A light rain fell throughout the night. I awoke to the cool misty grays of early morning, a few leaves had given into gravity during the night. They transformed the ground into a patchwork blanket of Autumn hues. The landscape lay suspended between the ghostly silhouettes of night and the realities of day. A tipping point between Summer and Fall had arrived. The freshening breeze announced a change to the weather and the season.

    Like the seasons, I was also caught in a space between. The changes inside me did not come so gracefully and gently as this new day.  

     Sis, my hunting buddy, a birdy coal colored ball of fur was gone. She died that summer chasing a scent that floated on the wind from the wrong side of a country road. The timing of car and black dog colliding was so capricious. She was too young, too gentle, too full of life, too loving for an ending like this. We have all endured tragic moments like this of some kind. We all go through times when love is transformed into grief.  Yet everything thing had changed. 

     I stopped hunting. A couple of other labs found their way into our home… but I could not bring myself to go through all the work and time of training them. So for as long as they lived with us they were loved and loving pets. 

      Sis was more. I don’t have words to describe it. How do I tell you what she was? I know this. She was better than I deserved. She was so much better than me. She revealed to me deep secrets of a life worth living. She was without guile. She inhabited pure joy…  a heavenly forbearance and forgiveness for all the things I did wrong… she never held a thing against me.

                                                                                                                                                       I'll be seeing you,  rod