Michelle's Musings

Last week I came face to face with cold, harsh reality.

I was headed to Michigan for a few days for a family reunion, and just days before I left, our dog, Ruby, fell ill. The vet di­agnosed her with a slipped disc, something that is more com­mon in small dogs, much less so in a golden retriever. 

I don’t think that the vet at the emergency clinic conveyed the seriousness of a slipped disc in a dog, and the Internet pro­vided little information on the topic. Some dogs recovered, others didn’t. We did not know how quickly it would overcome her.

The first signs of this prob­lem came suddenly. On a Sat­urday she was fine. On Sunday, she couldn’t go down the stairs. On Monday we were at the clinic, which could only offer drugs for pain relief and re­duced inflammation. For the first two days she would not eat or drink, but after the trip to the clinic, I convinced her to have some water and canned food. 

I will be the first to admit that as a young girl, I really didn’t understand women’s suffrage very well. I never thought about it much, honestly, but I remember my great grandmother talking about the elation women felt when they were given the right to vote. So all my life the importance of women voting has stuck with me. 

Grandma Clark didn’t really provide many details of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, I knew the basics, but it wasn’t until I got older and started to see the sexism that women face first hand, and not allowing women to vote is plain and simple, sexism. 

I was telling my husband, Matt, that the 100^thanniversary of women’s suffrage, and his response was, “A hundred years? Is that all.” It made me realize the different impact women’s suffrage makes on girls and boys, men and women, in this country. I think men, much like my younger self, don’t really think about it too much at all. 

In the past couple of weeks, I have been thinking about the foster care program in the United States.

It really began while working on a story about Luke’s Closet at St. Luke’s Lutheran Church. (See story page 5) Luke’s Closet offers free clothes to foster families, and I know firsthand that many children come into foster care with nothing but the clothes on their back because my family was a foster family.

I have been a person who has had pets, mostly cats and dogs, for the better part of my life. Today I want to talk specifically about dogs. 

Dogs have cohabitated with man for thousands of years as companions, laborers and sometimes even babysitters for children. There is nothing more loyal to a human being than a dog.

Our dog Ruby (aka Ruby Chewbacca because of her thick brownish fur), whose tales have graced this page in the past, is a large (90 lb.) golden retriever, and by far the best dog I have ever had. Sorry Daphne, Sadie, Daisy, Amanda, Bowser and Lily, but Ruby is the most obedient and smartest dog I have ever known. In the five years we have had her, we have had to come up with new and unique way to convey the words “walk” and “ball” because she has learned all the variations of our spelling, abbreviating and making up fake words to mean ball and walk.