Letting Go of Leon

He was just three months old when we brought him home from an animal shelter in rural Vermont. He was small and scared, and clung to me in the car for the forty-minute ride to his new home. When we pulled into the driveway, he promptly threw up down the front of my suede jacket. I didn’t care; David, my then husband, and I knew this was simply evidence of a delicate transition. Of course, we didn’t realize at the time that he would throw up on a regular basis following no emotional trauma at all, merely after eating grass or organic fish fertilizer or chicken bones foraged from the garbage can. But this, we came to learn, is common for hound dogs.

“The brown hound from the town pound,” David softly sang into his long velvet ears