As many of you are aware, due to my endless lamenting and carrying on, we had to lay our 13-year old black lab, Pre, to rest this past December. He was a good dog, our families first, and as I stated many…many…many times since his passing, our last. “No, we don’t want another dog.”, I had confidently expressed to anyone that asked about the prospect of any future canine folk calling our house a home.

Apparently, the “we” was more “me”, and occasionally over the past few months, Dawn would show me a picture of some dog the humane society was peddling in the newspaper as the “Pet of the Week”. I would look at the picture and silently nod. Silently nod, week after week, month after month. Confident and firm in my resolve that “we don’t want another dog”.

Then one day, not long ago, I found myself showing Dawn a picture of some dog the humane society was peddling in the newspaper as the “Pet of the Week”. I not only found myself showing it to her, I heard myself say, “What do you think of this one?” Dawn didn’t silently nod, she excitedly blurted out, “Are we getting a dog!”

Then I heard myself say the same thing I said 13 years ago, “We can go look.” Myself was out of control, doing and saying things it had vowed not to do or say, while I stood by helplessly. So it goes. So it went. So, Wilson, is his name.

We didn’t go to look at Wilson, he wasn’t the “Pet of the Week”, but as I was told when we got Pre, “You don’t find them, they find you.” Wilson was a 10-month old stray, and is a German Shepard-Siberian Husky mix, a Gerberian Shepsky, I’m told. Whatever he is, he’s a good dog.

The second day we had him, I took him out to roam around with me in the Black Hills. It was nice to have a four-legged roaming companion again, and as I hiked, and watched him dart about the woods, I thought about the magnitude of the transition that had occurred so quickly in Wilson’s life.

I thought about all the other dogs that he had “did time” with at the humane society, dogs that were still there, dogs that may never find their human, never get to run through the woods, never get to chew up a firepit cover, dig up plants, and whatever else has occurred since I sat down to write this column.

Sometimes you think you know exactly what you don’t want. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you don’t want. Sometimes, someone, or something, needs you to do that which you don’t want. I didn’t want a dog, we got Wilson. It seems we all needed what I didn’t want.

Perhaps, what I really didn’t want, was to have to say goodbye again? It’s not easy, but Pre trained us well. Welcome home Wilson.