Dog Days of Summer

I don’t know exactly when Molly’s birthday is, but some time this summer she turned twelve years old. I got her in the fall of 1995 as a three or four month old puppy.

For the first year that Molly lived here, Carlotta the cat was terrified and stayed in my bedroom closet. The only time she would come out of the closet was when she heard Molly being put into her kennel before I went to work. At that time Carlotta would fly out of the closet to her litter box where a look of relief would come over her as she stared out into space. Eventually Carlotta realized Molly wasn’t going to eat her and within a few years they even have been seen sleeping on the same sofa together.

Molly has been bad at times. She almost killed a neighbors Maltese once because she thought it was a danger to her and her friend Sophie. That cost me $750 and was really scary. Then there was the time Mark thought Molly was a convenient garbage disposal and fed her all, yes ALL of the leftover turkey from Thanksgiving. A dog will eat something like that until it explodes. She did. This resulted in one of the only two times she has pooped in the house. Of course it wasn’t ordinary poop. It was the worst of the worst diarrhea, which of course Mark didn’t help clean up.

But mostly she’s been very good. The vet says she is as healthy as a much younger dog. I hope I’ll be writing about her thirtieth birthday someday, with many squeaky toys and chewy strips in the interim.