Gift 2

March 22, 2010

My gift today was small. This past Christmas we adopted a 1 1/2 year old black lab from the shelter. She is incredibly sweet and incredibly well-trained, but it is clear that someone had beaten her badly before she came into our lives. I did not realize this at the time, but I believe we were meant to have her. We had decided on another dog at the shelter when a volunteer started chatting with us about the dogs she had been walking that day. She told us about this mild-mannered black lab that we should look at before we left. We had gone by the crate earlier when we were looking at dogs, but she had been out for a walk and so we hadn't seen her. Originally she was supposed to be a gift for my mother-in-law, but as fate would have it, we ended up keeping her. She has been a wonderful blessing to our lives. Every day we laugh more, smile more, and share more love than we did before her.

When she first came home with us, her ears were back often and she cowered regularly. Each day she becomes a little spunkier. Despite her sixty pounds, she now insists on crawling into our laps when we watch tv. She curls up at the foot of my bed every night, and she wriggles with happiness anytime we pick up a toy, grab a jacket, or put on our shoes. Anytime we let her out by herself, she stations herself at the door and bounces the ball off of it to get our attention, so my gift today was to play ball with her until she wore herself out. Sometimes I think playing ball with her is more of a gift to myself than it is to her. Her tail wags so hard that it nearly off-balances the rest of her body. She regularly runs into the fence because she's so excited to grab the ball. If she loses track of it, she races back and forth across the yard, nose to the ground and tail a-waggin'. Watching her sheer bliss at being in the moment can't help but cheer me and remind me of the importance of enjoying the pleasures in front of us all the time. And so, I am off to bed to scratch behind her soft black ears and appreciate the small joys in life.