Happy Two Year Gotchaversary, Curtis Loew!

 We're a pair, and it's a damn good thing, because living alone this far out in the country, snowed in for weeks during a pandemic isn't for sissies, or extroverts, for that matter. Just knowing there is someone else in the house, even if he's hairy, has a cold nose, and doesn't talk, helps. But that someone is Curtis Loew, a dog of great character and kindness, and that makes all the difference. 

                                                           You are hairy too. Just in patches. 

Love between two humans can sustain, enrich, swell, fade, wrack and rend, and that many-splintered thing, wonderful or heartbreaking or somewhere in the gray zone between, can go on for many years. But dog-love is constant, a bright flame we get to kindle and cradle in our hands for but a decade and change, and then it must go, be replaced in a different way. I've started with Curtis mid-decade. He's five now, and I treasure him all the more for it. He's a specimen and a half, in his prime, and I am delighted to be here for that stage of his beautiful life.

"Everything you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way." This quote by Franz Kafka is often reworded to say "a different form," which is a little more direct. Kafka could, of course, have been writing about dogs. Yes, I miss my little black inkblot every day, but Curtis does a fine, fine job of filling that sweet, achy cavern in my heart.  He's love, too, in a different form. 

 Curtis Loew is anything but Chet's reincarnation. He is a separate nation. Independent, self-contained, focused primarily on his freedom to do his work in the woods. He accompanies me, at least partway; humors my primate need for long hugs and ridiculous endearments, and shares a bit of my every meal with the slightly stunned, wide-eyed look of someone who's just won the Ohio Lottery. 

on the ride home from the shelter Feb. 19, 2019, his IV patches still shaved from neutering surgery; wide-eyed wonder in every line.

What this dog came from, chained out for most of his four years in the deep south of Ohio, and what he's landed in...Lord, Lord, he's a brindle Cinderella. Yet he earns this champagne and knucklebone life with every swish of his eloquent tail. 

He delights, comforts, warms and amuses me. He worries me to death, plunging off after unseen scents, and gone for hours on end. I have to remind myself, each time, every day, that he knows what he's doing and he will come home. Curtis was sent to teach me how to love without clinging, to hold on loosely. It shouldn't be that hard for me to do; that's the kind of love I'd like to have, too. 

Oh give me land, lots of land under starry skies above

Don't fence me in!

Let me ride through the wide open spaces that I love

Don't fence me in!

Let me ride to the rim where the West commences

Gaze at the moon 'til I lose my senses

I can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences

Don't fence me in! Just turn me loose... let me wander over yonder 'til I see the mountains rise...

 Curtis is my spirit animal, without question. 

Two years ago today, I filled out a questionnaire, signed a bunch of forms, and tearfully said, "I do!" to the soulful gold-brown eyes of an unknown but hopeful and polite cur-dog at the CHA Animal Shelter in Columbus, Ohio. 

Happy Gotchaversary, Curtis Loew!  I threw my arms around him after writing this, remembering him in a cage, waiting so patiently for the right person to come along. It made me cry to think of him

discarded. Who could just get rid of a soul like Curtis?

photo by Shila Wilson, taken five days after his adoption and I'm already besotted. Curtis baby, no more chains or cages for you. Just soft beds, willing rabbits, table scraps, and a million kisses.

And two years later:

               

With my deepest thanks to Kelly Ball for bringing us together, for knowing she'd found my next dog the minute she met him.