Lizzie: My Buddy Valentine

A year ago, I spent the day of love and kisses driving across the vast, taupe state of Texas, stopping for the night at a dingy motel about 250 miles east of El Paso. My significant others? Two dogs: Hurricane Katrina survivors, en route to their new homes via me and my rented Nissan Altima.

I wasn’t exactly feeling the love, except maybe from the tree with the big heart-shaped scar outside my room. But that was probably meant for the noisy, amorous couple in the room right above me, anyway.

Wild Child, the little German Shepherd mix usually confined to her crate and sedative-induced state, somehow managed to use the very center of the motel bed as her own personal toilet while I assembled her nighttime cage. I shifted the bedding as well as I could to get away from the huge potty spot and lay clinging dangerously to the edge of the bed, trying to drift, when I realized my other companion and future best friend, Lizzie, was leaving me a nice little doggy doo-doo present by the door.

Wild Child

Not exactly starry-eyed romance. But then last Valentine’s Day wasn’t about me. And really, that's just fine — I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’d met Lizzie five weeks earlier at the Best Friends sanctuary assembled in Tylertown, Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina blew through. I had the wonderful opportunity to help care for some of the hundreds of dogs still living there five months after the disaster. I fell head over heels for the sad little rust-and-white girl who looked like a giant Jack Russell terrier with a little Pit Bull thrown in. She was adorable and irresistible with those pleading, scared eyes and cautious but constant tail wags.

Lizzie in her Tylertown kennel

Lizzie had arrived at the sanctuary a month earlier, a stray trapped in one of many abandoned, toppled New Orleans neighborhoods. She was so happy, almost relieved, when she would find it in herself to inch close enough to get a few delicious chin and chest scratches. All she wanted was love. Well, and food, but mostly love. And so the day I was scheduled to leave, I found myself filling out adoption papers. No transport options panned out, so I headed back down a month later and fetched my Valentine.

It was a looooong drive home. Wild Child had that name for a reason—I guiltily fed her the sedatives the Best Friends crew gave me "just in case." Lizzie was sometimes so scared that she’d refuse to leave the car for potty breaks. Eerily, she would not let me out of her sight. I could feel her constant, suspicious gaze on me from wherever she was stationed in the car or in various motel rooms. But sometimes at night, I’d stir in my sleep and she’d trot over and cuddle with me for a just few seconds. So I hoped that meant that maybe was starting to dig me okay, too.

I think that as soon as she got home, she knew it was all going to be okay. She became fast friends with her new sister, Angelyne, relying on the wise, calm old Golden Retriever to help her get through. She immediately became more comfortable with getting loves from me. Just one day after she arrived, she was up on the couch (ahem, sorry, her couch) with a tennis ball—and pretty soon, she was tearing gleeful circles around the house. Since then, the only thing that slowed her down, temporarily, was a grueling heartworm treatment.

Finding it in herself to play on her second day home

As rewarding as it was to deliver Wild Child to her new family in Pasadena and to bring Lizzie home, I must say I’m glad I’ll be spending this Valentine's Day in the comfort of my own home. A nice, clean, dog pee-free bed is certainly preferable. Best of all, I'll have Lizzie: My sweet, tail-wagging package full of unconditional love and hugs and kisses. And I’m pretty sure she's just as thrilled to have me.

Lizzie the love bug