The end of June marked one year since we welcomed a beagle puppy into our home… Just before Marie-Hélène’s 11th birthday, we drove out to Branko’s Beagles near Saint-Laurent to pick up the purebred for which she had found the name “Enzo”.
One year in to being a family that owns a dog, Enzo is very much a member of the family… And thankfully, he’s grown. Puppyhood was adorable… but was it ever a lot of work!
Now, he rings a bell when he wants to go outside. He also doesn’t eat everything he finds on a walk. Until having a puppy, we had no idea how much litter people left behind, or how many birds hid in the shrubs along the path…
One fall Thursday, Enzo swallowed a sock. It wasn’t one of our socks… it was a sock someone had left behind in the forest. It was a sock so quickly disappeared I couldn’t tell you if it was a baby’s sock or a dog’s foot warmer, or some careless small person’s. The kids who were with me on the walk, told me of the sock, and it was so quickly gone that I wasn’t even sure there had ever been one. But on the Monday that followed, when we brought Enzo to be neutered and picked him up after the procedure, the vet had made a note on our bill to be more careful about layabout socks. Apparently, when Enzo had been sedated, he’d vomited the sock.
He’s vomited on our carpet twice; once after eating crickets at the park, another time after finding birdseed on a walk and mistaking himself for a member of the feathered species.
Once my sister asked me why we picked a beagle. For one, I’ve always heard good things about the breeder… Branko’s has a brilliant reputation. For another, beagles are known to be friendly, and Enzo is decidedly so.
He’s also an active dog… early on, he was eager to come along on family hikes and now runs alongside Christian on family bike rides, thanks to a bike harness.
Car rides make him nervous and balloons scare him. (We let him play with one when he was a puppy and it popped.)
I didn’t expect that I would turn into a person who likes talking to other dog owners. Even more than that, I didn’t expect that the all-season daily walk would yield such an appreciation for cold weather… There is something special about going out in the cold with a tough dog who delights in getting his exercise no matter what.
Mostly though, Enzo has been a wonderful diversion for the kids. The moment he’s out of sight, they ask, “where’s Enzo?” With school-at-home, he was always around for spontaneous cuddles. His “welcome home” treatment of Christian is delightful to witness.
