13-08-27manpray_8444-Recovered

Oh how we say time flies, but then there are those days that just seem to stay frozen in time. It was just about two years ago that I had to put my good friend down. I still feel a little lost without him. I miss his fierce protection of all under my roof. I miss his smell. Probably only true dog folks can follow that, but every dog I have owned had their own distinctive smell along with their own pedigree of personality:

Samantha (the sweetest), Pork Chop (the happiest), Midnight (a troubled black lab I could never quite follow), Clovis (the only dog we ever paid for, unconditionally the smartest and who was so tight with his pack) and then comes Grace (our blue-eyed deaf rescue found abandoned at a West Texas railroad station and who is now my only four-legged shadow).

I have loved each of them greatly and differently. Each one has brought me their lifetime of joy and buckets of tears upon leaving. Clovis was my poser dog. Whenever I got out my Nikon, he was quick to notice and quicker to upstage anyone and anything.

Since I lost Clovis, I have not, with any degree of seriousness, picked up a camera. He just took that out of me. I have tried to shoot at some images, but every time I pick up a camera I hear his tags a jingle, a bump on the leg wanting to know where he should pose. My heart goes adrift and the camera back in the backpack.

I am a sentimental old coot and damn but I miss them all and can pull up many a tearful memory. I have to ask, how can a dog steal my vision? Hey, if they can steal your heart, vision is pretty much a simple task.

Get busy living or get busy dying!…”Red”…aka S. King

Peace Out,   jasL

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We watched them graze like cattle. They moved with such grace in the air. Once they left the earth they left their awkwardness behind. It was nothing but grace.

It never ceases to amaze me how a new happening becomes imprinted in the soul. I was not at all prepared when they turned and in mass headed my way, twenty feet off the ground. Directly over me. For just the time of one shortened breath I felt the brush of the soft stir of air as it flowed over and under their wings and through me.

One of those fleeting moments in life that leaves you with no way to replace the feeling of the moment into words. It became like the smell of a freshly washed baby. A smell you will always remember with that part of your heart that stores such things away for your use only.

monos en theos ††† jasL