Amber

Nothing overly exciting happened today. I did some more silk painting and went to work and ate some nice food. All good solid pleasures of life (except work). All good but not hugely exciting for others to read about so tonight I am going to delve into my past again.

This time I am going to talk about a very special friend. We first met one summers day on a little back road. My sister, my Mum and I were going to see my Gran after school and the shortest route there was a very little used road. As we came up towards a bend we could see the car ahead slow and watched as a very, very scrawny dog sniffed it. Then they drove on. We didn't.

Said dog happily got into the back of our car and sat with me. She was white and a golden brown. She was so thin that she literally was a skeleton with skin draped over and sucked up between the bones in places. She had many small cuts. Despite all this she was gentle and friendly. To this date she is the thinnest greyhound I have ever seen...

We visited a couple of friends to see if they knew of her but no one did. We took her home and gave her some of our old Collie dogs food. She gently ate it and then we took her to the police station. We were told that if no one claimed her se would be put down after a week. She wasn't claimed and we offered to have her back.

She settled in well but failed to put on any weight. Then her nipples started to get larger. To my folks horror and mine and my sisters delight, she was pregnant. She gave birth to eleven puppies, two dead at birth, two died that first night. She was still so thin and we started weaning the puppies as soon as they opened their eyes. All had horrendous worms but were to young to worm and we couldn't worm her while she nursed.

We kept two puppies but she really was the main star. She converted the whole family to greyhounds and other people besides. She could jump a gate with ease and had a liking for peoples rubbish. If we left the door open she would take each piece of rubbish and lay it on the floor and thoroughly clean it. She also would jump over our gate and go visit our neighbours rubbish to.

She grinned. Many greyhounds do but she was the first dog we had met that did. The grin was genuinely a sign of happiness, gratitude, welcome, any positive emotion depending on the circumstance. One family friend had to pass her on her bed to go to the loo. He was gone some time and when we went to find him we discovered that as he went to come back she had grinned and he thought she was snarling. She always knew the person who was nervous and would be extra nice to them.

She was my friend. As soon as I was awake she knew and would insist on coming up to lie on my bed. She always came to me first and was never far from me. She knew before I opened the door if I had had a bad day and would be extra nice. She helped me when I was ill and kept me company through all the low points. She was with me whenever I went out for a walk.

She was a very, very special dog. She seemed to know so much more than most dogs. She seemed to care so much about everyone around her and did her best to help.

Of course she couldn't remain young forever. One day she keeled over in the garden and turned blue. She was rushed to the vet and received an emergency throat widening operation. She recovered almost fully but never had much of a bark again. She was now on borrowed time and the operation couldn't ever be repeated. She lived to around 16 before she started to struggle to breath and the inevitable day came.

I remember how heartbroken we all were. How much I missed her. I remember feeling her visit me just once. I thanked her and asked her to say good bye to my Dad as he was finding it so hard and then to go on her way. I always felt that she hadn't been just a dog, she was something else. She was a gift to me.