animals « lucashannon

It all started on April Fools Day 15 years ago. My dad came home from work with a box. My sister and I could hear puppy sounds coming from inside the box. We really wanted a new puppy because our dog Oly was getting really old and would soon die. When I heard those puppy sounds I was so excited. Then when we opened the box we found a tape recorder playing the puppy sounds. I was furious. I couldn’t believe my dad would be so mean. He knew we wanted a puppy and it just wasn’t funny even if it was April Fools Day.

I stormed up to my room and wouldn’t come back down even when my sister told me there actually was a puppy! You see my dad had a second box with an actual puppy in it but I missed seeing that box. By the time I came back downstairs all I saw was a little fluff ball of white and somewhere inside all of that fur was a little puppy.

We named our little puppy April (in honor of the day). She was a lab/chow mix but really she was just a mut that my dad found for us. But she was a really cute mut. When we lived in the country she ran around chasing rabbits and was a complete country dog. When my parents moved to West Plains she entered her retirement years and was an indoor dog pampered by walks with my mom and hair cuts a few times each year.

She lived a good life and on February 14, 2009 she died. She was 15 years old. She had been going downhill for a while and in the end she stopped eating. My parents knew it was time so they took her to the vet and a few minutes later she was gone. My parents took her home and my dad buried her in the backyard next to Oreo, our cat who lived to be 17.