The 11th day...

I woke up this morning and the bed was empty. I thought my husband was at his computer in his office but as soon as I got out of bed and started walking, I knew the house was empty. If you really concentrate, you can tell when the only energy in a house is your own.

When I got downstairs to the kitchen, the stack of 'lost dog' fliers wasn't as high as the night before. I looked at the rack of keys and didn't see my husband's key-ring. It didn't take Sherlock Homes to figure this one out.... Gary had gotten up early, taken the fliers, and went looking for Savannah. My guess was that he was gone by first light.

I'm getting used to the house again without Savannah in it. Very quiet. No long golden dog hairs swirled on the dark green kitchen tiles. No crumbs of dog biscuits that need to be either swept up or shown to Savannah, telling her "Hey girl, you missed some pieces here."  Then I would tap the floor with the toe of my shoe and she would walk over and gobble up the crumbs.

I wake up in the morning now and my first thought isn't "Get up and walk Savannah before the people up the road start leaving for work." (She didn't like the vehicles of one particular family up the hill and she would bark at them as they drove by.)  Waking up is leisurely now because I know the cats will wait for their breakfast, for as long as it takes me to get it to them.  Savannah wasn't a 'morning dog' because she needed time to yawn and stretch and play with Sweet Pea a little bit before I put her leash on and took her out into the day.

I've been telling my husband that if we get Savannah back, I will no longer walk her along the road. She will use the backyard grass and that's it. And I want a fence put up, so she will have part of the yard as her own, to run around in and play in, without being able to get near the driveway or near the road. We have twenty-three acres here... surely there's half an acre we can fence in just for Savannah.

I've also come to the conclusion that if we don't find Savannah, we will probably, eventually, get another dog. I will not, not, not, NOT get a puppy that will eventually grow to more than 25 pounds. Had Savannah been smaller, I would have been able to hold onto her leash when those 'bombs' exploded on the across-the-road-neighbor's property.  Any dog would have been terribly frightened of those M-80 fireworks, but with a smaller dog, all I would have had to do was pick it up in my arms and carry it back to the house. Savannah's nearly 70-pounds'-worth of fear pulled me face-first to the road and knocked me out, and when I woke up Savannah was gone and my world had exploded with that first blast of the fireworks.

My husband walked in the door just before ten o'clock this morning. He told me he couldn't sleep and after working on his computer for a while, he left the house at 6:30 and he tacked up Savannah's fliers on telephone poles as he found new back roads. He said it was a beautiful and very still morning, the silence broken only when he called out "SAVANNAH!!" from the car window.

Savannah. I was so happy to give her that name. It seemed to fit our puppy somehow when we first got her.  I named her for one of my favorite cities... Savannah, Georgia. We've been to Savannah twice over the years and I would move there in a heart-beat.  It's a small and very pretty city with an aura of mystery that is hard to define but easy to sense.  The city of Savannah has a slight wildness that hovers just below the southern propriety of the old-soul-ness that defines that historical city... a quality that is more felt than seen.  I used to tell our Savannah that she was like an old soul, especially when she sat quietly in her bed as I typed. She watched me as I kept up with this Blog and I have to wonder if she knew what I was doing... telling her story every day because for some reason, I thought this puppy of ours had a good story to tell, and I sensed that from the very first day.

I have never been a writer of fiction. I cannot make things up. I have always written of real feelings, real thoughts, real events. And every word, every sentence comes effortlessly to me. I just write until I run out of words, then I go back and re-read everything twice, checking for misspellings and grammatical errors. Never in a million years would I have been able to sit down and type out a novel about a puppy with unlimited anxiety who comes into a home and takes weeks and weeks to learn how to trust the people who want to love her and then disappears just when it seems she has come into her own dog-hood. Savannah was finally able to trust us implicitly and love us as if she'd been ours since her first day on the planet, and now she's gone. Gone without a trace. As if she had never been here at all.