Doppler - 2

Soon after Doppler decided to move in with us, we started making the rounds of the local animal shelter and the vets to see if anyone had left word they were missing him.  We dutifully left word of where to contact us in the event someone came looking and we all went home again.

Doppler himself gave us few clues about where he might have come from.  He wore a blue collar with no tags and nothing else attached but a few bits of wire and baling twine that looked like they'd been chewed through.  He was also scrawny and had some talents that indicated the scrawniness was no fault of his own.

As I'd mentioned previously, we were working at a friend's B&B.  One morning, there were leftover muffins to be had so I took them back to our apartment for a late breakfast.  Eric took his with whatever else was on the menu out to the living room while I had turned to fill my own plate and get a fork from the drawer.  When I turned back, my muffin was gone.

Feeling a little steamed, I went out to the living room and berated Eric for being a pig and taking all the muffins.  Picture the classic guy pose, mouth full, "What did I do?"  Pause.  "I didn't take your muffin."

Picture two heads turning slowly towards the quiet snarfing sounds from the other side of the coffee table where a scrawny dog was eating an orange chocolate chip muffin held gently between his front paws.  The nearest we could figure was that he, in complete silence, snagged the muffin off the counter (which had a top uncomfortably high for me to work at) and carried it into the living without either of us hearing or noticing what he was doing.

No one ever came calling to claim him.  Our best bet was that he was a Rainbow dog.  A Rainbow gathering had recently departed the nearby forest lands and we had quite the traffic moving through town for a while.   Eric says Doppler chewed through his baling twine lead and went off looking for adventure on his own.

And I was never that fond of orange chocolate chip muffins anyway.

Doppler - 1

We had the good fortune to have a friend with us for 14 years.  He was that houseguest that arrived and never left, eating our food, and sleeping in comfort while we lay awake from his snoring.

Yes, he was our dog.  And he wasn't our dog because we found him at the pet store, or a breeder or an animal shelter.  He was our dog because he chose us to be his people.

We were working odd jobs for friends in Colorado during the summer of 1995.  They owned a bed and breakfast and we were deciding whether it was a business we wanted to go into ourselves so we cooked and cleaned and did minor maintenance and generally got to know the basics.

One day, as I was taking laundry out the front door (while some late rising guests were having breakfast in the dining room) I was greeted by a skinny black and white stray.  I managed to get a hand free from the laundry so I scritched him under the chin and he gave me a loving look that soon would become familiar.  I trundled the laundry around to the back of the house to the washing machines and the skinny stray followed me around back and looked in the door as I left him behind.  I got busy with the usual day to day chores and forgot about him.

Later that day, I took a spare muffin out to my husband who was working on a truck we'd just bought at a farm auction and noticed the stray curled up under the tree next to the truck.  I probably made some comment on how cute he was.

He ended up staying with us that night because he obviously didn't want to go anywhere else.  To be honest, I don't think I wanted him to leave either.