We said goodbye to Freckles yesterday.  It was a hard but necessary decision.

We adopted her on December 1, 2009 from English Springer Spaniel Rescue. She was 5 years old. She had been in a kill shelter in Toledo. From her life long hatred of and fool behavior in cages, I’m sure she was a complete nut job in the shelter. She wasn’t a full Springer but the rescue pulled her out anyway. DNA testing showed her to be 33% Springer, 33% beagle with some Brittany, Dalmatian, and Pomeranian thrown in the mix. (I still think the Pomeranian DNA was from the ghost of Snowball spitting on the sample.)

If she was truly 5 then she was 15.5 when she died. She could have been older. It was hard to say.

She was getting very frail and very senile. She had to be reminded often of how to work doors. We have french doors onto our deck. She would go outside and then stand at the door that has never opened and get mad that I wasn’t letting her in. I’d have to physically guide her through the open door to get back inside. She’d go to find her food and end up on the wrong side of the doorway that her food was beside. She’d be sort of in the right spot but with a wall in between her and her food. But she was still able to run through the house when it was breakfast time. Then she’d sleep all the day to recover.

She couldn’t do stairs anymore or get on the couch. Her world kept getting smaller as we blocked off areas where she might fall. She went off dog food about a year ago and was getting special cooked food flown in from San Francisco.

Rules didn’t apply anymore. She did this when she could still get on furniture and I was eating. Why not walk across the end tables? Cats do.

It will be weird here without hearing her nails clicking down the hall.

We are getting this picture printed out to hang in the hall.

Freckles 2014