It Started with a Picture

It started with a picture, or maybe it started even before that but I like finding the beginning and tracing the path, so we'll start there for now.  I once had two job interviews in the same day, back to back and I mixed up the times.  I went to the second one first and was hired and accepted on the spot.  That is where I was working when I met my first husband who also came to work there, we married and then we had our baby girl.  If I had gone to the interviews in the other order, what might have happened?  A completely different path.

A non-friend, a person whom I had a slight connection to but had never met, saw this picture of me and sent a message.  She had two Pitbulls that needed to be re-homed, could I help?  I knew SmilingK9’s was pretty full at the time but messaged Katie and she got down to the business of networking to find a spot for these two that we knew little about.  We then found out the female was pregnant and the next message was even worse.  I was at work on December 1, 2011 when the message came, “Sparkle just had her puppies, 6 and 4 are dead…”  and then as I was leaving work, “She just had another baby.”  It was thirty two degrees outside.

When I got there, the mama, Sparkles, was in an open transport crate with three nearly dead pups and the male was chained to a tree with a padlock on his choke collar.  Both the adults were the sweetest dogs I had seen in such a long time.  Katie arrived, took one look at the freezing pups and stuck the nearly frozen one in her cleavage to warm up.  (The little guy survived four weeks.)  We got everyone loaded up and even took the male.  The owner thought she might have a taker for him from Craigslist, but I said, “I think we’ll just go ahead and take him, too.” 

As we drove off, Katie transporting Sparkles, the first time mom and her little frozen popsicles and me with Kane, a male Pitbull that I had just met, freed from a chain and now laying in my backseat calmly as if he had known me forever I could hear my husband’s voice echoing in my mind’s ear, “You don’t even know these dogs.”   I could tell right away, these dogs were sweet.  I might have fallen a little bit in love with the big sweet lug but there was a lot more to do that night.