Maggie.

So much is going on with the Bees that it is safe to assume that this post would be about them.  We had to requeen. There was a point where 8,000 bees were flying around the yard.

That was the post I was planning to write today.

In addition to the bee drama, our dog was super lethargic yesterday. She didn't want to do anything, but she is old and it was hot.  In the evening Sean was taking her out for a short walk and she barely made it out of our yard before collapsing.  Sean had to carry her home.

The long and short of it is that Maggie is somewhere around 14 years old.
Like many old dogs, She had a torso full of tumors.
Sometime yesterday or the night before some of those tumors started bleeding and she went into shock.
Her heart was racing, she was declining fast and it was time to say goodbye.

Sean learned all this around 9pm.
I took our kiddos out of bed and we went to the vet clinic where we made a couple of small final decisions and we said our goodbye to her (she didn't even want to eat the ice cream we offered!).  We were there when they administered the medicine and Maggie died.

Maggie has never been a person to me.
She was not our first baby, Maggie was a dog.
But she has also been a dog who has been in our lives for 10 years.
I was looking, last night, at pictures and in so many of them she is in the background.
Maggie has been in the background of our family since we could call ourselves a family.
She is part of the fabric of what married life has meant for us.

She was a dog that we had lots of room for when we got her.
We were engaged, moving to Seattle, renting a house (with a yard!), and my Mom didn't want a dog with so many socializing needs.
So we welcomed her.

We took her everywhere at first.
We drove her from Illinois to Washington.
Literally these are the the states Maggie has been to:
Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Colorado, Kansas Wyoming, Montana, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska.

oh, also British Columbia several times!

That's a lot of travel for a dog!

When we got her she had never seen a body of water larger than a baby pool.
She was scared of lakes, and terrified of the ocean...but she ended her days loving the water more than anything else.  She would shake with excitement when we were close enough to the ocean to smell it.

I wish we could have taken her swimming one last time.

She once swallowed a spatula at a friends house.
We didn't know, and she was sick for a week or so.
Finally one morning she threw up and a sillicon spatula head was mixed in the barf.
I asked our friend, "are you missing a green spatula."

Sure enough, he was.

She used to be so excitable that we would stand at opposite ends of the house and call her.

But these last years she had aged.
Her hearing has been gone for a year or 2.
We let her run a little bit free on Vashon.
We knew that she was happy chasing things.

She was happiest around us though.
Being petted,
Climbed on.
Eating the crumbs off the floor.
I bet she ate 500lbs of crumbs from under our children over the years.

She broke her hip one winter, got hit by a car.
Miriam was just a baby and we were drowning in a ton of things.
We paid for a surgery with some inheritance from my Dad's death.
Nana and Pop rehabilitated her.
Resilient dog.

We got lucky with her.
She wasn't a chewer.
She wasn't a barker.
She wasn't even much of a runner.
She had a bladder of steel and the willpower of a houseplant.

Maggie was not our baby.
But we were her people.
Life has not allowed us to always give her the attention she deserved.
I feel guilty for that, but I am going to let Maggie guide me on this.
Because if I know anything about that dog, it's that she didn't hold a grudge.
She wasn't thinking about what she DIDN'T get.
She was just glad for the snow
Or sun.
Or cool floor
or crumbs.

Thank you Maggie.
for your life with us.