2/24/22

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

Four years ago today, we adopted our dog, Ursula. Her official name: Ursula Le Guin Giorgio. She was originally from Alabama, and she’d been shipped up to Wisconsin with four other dogs to a humane society here. We were told that shelters in the south were overrun with dogs and cats, and in order to stop so many from being killed due to overcrowding, there was a movement underway to send animals up to other states with room in their shelters. I chose Ursula’s name, and I named her after the writer Ursula Le Guin, because I figured, with everything Ursula had already been through, she needed to be a strong woman to survive. She did, and I didn’t yet know the half of it.

We’d been through a lot ourselves. Our beagles, Donnie and Blossom, died three weeks prior to our adopting Ursula. They passed away together, side by side on the vet’s table, with all three of us resting a hand on each dog, and with two veterinarians injecting that fatal shot into each dog at the same time. It was a wonderful, horrible experience. Blossom was fifteen years old and had advanced kidney disease. She’d been diagnosed years before, and we’d been told she’d die within that first year. Talk about a tough woman. She struggled, but she remained. She went from a 35 pound beagle/coonhound mix to twenty pounds at the end. Donnie was thirteen years old, and diagnosed just weeks before with a form of cancer in his bones that we were told would take years to take his life. Instead, those few weeks later, he was doing things like standing in his food dish and looking at me, as if he was saying, “I know this isn’t right, but…” They’d both lost any sense of being housebroken. We were heartbroken, but we made their passing as gentle as it could be for them.

It was horribly hard on us.

I said no more dogs. But three weeks later, the empty couch, the lack of sound (jingling collars, ticking toenails, wagging tails hitting everything in sight, and beagle-speak) did me in. I saw a dog called Mama on the humane society’s website, and I pulled Michael and Olivia in with me.

What we saw was a quiet, sweet-faced dog. She wasn’t bothered by all the kennel noises around her. She was gentle. And partway through our meeting, she lay that big concrete head on my thigh for the first time. Those eyes.

She came home.

Where we learned fairly quickly that the calm dog was a façade. Ursula was afraid of everything. Literally. The tv. The microwave. The coffeemaker. The icemaker. The buses going by. The flags waving on our walks, which, four years later, we no longer take and haven’t since about six months in, because she became an anxious pile of goo. She’s scared of the outside. She doesn’t like grass. The wind is terrifying. Don’t even ask about thunder and lightning. And, to our great surprise, one of her biggest fears is when a gospel-type choir rocks out on a television commercial or a show. She flies up the stairs and hides in her crate.

The closest we can figure is that Ursula was a kennel dog, used for breeding. She was called Mama because she’d clearly been a mother. Four years later, she still prefers to “do her business” on the parking lot, not in the grass.

So Ursula is totally different from Donnie and Blossom. Blossom was scared of thunderstorms, but that’s about the only fear there was, except for Donnie’s being perpetually paranoid that he would never be fed again. I had to put childproof locks on all my cabinets, because he learned to break in and eat whatever he could find. One of his most famous eat-capades was when he ate a bag of 25 “greenies”, special treats for dogs to clean their teeth, meant to be given only one a day, and he did so in 20 minutes. That earned him a trip to the vet, where they wanted to keep him overnight. I said no and brought him home after he was given subcutaneous fluid. Donnie burped and farted a few times, rolled over, went to sleep, and was just fine.

And now we have Ursula.

Besides the extreme fear, Ursula went into cardiac arrest after being treated for heartworms. She was at the emergency vet’s for a week. Now, she has some weird autoimmune condition that causes her toenails to grow in strange shapes and to be extremely fragile. She takes daily doses of doxycycline, Vitamin E, and Niacin. With peanut butter. She has more good days than bad, but the bad days are still events, when she spends most of the day in Olivia’s bathroom, in the dark.

Even so, her good and bad days are all good days for us. She has learned to romp and play in her own way, and even to make noises when there are french fries in the house. She wasn’t scared of the Christmas tree at all this year, even sticking that big concrete head into its branches. She loves our cats. She still won’t go for walks, and the only way to get her out on our deck is to drag her by a leash. The beagles used to spend long hound dog hours out there, basking in the sun. Ursula just stands at the doorway and looks. She sighs sometimes.

But even with those sighs, she knows she’s loved. Wherever we are, she is. Those sighs are also sighs of contentment and happiness. There are many belly rubs. There are what we call “eeeeeeee’s”, where she smiles at us, and her lips part, showing us shiny healthy teeth. There is always that clunky head on my thigh. There are french fries.

There are those that say Ursula is lucky, that not many would stick beside her with all of her challenges. But we believe we’re lucky too. The beagles were wonderful. Ursula is wonderful.

And don’t forget the cats.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.