More on a Tale of Tails

After Mitzi went to Narnia it was quite some time before we considered another dog – so for a couple of years it was just Darby, which I think was probably fine with Darby because as long as Darby had Vickie Darby was fine. Besides, as previously mentioned, The Mitz could be temperamental and snarl and bite at Darby – maybe Mitz suffered from PTS due to her childhood experiences running the streets of Richmond. In any case, Darby was fine, we were fine, and I grieved over the loss of Mitzi – Mitzi was my dog, Darby was Vickie’s dog…though as I pointed out over the course of her life, Darby was my dog too/two.

A coworker’s basset hound had a litter of pups, she insisted that the father was a border collie, but we’ve seen no evidence of that with Lina, next in our line of puppies – our guess is that the father is a beagle – we don’t discuss this around Lina, no reason to bring up questions of such a nature.

Lina has a black tail with a white tip, and when she’s chasing something the tip is in the air and she is moving like a rocket sled, but when she isn’t chasing something or running to see us when we return home she is s-l-o-w….v-e-r-y  s-l-o-w. When she is unleashing her energy she is amazingly fast, but otherwise she seems to operate on the assumption that if there is no reason to be in a hurry why bother with being in a hurry. He tail is long and thin and when she sleeps she can curl it up so that is touches her nose. When she was a puppy a neighbor looked at Lina and said, “She sure is long, but it looks like she has all her parts.”

Just before we adopted her we had read George MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie. Curdie had a faithful dog-like companion named Lina – so that’s where Lina’s name came from and she has lived up to her name. There is nothing quite like having a dog as a friend.