Dog Things
In May, I rescued a Rat Terrier named Sunny, and she’s been the highlight of my summer. I haven’t owned a dog since before I went off to college when I was 18, and I learned quickly that I was unprepared for what owning a dog entails.
Dog Ownership is Different
Dogs are intense. Dogs are harder to own than cats, which I have had since college. Cats meshed with my chill laissez-faire lifestyle. Had Sunny not arrived on my doorstep the last day of school in May, I wouldn’t have made the plunge to dog ownership at all.
I officially adopted her after exhausting all efforts to finding her previous owners. She wasn’t microchipped, but I posted on my personal Facebook and made a post on Nextdoor via Pawboost and PetFBI. I posted signs all over the neighborhood, went door to door to ask if they had seen this dog or knew where she belonged, and asked everyone I saw on walks if she was a familiar face among the dog owners in the neighborhood but she had seemingly appeared out of nowhere.
She has settled in well here and me and my son are over the moon in love with her. She’s brought a joy to our lives that we needed and I just cannot believe how much a dog can change your life for the better.
There are mysteries I’ll never get answered about her life before she came to me, like why she didn’t know how to walk on a leash but was definitely cared for because she’s so gentle and sweet. She wasn’t spayed or microchipped but had been housetrained.
I do think someone dropped her off in my neighborhood the morning I found her, and it was a serendipitous moment that I ended up finding her!
Story time!
It was the last day of school, and my team had made end of the schoolyear t-shirts that we were all going to wear. I was so excited about the shirt, so much so that I laid it out the night before on a chair to sort of display it.
But being neurodivergent the next morning I completely forgot to put the shirt on and went to school in a different shirt! Upon arriving I saw everyone in their shirts and was so upset that I had forgotten mine.
My assistant principal is awesome though (now she’ll be my principal this coming school year!) and she told me I could run home and get it. The last day of school is really chill for the most part, and I live close to my school so I ran home. Funny enough, I almost decided to not bother going but a few teachers talked me into it. It was really cool that not only my team were wearing these shirts, a lot of other teams had ended up buying them and almost the whole school had them on!
An Amazing Confluence of Events
Honestly, there was an amazing confluence of events at play here because to this day I keep thinking about what would have happened had I a) not forgotten to wear the shirt and b) decided not to go home and change into it.
Because none of this would have happened! It really is sometimes a tiny, inconsequential decision that ends up making big changes in your life.
I had called my mom to chat and I’ll never forget the moment. Because once I came home, ran inside and threw on the shirt, I turned back around to leave and there on my porch is this dog! She was looking hopefully at me, like she’d seen me come home and ran up to greet me. And I said, “Oh who are you?” This lost, scared, and nervous dog grabbed onto my heart and held on tight. I was immediately in crisis mode and grabbed some ribbon from inside to slip through the collar she had on. She had a collar, but later we found that she was not microchipped, and didn’t have a rabies vaccination tag. Hoping to find someone looking for her, took her back outside. She looked like she’d just slipped out of someone’s house. There was no one looking for her.
Had to get back to work
I knew I had to get back to school quickly so I led this poor scared dog down the street and noticed right away that she didn’t know how to walk on a lead. Strange. So I scooped her up and ran down the street to a neighbor’s house. I had seen her with a dog vaguely the same size/shape as Sunny so I wondered if she belonged to her.
However, upon knocking I heard a dog barking from inside her house, so I knew the dog in my hands wasn’t her dog. I almost turned around and left because I’d never even spoken to this neighbor! She opened the door and we talked. Upon hearing that I was a teacher and needed to get back to work she agreed to watch the dog for the day. I promised her that I would come back after work and pick her up. Meeting her has also turned out to be an incredible boon as she is the best!
So having secured the dog for the day I went off to work. Throughout the day, I posted on Facebook and the lost pets sites. That afternoon, I returned prepared to pick her up. It was surreal, to be honest. My neighbor took her to a vet and checked for a microchip and did not find one and Sunny accompanied her to her volunteer bookstore job with her dog Rusty.
She’s Mine Now
That afternoon I took Sunny back to my house and we started our journey together. Again, if any of the small decisions made that morning had gone differently, I might not have found Sunny at all. That makes me so incredibly sad to imagine, and so thankful that everything came together the way it did to put her into my life when I needed her so much and didn’t even know it.
She is spayed and microchipped now, took care of that! I got her this doggie onesie to wear after her spay but it was too big, she looked like she had a dumpy diaper in it and it didn’t keep her from licking. But had I gotten the right size it would have been good!
Anyway, long post but once you become a dog owner you find yourself really involved in your dog! Update: While we were on vacation my dog ate rat poison! Read about that here!
