Now I lay me down to sleep

This blog, as I have noted before is as much about a life's journey as it is about discovery. Each day we have the potential to learn something new and add it as another footnote to our own history and experience. Then again, sometimes it's not about discovery because you already know and understand the experience. That song has played before.

This evening My Beloved and I released two small souls we dearly loved. Our fifteen year old golden retriever Sara and her constant companion Kalicat who was eighteen went to sleep for the final time. Although I am a Midwestern boy I have never lived in a rural setting. I understand the uses of animals on farms and working dogs, but mine have always been my pets. I have never understood the concept of an outside pet. Pets are to be inside where it is warm and comfortable, underfoot, shooed off the furniture and loved. Sara was my constant companion at home for the last decade and a half.

I offer no delusions as I know they are not 'my children' as others affect them. But they are beings whom we loved and cared for from nearly birth to death. I find myself looking to where she would lay, and she is not there. Kalicat is not walking across my keyboard trying to get attention. Tonight I have no one to sneak a peanut to or give a bit of licorice. I will miss them.

This evening our home is quietly subdued.