Remembering Dixie

She could be an outright bitch at times and very spiteful if she felt slighted. 

She once peed on my bed because I came home smelling of another.

She bit on more than one occasion.  Most all of us in the family have a little scar to remember her by.  It was usually because she thought you were going to take one of her stuffed toys away from her or ( heaven forbid!), some treat she had found and knew she was not allowed to have.  

She, especially in her later years, passed some gas that would burn the hairs out of your nostrils.

She sometimes scared little kids, and even some grown ups too, with her surprisingly loud voice.

But she could put a smile on my face like no other...

She was a long haired Dachshund named Dixie Dog who came into my life in the Fall of 1995.  

She loved to ride in the car.  The destination never mattered.  It was all about the journey.

She could sing with the best of them (but only if I howled along) and she loved opening presents about as much as she loved riding in the car and could never resist a basket full of clothes or a balloon.

She was there by my side, with worry in her soft brown eyes, when I went into labor with my first baby boy in 1999.

She was there outside the nursery room door, waiting patiently, as I nursed and rocked him to sleep at night.

She was there in the summer of 2003 when we brought our second  baby boy home, and again that December  when we were struck with tragedy and grief at the loss of our family member, my first husband.                   

And she was there 9 months later when our little buddy Dexter Dog (another dachsie we got in 2001)  got sick and eventually died after a 4 night stay in an animal hospital.

She never left my side for all those days and nights that I cried tears of grief into her fur.

She was there as I began to smile again, laugh again and live again.  Each and every time I came back through the door, whether I had been gone for one week or one hour.  Always with so much elated excitement that I felt like the most important and loved human being on the planet. 

She accepted my new husband, though not without some reservations at first. (He has the scar to prove it!)  Though in her defense, he did get dangerously close to her favorite blue baby. 

She was my best friend for 14 years and not a day has gone by in the past year since her death that I have not thought of her with a smile or a tear.

She is the reason why I am, and forever will be, a Dachshund Lover.




Remembering Dixie Dog

(August 31, 1995 ~ September 21, 2009)


To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace. ~Milan Kundera


Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened. ~Anatole France