And God Gave Us the Dog

Quito and I at Todd's gravesite on Todd's birthday sharing a few tears and words of love.

There seems to be something that God put in dogs for them to sense when someone is hurting. I know there are dogs who can even tell when someone is about to seizure or blood sugar crash and these well trained dogs alert their masters.  Quito isn't a well trained dog for anything except maybe moving cattle, at which he was excellent at. Todd said he was the best cattle dog we had had so far.  There's no cows for Quito right now, and his life is pretty boring, but he does one thing that always surprise me.  Whenever I'm sad or hurting or crying, he comes and finds me, and lays his head on my lap.  How does he know?  Sometimes I just hug that stinky old dog, and cry into his smelly fur.  He still smells and stinks like dogs do, and has bad breath, and leaves hair all over my house, but he often knows more that any human around, and offers what others don't, a comfort of a those big brown eyes looking at me saying, "what's wrong? can I help you?"  He just lets me cry.  He doesn't fix anything, for somethings can't be fixed, but he's there for me.