The End of Our Dog Era

 “That’s the end of our Joplin era,” my wife said to my oldest daughter.

We were still crying and wiping our tears.

I didn’t say it out loud, but I thought “That was the end of our dog era,”

We’d just returned to the car from the vet’s office where the three of us, through tears, accompanied our 15 year old black lab to the end of her life. 

Joplin had been the runt of her mother’s litter. She was a black lab in a mixed litter of black and yellow labs. We picked her out before she was weaned and returned to the farm where she was born to bring her home a few weeks later.

When we brought her home she could be held in one hand. She was initially confined to the kitchen as we introduced her to her feline siblings and we started on the house training. At night she whimpered and cried. I slept through it, but my wife found herself laying on the kitchen floor next to Joplin comforting her so that they both could sleep.

Joplin was a good dog. Loyal, protective, affectionate, but not annoyingly so, playful well beyond her years. Though she was a black lab, she was not a lover of the water. She was never a swimmer. She was legs with lungs. She could run, and run, and run.

She loved open fields and the off-leash dog park.

She took thousands of walks over the years. Our routine for most of her life was to walk from our house through downtown and back, a three mile loop.

When we moved to Sammamish, Washington in 2012, she was three years old. She flew from Kansas City to Washington in the cargo hold of a plane with her two sibling cats, each in their own crate. I picked her up from the cargo place at Seatac. She was stressed from the journey.

I brought her home to temporary housing in Redmond where I was living alone, waiting for my family to make the journey in a couple weeks. It was 45º F an

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