Pretty and I were privileged to share our home and family for the past five years with a little old man named Carl. He was supposedly 12 years of age when he came our way, quite a mess health wise but full of courage and spunk. Carl’s world had shrunk dramatically in the past few months due to a total loss of hearing, limited vision, stage four heart murmur, and arthritis in his back legs that made any movements difficult. His sideways gait seemed to make his sundowner pacing in the afternoons more agitated. On Friday, May 9th., 2025, we said our final goodbyes to this terrier mix. Our pain was one we recognized and remembered, a pain that was still fresh from Spike’s passing six weeks ago.
Carl reminded me a little of The Red Man –
I hope they get to meet somewhere to swap stories
Red could tell Carl about the Lexington County Animal Shelter where Pretty rescued him, and Carl would have a few stories of his own that only he knew. Pretty also rescued him; they could compare notes on how she managed to keep them without running their redemption past any other family members. Pretty knew best.
Carl in July, 2020when he came to us
Carl the dog with nine lives in April, 2022
Carl on patrol in back yard– he loved his yard
Carl looking dapper after grooming (April, 2022)
Carl sharing space with Charly next to my chair in den– 2024
Carl in April, 2025
Pretty and I still grieve the losses of Sassy, Smokey Lonesome Ollie, Paw Licker Annie, The Red Man, Tennis Ball Obsessed Chelsea, and six weeks ago our other old man Spike – Carl was loved with that same passion. We will miss his spunk, spirit, bravado, loyalty, and adoration – our home won’t be the same without him. His urn was engraved Carl Williams Morris: A Warrior Heart.
May he go to the Place of Endless Treats and rest in peace.
“I came to cheer you up,” announced three-year-old Molly as she pulled me the three steps from the carport to the back door of the kitchen. I told her thank you so much and how happy I was to see her, how much I’d missed her and her big sister five-year-old Ella who was galloping ahead of us with her mother, Caroline, and Nana. Molly’s words made me smile – she had already cheered me.
Caroline had called earlier in the afternoon to say she and the girls were coming over to cook dinner for us that night since we had told her and our son Drew we had asked a veterinarian to make a house call to help us say a final farewell to our little Carl the next day. Since she had been the vet we used when we needed this assistance with our big guy Spike six weeks ago, she was familiar with our location and made the appointment for Friday, the 9th. of May.
The little girls were like a tornado of energy – their laughter, moving at warp speed all over the house and back yard leaving a path of destruction in their “tree house” and our den – provided a welcome distraction for Pretty and me from the pall that enveloped our house for the past few days of waiting for the inevitable. Caroline got busy in the kitchen and cooked a delicious shrimp creole dish for us. For dessert, she’d even brought a yummy key lemon pie.
“Let’s take a family photo,” exclaimed Ella when her mother said it was time to go home. After all, it was a school night. Caroline shook her head, said it was past their bedtime, but I chimed in with Ella and argued I thought a picture was a great idea. I felt Ella was trying to postpone getting in the car to leave, but it was the first time she had asked for a family photo at our house so I was 100% on board.
Ella, Nana, Naynay, and Molly
I had hoped Carl would stay outside with us for the family picture, but we took too much time getting fixed. When we came inside and the girls were about to leave, I said for them to be sure to give Carl a hug on their way out, and Ella said, “Carl is going over the rainbow bridge tomorrow,” as she bent to give him a hug. Molly took off one of the four necklaces she’d found in Nana’s jewelry inventory and draped it on Carl’s neck. Caroline quickly intervened and gave the necklace to me.
The girls ran to the car with their mother while Nana and I followed to say goodbye to them. We heard Caroline laugh and asked her what was going on. “Ella said she hoped Carl didn’t run into Spike over the rainbow bridge because there could be a bad fight.” Nana reassured Ella that nobody would get mad at each other on the other side of the rainbow bridge. Caroline added if anybody did get angry, there would be baby gates like Nana and Naynay had in their house to keep Spike and Carl apart.
Nana and I agreed later that Molly, Ella and Caroline had cheered us, the perfect distraction for the sorrows to come in less than twenty-four hours.
Once upon a time there was a little girl named Ella who was five years old. She lived with her Daddy and Mommy and younger sister Molly and their dog, Sadie, in a city called Columbia which was in a state named South Carolina. Ella and Molly went to school every morning where they and their friends learned something new each day.
Her grandmothers Nana and Naynay sometimes came to pick up Ella and Molly from their school in the afternoon. Nana and Naynay always asked the little girls about their day at school.
Each week Ella told Nana and Naynay the letter of the alphabet she was learning until finally she had finished all the letters and could write the whole alphabet. Nana and Naynay were so excited to hear this news! The teacher had also taught Ella how to sound out the letters she was learning to write.
One of Ella and Molly’s favorite books was the book about Dick and Jane that Naynay read to them in the car on their way home from school.
Now Ella tried to follow along to understand how the alphabet letters made words. She wanted to read the book by herself when the magic came to her one afternoon last week.
The kitten’s picture was a hint, but five-year-old Ella wasn’t focused on it. Instead, she looked intently at the bold letters below: P-u-f-f. She said each letter and sounded it out like she had been taught in her class at school. Puh-uh-ff.
Puff!! she exclaimed with a look on her face that was unforgettable. Wonder. Surprise. Joy. In amazement she looked at her grandmother and asked, Naynay, how did I know that word?
Nana and Naynay were thrilled and told Ella she had begun to solve the mysteries of the universe because she was learning to read. Since everyone was smiling and happy, Molly was happy, too.
Ella closed the book, still smiling, not really concerned what mysteries of the universe meant, but asked if anyone brought cookies.
Fifteen years ago this Easter my mother was in a secured memory care unit of the Atria Westchase assisted living complex in Houston, Texas. Pretty and I had recently bought a second home in Montgomery, Texas, so I could be closer to Mom as her dementia progressed; she lost that battle two years later, but on that Easter Sunday in 2010 I arrived in time for a chapel service before lunch with my mom. After lunch, well, here’s what happened…
The traditional Easter egg hunt came to us mid-afternoon through the children of the staff members. The day was beautiful, and the fenced courtyard area was the perfect setting for a party. Those in our lunch group pushed their walkers or were wheeled outside into the bright sunlight, those who could sat in the Adirondack chairs under the portico. I met three other daughters who were visiting their mothers that day which made me thankful I was there with my mother, too.
The Hispanic women who were the caregivers for the memory care unit brought their children to enjoy the search for the pastel colored plastic eggs filled with candy in the tranquil setting of the facility’s outdoors. Eggs were hidden everywhere, including on and around the residents. Jim, a tall sad unshaven man who never spoke and struggled to move, opened the chocolate egg Rosa placed in his shirt pocket; he ate the candy before the kids arrived. No one tried to stop him including my mother who in days of yore would have surely reprimanded him in her best elementary school teacher voice.
The small group of children burst into the courtyard with an exuberance all youngsters bring to filling an Easter basket. Ages ranged from four to twelve, with one six-month-old baby girl held by her mother. They were dressed in their Sunday best. Little boys wore ties with their jackets, little girls wore pretty spring dresses. It could’ve been a movie set, I thought, because they were strikingly beautiful children. They flew around grabbing eggs with gusto as their baskets filled quickly. They were noisy, laughing, talking – incredibly alive.
It was the resurrection. For a few brief minutes, the stones were rolled away from the minds buried deep in the tombs of the bodies that kept them hidden. The children raced around the residents searching for treasures, exclaiming with delight when one was discovered. One little boy overlooked a blue egg under a wheel chair, and my mother tapped his shoulder to point it out to him. He was elated and flashed a brilliant smile at her. She responded with a look of pure delight. The smiles and the murmurings of the elderly were clear signs of their obvious joy that proclaimed the reality of Easter in their minds in those moments. Hallelujah. We were all risen.
Memories were made and lost that afternoon. The children who ran to find eggs among the old people in the place where their mothers worked were unlikely to forget this day. Years from now some will tell the stories of the Easter Egg Hunt with the Ancient Ones. The stories will be as different as their own journeys will take them. For my mother and her friends, no stories will be told because they won’t remember. My mother doesn’t know I was there for her on Easter this year which is not unexpected. But I remember I was, and it is enough for both of us.
I was born on another Easter Sunday morning in April, 1946, and that makes the year 2010 my sixty-fourth Easter. I recollect a few of the earliest Easters from my childhood: sacred religious days for my Southern Baptist family that rarely missed a worship service on any Sunday of the year but never at Christmas or Easter. I also remember having a hard time finding eggs in the church hunts. My baskets never runneth over. But to be honest, in recent years Easter Sundays had been difficult to distinguish from any other day of the week.
When I moved away from my family in Texas in my early twenties to explore my sexual identity, I didn’t know I’d be gone for forty years. I also had no way of knowing one of the costs of my freedom from family togetherness was my absence from family rituals. Distance, travel time, money, job obligations, girlfriends—these were the obstacles I had to overcome for visits home. Or maybe they were just excuses. I usually made the trip home at Christmas and less frequently one more time in the summer. But never for Easter.
This Easter was special for me because it was a day with no excuses necessary. I shared a Sunday sundae with my mother for lunch today at a table neither of us could have envisioned a few years before. Today was for the two of us, and if there were barriers between us that once seemed too impenetrable, they were now lost in the cobwebs of time.
We were all risen, indeed.
**************
My divorce from the politics and religion of the Southern Baptist denomination took decades, but I am grateful for the biblical stories I learned in Sunday School about resurrection because I continued to believe in the power of hope I experienced even in the midst of personal despair on an Easter Sunday afternoon in Texas when the children came to play.
(This post is an excerpt from my third book I’ll Call It like I See It)
On Thursday, March 27th., Pretty and I lost our beloved Texas dog Spike – not totally unexpectedly because he was old for a big dog, yet somewhat of a surprise because he had been in a slow decline for a long while before suddenly finding movement almost impossible Thursday morning. He told me and Pretty he was ready to go with his soulful big brown eyes. That afternoon an angel of mercy came to our home to help ease his passing. Our family has lost a cornerstonethat cannot be replaced.
In January, 2022, I published the “Spike Story.”
When my cousin Martin saw Spike for the first time he said, “Sheila, that ain’t nothing but a cur dog. Plain as day.”
That was in the spring of 2012, the year my two mothers died within two weeks of each other. I was a motherless child by any definition at the end of April, the month Spike appeared on Worsham Street in Texas as a motherless cur dog which according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition, and my cousin Martin, meant he was a mongrel or inferior dog – surly or cowardly.
When that cur dog showed up on Worsham Street in front of our house, Pretty and I had four other dogs: Annie, Red, Chelsea and Ollie. I tried to convince my neighbors across the street to keep him, but both of them had cats as well as dogs plus jobs that required their daily presence. I was a stay at home writer. My neighbor Lisa and I tried to find his owner for several days but finally realized someone had dumped him in our neighborhood so he belonged to Worsham Street. I called Pretty to talk to her about him – she was working and living most of the time in South Carolina while I had been in Texas to take care of my mother – and since we split the four dogs into two separate households – what was one more?
At first Spike was skittish around Red, Annie and me. He preferred to stay in the yard, but one night the rains came; I saw him sitting on the back porch looking at Red and me on the bed through the sliding glass door which I got up to open for him. He came inside that rainy night – never to be an outside dog again.
Spike sound asleep with his buddy Redon our sofa in Texas
(spring, 2012)
Red was quick to besurly – Spike not somuch
Spike seemed to understand that he was the low dog in the pack. Red was the alpha male because that’s how terriers roll. Smallest in size – but Red was the recognized “star.” Annie was a big dog like Spike but much older. She allowed Red to lead as long as she approved of his leadership, but don’t ever cross her. Spike learned to avoid her, but he loved Red. Red adored Annie. Typical love triangle similar to humans. Am I right?
The math Pretty and I had originally calculated worked well when we were in different homes but changed dramatically when we were together in South Carolina. Then we knew we had five dogs. Looking back to those years I’m not sure how we managed but we loved them all.
Spike, Redand black lab Chelsea in back yard on Canterbury Road
Spike fell in love with Chelsea on his first trip to South Carolina in 2012; it was a feeling that stayed with him as long as she lived – a feeling that remained with him forever after she died in March, 2016. To this day he whined or barked when he saw a big black dog walking by on our street from his perch on the couch in our living room on Cardinal Drive.
Spike at homeon our patioat Casa de Canterburyin July, 2012
Spike and Chelsea on my grandparents’ bedin September, 2014
my grandparents would be horrified if they knew
One by one Spike’s pack succumbed to illness and old age, and he became the sole survivor in the spring of 2016. Pretty and I promised each other we would shower him with affection, treats, walks, to give him the attention he hadn’t experienced as the interloper of the original four. We tried for months to lavish him with our love – perhaps partially to assuage our own grief. What happened surprised both of us. Spike’s grieving was as real as ours, and he didn’t like being an “only” dog. He missed his pack.
Enter Charly in the summer of 2016. Charly was twice rescued: once by Pawmetto Lifeline and then by Pretty, Spike and me.
Spike and Charly in ourliving room – 2019
when you can’t be withthe one you love,honey, love the one you’re with
Now we have another little old man about the same size as Red, but Carl and Spike aren’t buddies, though – neither is Carport Kitty who definitely dislikes our three dogs. That’s okay. Charly runs interference between Spike and Carl who has learned the importance of pretending CK doesn’t exist. Spike has a pack again. Pretty and I love them all.
Spike on his walk –January 11, 2022
By the way, cur dogs are really a wonderful breed of “hard-working treeing hounds” with traits that include being devoted to their people, protective of their environment and fabulous additions to families.
So to my cousin Martin I say thank goodness Spike ain’t nothing but a cur dog. Pretty and I wouldn’t have him be anything else.
I'll Call It Like I See It 
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