The capability and potential of the human being is quite amazing.  Take into two simple considerations.  Human Memory.  Human Emotions.  Each, by their own right is incredible.  Our ability to recall certain events in our mind’s eye…. from different periods throughout our lives.

And emotions. Love, Joy, Surprise, Anger, Sadness, Fear, Envy, Relief, Longing, Anxiety.

But the two together, memory and emotions, are like peanut butter and jelly.  They go right along with one another.  Each one will spark the other.

Tonight, I was thinking back about 10 1/2 years ago.  It was a frigid cold November night.  Unseasonably so.  And our furnace went out.  And at 1:30 a.m., our newly adopted dog Frances, bumped my hand with her nose as I slept. She told me it was time.

Time for her puppies to be born.  Boy oh boy.   We were ready too.  We had a whelping box we’d been training her with, in another room in the house.  But Frances plopped right down there, on the floor in the bedroom, and started cranking out the kids.

When six little puppies had made their way out… I turned to Mary and said… “She’s not getting any smaller yet.”  And those puppies needed heat.  Mary was the better maternity nurse.  So off I headed to Walmart, at 4 in the morning, to buy heating pads.

Snow was falling.  It was so still and quiet in that parking lot at Walmart.   I felt completely alone there…yet at the same time… very surrounded by everything.  It was very surreal.

Upon returning home, two more puppies had arrived.  Oh… But we had a few to go.  Thirteen in all.  Yet despite the large number and difficulty….. Frances gave birth in the same manner she does everything.  With compliance, and grace, and peace.

Tonight.  My sister told me that one of those Incredible 13….  her boy Dashe….  had died.  You see, of the 13 puppies, Dashe was the last of the brood to find a home.  Well, he and Eleanor.  Nobody wanted him, for some reason.  But my sister did.  And away he moved to Columbus, with his new family.  He turned out to be a completely amazing dog.  Like mother, like son.

He was charming, and funny.  Smart and well-mannered.  Handsome and athletic.  He was dashing.  He was Dashe.

And now that bright, bright spirit, has left his little dog body.  My sister is crushed. I am so sad.  And I am remembering his first weeks here, on Planet Earth.  In to the world he came, and now into the world he goes.  In a different time and a different space.

He goes elsewhere…. from us humans with our amazing capabilities.

Physically, he leaves.  But he stays here now… forever in our memories, and emotions.  In our hearts.   And we ache because he is gone.  And we long for more…  … ..