Bad days can get brighter

Jennifer Vanderau
Cumberland Valley Animal Shelter

(6/2018) When I was a kid, my mom and I used to love to read the book, "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day." It basically chronicles the tale of an elementary school student who, from the moment he wakes, has a pretty rotten day.

It’s one of those "if something can go wrong it will" kind of days.

A few weeks ago, I could have been the protagonist of that book. Man, I was having a rough one. And it wasn’t really any one specific thing, you know? Just little things that once you started noticing them began to really add up – kind of like Alexander.

It got pretty frustrating. At one point I said to myself, "Some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed."

Sigh.

But then, as is the case working at the Cumberland Valley Animal Shelter, things changed.

We had puppies – little puppies – that we had in our foster-to-adopt program. This is where people take the little ones into their homes to foster and bring them back to be spayed or neutered and officially adopted. They have essentially already adopted the squirts, but this way, the pups can grow up in a home instead of in a kennel.

This program is particularly helpful to little puppies – it gets them out of the shelter environment and into a home, which keeps them healthy in the long run.

Well, in addition to this day beginning pretty poorly for me, it also happened to be a spay and neuter day for the foster-to-adopt program. As a result, we had human moms and dads drop off their little four-legged babies to be spayed and neutered and I happened to be at the shelter when one mom came back for her baby.

She told me at the door, "I just want to see my boy. It about killed me to leave him here. I cried a little."

I can totally understand feeling.

So we brought him out to her and therein began one of the sweetest, most heart-warming spectacles and boy, did I need to see it.

The little guy is a Chihuahua/terrier mix and as soon as he saw his mama, that little tail started whipping back-and-forth. You could tell he wasn’t completely sure what had happened to him, because he was still a little loopy from the surgery and he seemed a little scared at his surroundings, but the minute he saw her it was like he knew everything would be okay.

She scooped him up and held him tight against her neck and kissed him like crazy. You could hear that tail flapping against her arm as they smooched each other. Even as she filled out the adoption paperwork, she never once put him down on the floor.

I jokingly said I hope I’m reincarnated as a dog in her home and she laughed and told me her husband tells her he hopes he comes back as one of her dogs, too! How funny!

It turns out both she and her husband are incredibly fond of the little guy. In fact, he’s got a fenced in yard where he’s free to roam, but when they found a garter snake around one of the bushes in the yard, her husband actually built another little fence around that bush, so the puppy wouldn’t get in with the garter snake and possibly get hurt.

It also allowed the garter snake to live in relative safety in that bush – talk about real animal-lovers!

She told me she even had the name of one of her dogs on her license plate. Now that’s devotion.

It turns out the little guy she was adopting from us was doing really well for her and that she just adored him. He sometimes plays a little rough with her other dog, but the two get along just fine.

There’s a theory – a pretty scientific one (my dad will be so proud) – that everything is made of energy. There’s a vibrational frequency to everything on the planet, even things that we think are solid and not in motion actually have a molecular vibration. Words vibrate, emotions vibrate, our bodies vibrate.

Have you ever instinctively been able to tell when someone is lying to you? That’s because words that are lies vibrate differently than words that are true. Trust those instincts! You’re getting the information on a level that you may not be conscious of, but is certainly still there.

I think on a very basic level, we are all tuned into the energetic frequency of the planet and all the plants and creatures on it. We just have to be willing to listen, not necessarily with our ears, but with our intuition and our heart.

I have to tell you, as I watched that mama and that puppy in this shelter, I could actually feel the love that flowed back and forth between them. It’s difficult to describe, but I really did receive something, a sensation, if you will, that settled somewhere in my chest with warmth.

It was not only visible, but also something that I recognized deep within me.

And as is the way with bad days, my mood got just a little brighter.

Maybe Alexander and his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day just needed a good dose of puppy love – and somehow that’s always just around the corner here at CVAS.

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Jennifer Vanderau is the Director of Communications for the Cumberland Valley Animal Shelter and can be reached at cvascomm@cvas-pets.org. The shelter accepts both monetary and pet supply donations. For more information, call the shelter at 717-263-5791 or visit the website www.cvas-pets.org. CVAS also operates thrift stores in Chambersburg and Shippensburg. Help support the animals at the shelter by donating to or shopping at the stores.