PART 5 - the one that almost didn't get away
shortly after getting keisha and baker's paperwork finalized, the rescue lady said, "so, are you ready for your next challenge?". before she finished her sentence my hands were in the air crying uncle. i confessed after fourteen months with keisha, i needed a break. a long one. she said ok but assured me this one would be super fast. maybe just a few days even. she was trying to remove some dogs from one of her foster families because she thought they weren't safe there but couldn't take them unless she had a place to relocate them to. she said the dog we would be watching would get adopted in minutes so she just needed a very temporary spot for her. we said if it was that short, and the dog wasn't crazy, we could do it.

we used to have a neighbor who if you ever said the word "foster" to him, he would quickly say "there's no such thing as fostering". when you ask why he would say that he explained that every single thing his family ever "fostered" never left. he'd add, i have a cat, a dog, two birds and a little girl. all of them are fosters and all of them have become permanent parts of my family. i would think of my former neighbor mike, every time we successfully watched and then placed a dog. and then sassy arrived.

well sassy is just the name given to us when we picked her up. but in the days that followed she would be called in addition to sassy, sassafras, chocolate rain, rain, coco, cassie, and cassie-lou. cassie-lou is what i called her and the name stuck because cassie-lou and i became quick and fast friends. she is the first foster we had that favored me over all the others in the house. i don't know why but she and i just got along super well. when i worked in the mornings, she would hang out behind me waiting for me to spin around in my chair to see if we were going to go for a walk, get some food, or play on the ground for a few minutes. the pictures above are a few of the poses i found her in when i spun in my chair. and believe me, there are more pictures. i just picked a representative few.

so not only was she a great judge of character [;-)] she was crazy-smart, smarter than every prior dog we had combined. when there was no one at the house, we had ways to restrict dogs to just certain parts of the house, namely the tiled kitchen, in case there were accidents in our absence. the first time we left her alone, when we got home she was sitting in the foyer tail wagging to greet us (and no accidents). after studying the setup and seeing how she got out, the next time we left we re-fortified the barriers. and when we got home, there sat cassie-lou in the foyer, tail wagging again (and no accidents again). more fortifications. more foyer greetings. we had similar battles keeping her off the dining room table. we kinda gave up when we realized she would push chairs across the room so she could jump up on them to inspect the table for anything worthwhile. knowing when you are out-matched is a great life skill.

when the call came a few days later asking what time we would be at the adoption event, i said i'd get back to them. the family knew i was in a state and didn't say much to me about it. they knew i was deciding. they knew i was struggling. fact is if my life and company were in a different place, it would have been one of the easiest decisions i ever made. but my life and company are not in a different place. as it is, in example, i can barely attend to this website, let alone taking on the permanent nurturing of a(nother) living being. thankfully one of the things i'm pretty decent at is distraction-management. i don't know how one might grade such a skill but i'm confident if they came up with a test, i'd do pretty well on it (not that i'd ever waste my time on such a thing). but cassie-lou had my distraction alarms sounding. and it wasn't just about me. this sweet pup deserved more than i could give at the moment. and that was that.

so we took her in, or rather bella took her in. and bella was fifteen minutes late and the people called asking where she was because there were people there fifteen minutes early eager to meet cassie. in short, she was adopted before she had even arrived. and she went to a family that had four kids aged twelve and under. this was the only thing that lessened my sting. for those kids, cassie will be remembered as a playful and loving pup from their youth that slept on their feet on cold nights and stole licks off their ice cream cones and snuggled into their blankets on movie night and made their parents crazy for always getting on the dining room table. for me, she will always be the one that almost didn't get away.

FIN

PHOTOS a few of the cassie-lou sprawlings i saw after spinning in my work chair for a break.