23 January 2008
We lived our best five years in Sweden — the golden stretch of our family life — and getting a dog felt like the final piece of the family life jigsaw clicking into place. My son was thirteen, my daughter eight, and Molly had been trawling Blocket, the Swedish Craigslist, hunting for flat coat puppies like the ones her grandparents once had. We already had guinea pigs, a hamster, and what felt like a small empire of gerbils, but this was different. This was the big deal. The substantial one. My third child, though I didn’t know it yet. I’d nearly committed to a rescue dog called Rasmus, but then Molly found a litter of thirteen. Thirteen. That was it. Unlucky for some but not us, We kept the name.
We drove for hours through deepening snow until a red farmhouse appeared like something from a children’s book. A husky with one blue eye greeted us, followed by a huge black dog and her mother — a whole canine family tree spilling across the yard. The woman who opened the door was every warm, wool layered farm lady stereotype in the best possible way. Lemon cake cooling, Swedish coffee brewing, and clashing fabrics and textures everywhere — a hodgepodge of decades’ worth of collections, scraps, colours, and things repurposed to suit middle of nowhere farm living. It felt like stepping into a storybook stitched together from mismatched cloth.
Thirteen black fluff balls poured out of an enclosure like a live action 101 Dalmatians — part bear cub tumble in fresh snow, part black ant march through the farmhouse kitchen, the farmer lady’s children herding them toward the puppy pens. My neurodivergent senses were already buzzing — joy, overwhelm, worry — but once we were sitting in the pens with puppies climbing over us, everything else dissolved.
One puppy crawled under my arm, bit my cardigan sleeve, climbed into my lap, and fell asleep. The biggest one. The one I’d already ruled out. But he chose me before I chose him. The imprint was instant. So the blue collar went on him. Rasmus.
Four weeks later we returned to collect him. He cried, I cried, and I wrapped him in my cardigan because it smelled like his mother and his siblings and maybe a bit like me. That first night he slept in a toy box bucket beside my bed, crying until we locked eyes in the dark and something clicked — the second click, the heart click. He imprinted on me.
From that moment, he was my third child. My shadow. My constant companion.
He gave me thirteen years of loyalty so fierce it still aches. I love love loved him then. I love him now.
Footnote: art below by my son - it really is the best depiction for my feelings.
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