From commentor Carnacki:
Lucy looked up at me with her lovely dark brown eyes as she greeted me at the back door this evening. Her tail thumped into the metal cabinet like a drum. I bent down and kissed her forehead and scratched her behind her ears the way I always have.
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Lucy was 9 when we adopted her two years ago. She was already old with gray around her eyes and throughout her muzzle.
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She perked up when we walked through the rescue shelter looking at the various strays. She was in the last cage, a black Labrador-German shepherd mix that weighed nearly 100 pounds, a senior dog brought in by an elderly woman who had to go into a nursing home because of her health and could not find anyone to take in her dog.
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It was July 7, 2007. 7-7-07. A lucky day, we said.
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Ms. Carnacki wasn’t certain we should get such an old dog and had not thought of us getting such a big dog. But there was something about the way that Lucy lit up when she saw our three daughters and us. We took her outside on the leash and she moved like a puppy, happy to be outside and licking the children with her long tongue. She won all of us over and we took her home and it was as if she had always lived with us. She wasn’t a pet. She was family.
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A week after we had brought her home with us, I strained my right hamstring while running intervals for exercise. I had decided I was going to milk it for the weekend and put off the jobs on my to-do list. I was on the sofa with a horror movie on the television at 2:30 a.m. and my feet propped up. Lucy lay on the floor next to me, her head resting on her paws while I gently scratched her head.
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Suddenly she jumped up and raced into my oldest daughter’s bedroom barking fiercely. A neighbor’s dog was barking in that direction and I thought Lucy was answering him. My fear was she would wake my daughter. Unlike Lucy, I was a fool.