea where the kitten had come from.
After the vet dewormed him and his eyes grew straight, Kringle blossomed into a beautiful, regal, affectionate and, well, sometimes distraught soul with what appeared to be two personalities living within the same body. His tail would often taunt his head and his head would savagely attack his tail providing endless entertainment without leaving the warring cat any worse for wear. The game was akin to Ring Around the Rosie “for one” with a bit of hissing, spitting and an occasional sommersault thrown in for good measure. Last year’s holiday video demonstrates it best:
As we moved through several apartments during our lifetime together, there was at least one landlord who feared for his children’s safety when Kringle hissed and spat himself into a tizzy. While that landlord never did believe me, Kringle was the perfect gentleman around children. He also got along well with dogs and birds.
While out on the prowl two weeks ago to the day, Kringle passed away. Tim discovered him laying in the path next to the house. He was pointed in the direction of home. I suspect a catastrophic health event brought him down where he lay, but his body was positioned at peace, paws crossed, every muscle at rest.
When Tim ran outside that morning, I knew it was the day I had been bracing for. Each and every minute after Kringle turned thirteen was a gift in my mind. I had never known a cat to live longer and yet Kringle gave me 16 wonderful years. We had no regrets, no unanswered headbuts, no ignored meows, no unsaid “I love yous.” Ours was a beautiful relationship and I was acutely aware of its perfection in every moment.
I joined Tim outside. We knelt in the snow and admired Kringle’s beautiful fur, fluffed and glistening from the chill in the air. I wrapped his body in a towel with Tim’s help and held my dear friend close feeling the weight of his plump, furry mass in my arms one last time. Through my tears, I breathed a sigh of relief that he didn’t suffer from disease or linger on in pain. He played with the dogs, went outside for one last walk, fell into the soft snow and succumbed to shock, sleeping the deepest sleep under my window in the garden where we often played in the cat mint.
The night of his death, I choked on my sobs and held my breath as though stillness would halt time. I wanted the day to never end so Kringle would always be part of it, even if that meant nothing more than arranging for his cremation.
Life has since been plagued by distraction leaving little time to reflect upon or accept this enormous loss. Only occasionally has reality crept in. The day following his death, the phone repair man stepped in Kringle’s sillouhette. A footprint had desecrated the indentation where there had been warm paws, an ear, a tail to shape the snow. I felt stinging sadness as I vacuumed the last of his gray fur from under the coffee table where he always sat waiting for a passing human foot or dog paw to whack. I wiped three muddy footprints from the sun porch floor knowing I would miss that task from now on. Even still, there are traces of him all around, memories of laugher, purring, warmth. I move through my days as though Kringle is asleep in my bed or out for walk, never facing the fact that he is, indeed, gone. I don’t remember what life is like without him and have yet to fully understand what that feels like.
But now there are ashes…
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When the email arrived, Tim came away from his computer with such a sad face that I thought someone had died.
I was at the table writing holiday cards while festive music played softly in the background. Shamus, the Newf, was romping in the snow and Emmett, our foster of six months, was resting in his bed by the fire.
“Somebody is interested in Emmett,” Tim said.
I felt sick.
Tim sat down.
We wrote more cards. We took in the holiday scene, the romance of it. We saw our boy so content in the other room. We each shed a few tears while the other wasn’t looking.
Having asked Tim in early December if an adoption contract was in our holiday future (Emmett was the only present I wanted), Tim said he prefers to perpetually foster. I didn’t push the issue, promising to never back Tim into a corner the way I did to keep Bill, the first foster I couldn’t let go. While I want to make this a decision together at the right time, getting the first bite of interest for Emmett meant a real conversation was in order.
I know Emmett could make a great pet for the right person but, after talking it through, Tim and I are also sure that Emmett’s progress would revert in the face of change. We watched Emmett go back to square one for a full five days after spending just one week at the kennel. How will a new situation effect his sense of security? I also worry that Emmett’s nervous antics (he ate another cushion today) will incite anger with somebody new. The truth is, sometimes we get angry and we’re pretty darn tolerant. So yes, there are many questions about whether Emmett is adoptable yet or whether we can emotionally let him go.
The debate has not been settled for nearly a month, in part because the inquiring family never asked after Emmett again. Still, this is the moment of truth. As I see it, we have 3 options.
- We continue to foster and eventually send Emmett out into the world.
- We make a lifetime commitment to him.
- We ride this out and have the conversation all over again the next time a query arrives.
I’m opting for 2 while Tim opts for 3.
For now, I leave you with this video of what life with Emmett is like. Six months of our fostering experience has been condensed into less than 6 tasty and digestible minutes for your viewing pleasure. (To satiate your appetite for more ridiculousness not caught on camera, visit my previous post, “The Forever Foster?“). Perhaps you, dear reader, can offer some perspective. We’re obviously too in love.
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THE REWARDS OF FOSTERING
Fostering is one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever known. I rank it right up there with my month-long volunteer experience in Ghana. If one could measure such things, my satisfaction with fostering might rank slightly higher because, with the dogs, I know I have had an immediate, direct and positive impact on a life for the long haul.
Tim and I have had several foster dogs, each with amazing personalities and various degrees of challenges. You can read about Jack, Bill, Petey and Moo on the Dogs We’ve Fostered page. Relatively new to this list is Emmett, a high-energy Britney mix and our toughest dog to date.
MEET EMMETT
When Emmett was wandering the streets, he was so filthy that rescuers thought he was dark brown. After a good, long bath, it took two days more to pick the ticks from his poor body. Under the filth and parasites was a dog with beautiful, glowing white fur, liver colored spots, a split ear, one scarred lip missing a half-inch chunk… and a non-stop wagging tail.
Emmett became an AnimaLover’s dog and lived in the safety of Creekside Kennel for 8 months. While other dogs up for adoption came and went, Emmett waited for his own forever family until, finally, one entered the scene. Unfortunately, after several weeks, Emmett didn’t do well in his trial adoption. He needed more patience and firm guidance than a family with children could provide.
What the family did provide was significant insight into Emmett’s behavior (or lack thereof) in a home setting. We learned that Emmett has a penchant for being in charge and he’ll push every button along his way to being top dog. This was a side of Emmett’s personality we had no access to at the kennel. Thanks to this trial family, we knew Emmett had to learn to mind his manners (and what manners are) before being reconsidered for adoption.
CAN WE DO THIS?
With no foster homes available and little hope beyond perpetual kennel life, Tim and I considered taking Emmett in. Our two old boys had recently passed away and Shamus, a Newfoundland in need, had rescued us from our enormous burden of grief. Our household was only beginning to settle in and Tim and I strongly questioned our emotional abilities as foster parents at that time. Did we have the patience to train an infuriating dog? Could we do the job well without being short or, worse, getting downright angry? Would our animals be safe? We had no idea. We only knew we had to try.
FLIGHT OF THE DEVIL DOG
The first time I walked Emmett on a leash, he literally took flight. Repeatedly jumping 4 feet in the air, he tried to maneuver out of his collar for what felt like an eternity. Stunned, I planted my feet firmly and held on tight until, in a fit of exhaustion, I eventually dragged him back into the house. Placing leash walking on the to-do list, Emmett’s main outings were shuttled through the dog door.
Taking flight of a different kind, Emmett has crashed through me at the front door and Tim at the gate on two separate occasions, making us traipse through the woods for hours looking for him. He also made his way under the fence (one that has effectively contained 7 other dogs in our care over the course of 15 years) by working at a weak point until he escaped and took our Newf with him.
A DOG OF TASTE
Emmett has a taste for fabric, paper, Newf and cat fur in the most playful sense, but he rarely knows when enough is enough. He initially played too rough with Shamus and required constant intervention. Let me say, inserting oneself between two torpedoing dogs while assuming a position of power is a real trick and one I wasn’t crazy about learning.
Emmett would go after household items with the same intensity and stealth speed as he did Shamus. I would find him sleeping in a cloud of stuffing from a pillow I never heard him shred. Blankets, towels, dog beds, you name it, all have been dragged through the dog door at one point or another, and some more than twice. Daily, I struggled with the balance between crating Emmett and reporting to Tim about items decimated on my watch. I often felt like I was failing one, the other or both.
While most of the thieving has finally stopped, aside from a stray piece of recent mail and a Christmas card that fell from the wall, we still work on many other issues. There is no climbing up for attention allowed and we still, months later, have to remind Emmett to sit before he gets a head scratch. Because he strongly dislikes sharing his dog bed at night, we now stand over him to demonstrate that the bed belongs to us, not him, and we invite the cat and Shamus in too. The bottom line is that, while Emmett has come such a long way, he still has so far to go.
EMMETT’S FOREVER FOSTER HOME?
For all the issues Emmett has and all he has destroyed, I still find having him in my life extremely rewarding. He makes me laugh more than any dog I have ever known. He also makes me beam with pride when he takes significant steps toward change. Tim and I have grown very fond of him, as have Shamus and our cat, Kringle.
People have told us to stop pretending Emmett doesn’t already belong with us and, in all honesty, it feels like he does. After six months, of course we have grown attached. I asked Tim over the holidays if an adoption contract was in our future, but he said he’d prefer to foster indefinitely… until he received an email from a family interested in Emmett.
I’ll address all the issues that this new query brings the next time I write. For now I have to go. If I don’t, Emmett will continue to jam his face into my keyboard for attention and destroy this post like he has my office carpet…
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Foster A Lonely Pet for the Holidays – The Kick-Off
Being a foster mother to several dogs over the years (and keeping an eye on one now who enjoys dragging the Christmas tree skirt out through the dog door), I was happy to watch Hallmark’s Hall of Fame movie “A Dog Named Christmas” (airing on CBS Nov. 29) kick off the “Foster A Lonely Pet for the Holidays” program. The program, spearheaded by Petfinder.com, works with over 2000 shelters and rescue groups across North America. The aim is to ease the holiday burden on rescue organizations, to provide an animal with individual attention, and to offer families the experience of having a pet in their homes.
A Dog Named Christmas – The TV Movie
“A Dog Named Christmas,” based on Greg Kincaid’s novel, is a sweet holiday movie about Todd, a young man with a developmental disability who works to convince his family and community to join in the local animal shelter’s “Foster a Dog for Christmas Program.” The story focuses not only on how the family helps the dog, but even more-so on how the dog helps his new foster family. It is the latter that makes the dog named Christmas seem unrealistically independent and I find it important to point out one specific scene that concerns me.
When Todd and his father first leave the shelter with their new foster dog, the dog is let off leash and expected to jump into the back of a pick-up truck. Even if the dog had done as expected, without a dog crate firmly secured in place he could have jumped out at high speed or been bruised and bounced about on the long dirt road back to the family farm. Thankfully, this dog avoids any immediate danger by heading straight for the front seat. In fact, he’s so smart that he can already do many tricks as well as protect the family from danger later in the film. Unfortunately, this kind of dog awareness typically happens only in movies.
Fostering – The Real Story
Animals need people to watch out for their well being, not the other way around. They need safe modes of transport for the same reason that the law requires people to use seat belts. Animals need leashes or cat carriers to prevent their return to the very streets from which many were rescued. And, as for dogs thinking on behalf of their own best interest, really they just want to be dogs. They have no drive to exhibit a high IQ, obey rules without reward or to be the family hero. That said, never let a dog off leash that you haven’t personally trained with the knowledge that - for a fact – your dog will respond to a “come” command without question.
While I have never let Emmett, our foster, off-leash, he has managed to escape from us on several occasions. Once, when I was injured, he pushed past me as I stepped through the front door. Before I could get up off the ground, he was gone. That same week Emmett pulled a similar maneuver with Tim at the dog yard gate. We have since learned to deal with Emmett’s unacceptable habit of ramming his way out, but it caught us off guard as much as our freshly rescued Newfoundland did when he thought, at nearly 100 lbs., that it was fun to take us out at the knees from a running start.
Everybody can appreciate a good survival story, and it’s wonderful when things work out, but fosters and rescues can be unpredictable. This is my journal entry from the day Emmett charged out of the dog yard:
I was in PJs & on the throne when my husband yelled “SH!T!” and our foster broke through the gate. FLUSH AND RUN. It was all I could do. No time for pants or bug spray. After an hour of mucking around in the mud, I’m now obsessed with the itch of ten thousand deer fly bites from trekking through the woods in the rain wearing a measly tank top. The good news: I tracked the dog down with treats and a leash, brought him home and somehow managed to avoid contracting poison ivy while wearing capris bottoms with no socks.
Funny as my tone may read, and fostering is often fun and funny, Emmett later encountered a dangerous situation after he found a weak link in the fence and slipped underneath. In the film, when Christmas escapes under a fence, he is trying to go home. When Emmett did so, it was to track every scent through the woods with no regard for returning. Sometimes the story just doesn’t end humorously. It’s nice to see Emmett sleeping in front of the fire as I type knowing that - this time - everything worked out. Still, I often think he is simply smarter and definitely quicker than we are. We are always on our toes, and that fence required a new chain link section as well as reinforcement at six inch intervals all the way around.
My point is that the perfectly trained and well behaved dog in the film is not likely the kind of dog found in a shelter. As ”A Dog Named Christmas” well outlines, many animals are turned over because people lose jobs and care becomes too expensive, because people move to places where animals aren’t allowed, or because the owner has failing health. Others are turned loose in the streets because, without proper guidance, they become possessive of certain people or toys, they may not be well socialized with other dogs, cats or new babies, or they simply aren’t loved. As emotional beings, animals coming from any one of these situations can become withdrawn, sad for the loss of their owner, protective of food and toys, unsure or frenetic. These are the most crucial moments when positive human contact is so important.
How You Can Foster a Dog for the Holidays
As committed as shelters and rescue groups are, there is nothing more settling for an animal than to be in a home, even if that home is temporary. My husband, the Dog Adoption Director of AnimaLovers.org for more than 10 years, has seen the benefits countless times. To watch an animal emerge from his or her shell and learn to trust is incredibly rewarding. The growing sparkle in a dog’s eyes, many wags of a tail and the purring of little cat engines make the commitment (and, in Emmett’s case, $200 worth of eaten concert tickets) worth every minute.
Make a difference. Give the gift of teaching a dog or cat how to better behave in a family setting and provide them and their new adopting family with a solid base to start from. These new beginnings create a lifetime of change for the better.
If you decide to foster a pet for the holidays, please visit Petfinder.com to locate participating shelters and rescue groups near you. Don’t forget to drop a note about the adventures you have!
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As we finish our Thanksgiving leftovers and drag out the many boxes of holiday decorations, Mother Nature is doing some holiday preparation of her own. She has sent a full day of gusting winds to whip up the last of the fall leaves and ship them out.
Shamus and Emmett turn their noses toward the winds of change and nearly take flight. The Newf tends to remain fairly grounded but I’m tempted to tie a rope to Emmett and fly him like a kite…
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Thirteen wild turkeys (I’d call them a baker’s dozen but that just seems cruel) have come to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with us. Seeking refuge with vegetarians is a pretty safe and healthy bet - as long as the gun-toting neighbors aren’t firing their rifles in this direction. And just how do the slaughter-spared turkeys celebrate Thanksgiving? Oh, they do it in style, the same as we do. Take a look…
Vegetarian Celebration: My husband wrangled us up a wonderful free-range Tofurky at the Honest Weight Food Coop earlier this week. This morning, as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is airing and I prepare quartered potatoes, carrots, apples and green beans for roasting, our Tofurky sits in filtered sunlight taking in the view.
After Dinner Addendum: While our Tofurky was delightful in its orange juice and soy marinade all smothered in mushroom gravy, we’ve also received 4 thumbs up from friends who tried Field Roast’s Celebration Roast and Quoarn’s Turk’y Roast. We’ll give one of those a whirl for the next big holiday.
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Fall. ‘Tis the season for woolly sweaters, falling leaves, butternut squash, pumpkins …and gobs of apples.
This last detail is a treasured favorite among our dogs. As each sweet, succulent bauble dangles and then, at the peak of ripeness, drops from a branch, Shamus (our Newfoundland rescue) and Emmett (our mischievous, mixed-breed foster) come charging forth. “Gifts from the Great Treat God!” they must be thinking.
And why should humans be the only beings to savor the perfect apple as we devour a steaming, fresh-baked pie with heaps of vanilla ice cream on top? That thought has never crossed the minds of our pooches. They have shamelessly devoured mass numbers of apple treats during this year’s harvest (as evidenced by a recent increase in gastro-intestinal rumblings) with nary a care for moderation or just who those apples belong to. For that, I applaud them.
Sadly, as the season wanes, the gifts from the Treat Gods have become less and less frequent. Rest assured, with this new scarcity, the dogs have become more and more resourceful. Watch for yourself as Shamus and Emmett learn to live with less. It may have even taught them how to share… a little.
Shamus was adopted in March and we began fostering Emmett in July so it stands to reason that this behavior was born from competition, not to mention some odd canine vegetarian tendencies. Whatever the reason for the apple-loving season, it’s wonderful to watch the tradition of our original apple-loving dog, Bill, continue even though he has since crossed over the rainbow bridge.
Yes, Bill too loved him some tasty apples. In fact, he loved them so much that he’d perseverate over which one was absolutely perfect. Once he found his preferred pick, he’d find a spot in the sun and peel away the skin to reveal the sweet, juicy flesh beneath. Knowing that apples gave him the greatest joy, we’d buy them from the grocery store when the dog yard tree wasn’t in season – but he certainly loved those that came fresh from the tree most.
On that note, perhaps I should make some pie so I too can enjoy the last pickin’s of the season. As I do, I leave you with our favorite recipe. From our family to yours, have a wonderful Harvest Feast!
Apple Crumble Pie
Yeild: 1 deep dish 9 inch pie
Prep Time: 30 minutes
Cook time: 35-40 minutes
Servings: 8 (or 4 if you’re us)
Ingredients:
1 (9 inch) deep dish pie crust
5 cups apples – peeled, cored and thinly sliced
1/2 cup white sugar
3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/3 cup white sugar
3/4 cup all purpose flour
6 tablespoons butter
Directions:
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Arrange apple slices in unbaked pie shell. Mix 1/2 cup sugar and cinnamon; sprinkle over apples.
- Mix 1/3 cup sugar with flour; cut in butter until crumbly. Smooth mixture over apples.
- Bake in preheated oven for 35-40 minutes, or until apples are soft and top is lightly browned.
If you have any seasonal dog stories or favorite recipes to share, please do. We look forward to reading them!
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