meg and me

walked into the house one morning after doing the morning school run, and this is what i found.   

 unfortunately, i knew what had happened--it had happened many times before.  i walked through the mess, peeked over the couch, and this is what i saw.

no, she's not dead.  she's not even asleep.  she's doing that guilty thing.  unrepentant, yet resigned.  ready to take whatever punishment i mete out. 

do you see the hot pink smudged on the top of her head, glopped by her eye, smeared into her ear?  do you know what that is?  it's that gooey-sweet frosting, drenched in food coloring, from the top of a costco cupcake that maddie got from a friend's birthday party.  it had sat out all night on the counter and gotten tossed in the trash that morning.  and what didn't make it into meg's stomach, or onto her body, had gotten rubbed into the carpet everywhere i could see.

oh was i mad.  i was not happy about having to spend a half hour scrubbing the hot pink frosting out of the carpet.  i thought all kinds of things about her.  unkind things.  unloving things.  true things.

then, this was meg last night.

she had surgery yesterday.  she had some masses and growths removed, one really big one on her side, and some smaller ones on the top of her head and face.

  today there is no pink frosting on her head.  just cute, sad little patches of baldness and stitches.  she is laying in the exact same spot she was the other day when she had just been such a bad girl.  but those feelings of hatred are gone today.  today she is pure sweetness.  today she is the best dog in the world.  

what is it about animals, and people too, especially children, that when they are sick or injured or recovering from surgery engender such affection?  i can't stop looking at meg's pathetic patches of shaved fur.  i probably spent two hours today just rubbing the places where the hairline stops and the shaved places begin.  the hair is already beginning to grow back, and the skin is so soft.  knowing what she went through under the knife (they had to cut through her muscle to get to one of the masses) makes her seem so vulnerable and sweet.  

it doesn't help that last week alan and i saw "marley and me" at the dollar theatre.  i bawled through the last 20 minutes, solid.  and it doesn't help that, like marley, meg is getting old. and it won't be much longer until she's gone.  then maybe i'll wish for trash to pick up, and for pink frosting to scrub from the floor.