Emil was a three-year old rescue when he came to us from Quebec. The couple who fostered him said he had been shuffled through eight homes. She told me her computer crashed because she had so many requests from people who wanted him, but she didn’t know what to do because she didn’t speak English. When I called her she was delighted I spoke French. We had a long conversation and she decided on the phone that Emil would come to us.
We paid for his flight to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and immediately fell in love with him.He was a quiet, friendly boy who only wanted to be loved. When my husband mowed the lawn, Emil followed right behind him, all over our property until the mowing was finished. I suppose you could say he was bilingual because I sometimes spoke to him in French, but my husband didn’t speak French and stuck to English.
I let him out to pee one day and didn’t notice that he had something in his mouth until it was too late. He rushed right up to our lobster fisherman neighbor, proudly wagging his tail and showing off one of my bras. I was too embarrassed to try to retrieve it, so I hid by the door until he returned. He came right back to the house and was like, “Look what I have Mom. It’s one of your bras and I brought it back. I’m a good boy!” He hadn’t chewed it. He liked his ball but never chewed anything he wasn’t supposed to.
Emil loved car rides so much that when we’d get home he wouldn’t get out unless we coaxed him with treats. It was heartbreaking when he died from cancer at the age of five. We will always remember the happy times we had with our precious Emil. Yes, he was a very good boy!
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from Claire in Nova Scotia, Canada