Lina and Her Tree

You may recall that last year our basset-mix Lina developed an affection for one of our Christmas trees. Well, the tree is back and so is Lina (photo below).

It’s hard to see puppies grow old, you know it’s going to happen and you enjoy the time you have with them, but you know what’s ahead and they don’t. Lina will be 14, the Lord willing, in April. We have been blessed to have dogs who live long, and we always grieve with others who lose their pets before their life expectancies.

Not too long ago we visited friends and asked, “Where is Betsy?” Betsy was a sweet yellow Lab around four years old. They told us that Betsy died of cancer. As I heard the words I could imagine the pain of our friends; the tears, the sorrow, the hurt.

Lina can’t see well anymore; her cataracts have gotten worse. Thankfully she can still hear well and we talk to her a lot so she’ll know where we are. When we had Mitzi years ago, her eyesight held up in her senior years but her hearing didn’t so we learned to speak loud and make a little noise when we entered a room she was in so we wouldn’t startle her if her head was turned away from us.

Lily turns ten in a couple of weeks. When we got Lily, Lina was almost four. Lina thought Lily an intrusion – we had recently lost Darby and it was obvious that Lina missed her, every morning she checked out the place where Darby had slept. Darby and Lina were always together, and often they were touching. While Lina and Lily are often together, they aren’t as inseparable as Lina and Darby were.

Well, in a world of insanity it’s nice and comforting to have puppies (they are always puppies to us).

Who knows, when we get to Narnia we may recognize that our relationship with puppies was one of the great miracles of life here in the Shadowlands – or we may realize it now.