More Hellos from Heaven: Canine Edition

As I began to head down the long flight of stairs to the street with our border collie mix Sophie for an early morning walk, she suddenly froze, her tail wagging (this, the dog that usually races down the stairs, so excited to start her walk). I didn’t see anything at first, but then Sophie went crazy, whining like I’ve never heard her do before, shaking, frantically excited. I looked down to the bottom of the stairs and was stunned; there on other side of the gate was Cooper’s twin looking up at us- a dog I’ve only seen twice before, way on the other side of the neighborhood, never on our street. I’m talking a carbon copy duplicate of the dog we just lost- so much so that Sophie thought it was her sister of nine years.
The owner came hurriedly after the dog, and continued down the street. I was so blown away that I froze, finally running back into the house to tell Dan what had happened. Cooper (who we found out after she died just over a week ago was a ‘Labrakita’ (there’s even a website- who knew?), Labrador/Akita, with some shepherd thrown in for good measure, was not a common dog breed in any way, shape or form. The chances that that particular dog was looking up through our gate at us just as we were heading out on a walk at 6:30am…well, I still get goosebumps thinking about it. Yet another little hello from Heaven…canine edition.