Farm Fresh Blog

It was a good day to die. The temperatures are mild again.  The sun smiled on us. Alice started her day, like every day, with a morning walk in the pasture. She went over to Grandma's house for fresh eggs.

She shuffled around the sheep.

Then she ate a hearty breakfast and went back to sleep. She woke in the middle of the day and went outside to lay in the sun. Before I took Trace to his puppy agility class, I made sure she was back in the house.  She was. She was sleeping in my bedroom. Farting. Bloodhound puppies smell like Fritos corn chips.  On a good day, adult Bloodhounds have a rank, hound smell.  Bathe them in rose water and they smell like wet Bloodhounds.  An ancient Bloodhound with skin problems and oozing tumors smells like a decomposing body. That's what Alice smelled like as she happily lay holed up in the Blue Heeler's kennel . . . farting. I'm sure Blue Heeler didn't appreciate Alice stinking up his kennel, but he would never say anything to evict her. No one argued with Alice.  She came. She went. She did her own thing. No one questioned it. 

If she wanted your kennel, you left it. If you didn't, she would just walk in there with you.  She was Pig Pen in the Charlie Brown cartoons - a funky haze followed her everywhere. Because no one wanted to be in a confined kennel with a Funky Bloodhound, the rightful owner never failed to vacate and let Alice have Squatter's Rights until she moved on someplace else. So I left her in Blue Heeler's Kennel.

I returned to find her in my office - on her own dog bed. She seemed fine. We left and went to dinner.  When we got home I went to the barn and fed the livestock while Other Half and Son fed the dogs. When I returned from the barn, Other Half informed me that Alice was dying.

"Do what?"

I was confused.  I argued with him.  No, Alice was fine.  I just left her a couple of hours ago and she was fine. She ate her eggs. She putzed around the pasture.  She had a good day. Alice was fine.

No. Alice is dying.

So I went to see for myself.  He was right.  He had found her on the couch, where she had thrown up watery foam. When he called her for dinner, she moved to her dog bed in my office.  She had thrown up white foam all over the office and her bed. She wouldn't eat.  I put a hand on her tummy.  I could hear her gut.  I could feel the motion of something, be it gas or blood, oozing through her.  This was so very bad.  She was in pain.  It was time.

So Dear Friend and Vet Husband rushed over with drugs.  He sedated Alice to help with the pain until he could get to the clinic and back with the drug he needed. While he was gone, Other Half and Son dug a hole. Dear Friend and I sat with Alice. And then the most amazing thing happened . . .

Dear Friend announced that she smelled lavender. I informed her that all I could smell was rank bloodhound funk. She insisted that she smelled lavender. I insisted that there was no lavender in the office or the bathroom across the hall. 

And then . . .  I smelled it . . .

She was right. I whiffed it too!  Here and there, hints of lavender wafted through the room.  How could that be?  I looked down at the old dog, sedated and dying, and the most bizarre thought popped in my head.  Perhaps, just perhaps, the angels that God sends for good little Bloodhound souls, smell of lavender.  Lavender Bloodhound Angels.

I have no idea where the lavender came from.  We both smelled it. I checked that room again this morning.  There is no lavender potpourri, no lavender candles, nothing. Alice is gone now.  And so are the whiffs of lavender.  But wouldn't it be fitting?  I know that I for one, will never think of lavender the same way again.  And I'll plant some lavender on Alice's grave, and always remember the Lavender Bloodhound Angels that came for Alice last night.

Kona passed away June 2010.

Alice passed away February 2011.

May they run through the lavender fields of Heaven together today.