CINDER

Monday November 19, 2001 will be a day that my family will never forget. Cinder Lowery was put to sleep in the morning after 15+ years with us. She seriously was a family member to me, like a sibling. Everytime I left the house for school it worried me that that would be the last time I'd see her. She is the cutest thing in the whole world. Talk about unconditional love, it's truly amazing. There were some tough days back in my teenage years that if I didn't have Cinder to play with or her to come over and lick me on the face it would have been so much worse. She made my life indescribably happier. I still can remember when we first got her as a puppy. She was the last one of her litter and named Cinder because she had a cinder of hair cut from her belly to distinguish her from the others. I had left a soccer game around the age of 5 or 6 to go pick her up. It was an incredibly exciting day. She was the most adorable black lab puppy I had ever seen and was FULL of energy. It was so much fun watching her grow up along with me growing up. My favorite game to play with her was tug-o-war with a yellow striped soccer sock. When I was a little kid she would almost always beat me and pull the sock away from me. When she got the sock she'd run around the house the same way every time across the kitchen, around the dining room table, back across the kitchen, and around the family room table. She'd run it over and over agin losing any energy as would I not lose any energy being a little kid. Then she would hide underneath the family room table and would play keep away the sock with me. She'd growel at me to try and keep it away but it was all just a game. She NEVER hurt me. And then when I'd get underneath the table with her she'd start licking me on my face and wouldn't stop, and she had the biggest smile on her face. Seriously, it was a huge smile, one of the best smiles I had ever seen. She was so loving, it was amazing. We'd do that for years adn take long walks around the neighborhoods. She always couldn't wait to get to the ditch so she could sniff around for otehr dogs that had been there. She was so strong that it would be a struggle just to hold on to her. And then you'd want to keep moving up Deer Run but she just wouldn't budge from teh ditch. I used to get frustrated wtih her, but those were seriously such happy moments. How can you not completetly love unconditional love from Cinder. She played an enromous part of my life, and now its just so damn sad that she's gone. It's like losing a sibling, a part of me is gone forever. Now all I have is just incredible memories of all the days at Timber Lane Hatfield, North Carolina, and the Jersey shore....thats all for now.....so much more I could say about her, man this is hard...

...Ev
Evan Lowery