After Sandy and Stormy died, we got two new puppies. Stormy and Sandy were our storms, so we thought it would be funny to have our next puppies’ names be storms too. But all of our pets before (Sandy, Stormy, and Skipper) had names that started with s. Since we could think of no other storm names that started with s, we went with the s sound instead. Thus the names Cyclone and Tsunami were given to our next puppies.

Cyclone— She was frisky when she was little, as most puppies are, and as an adult dog she was playful, but sweet too. Her eyes were honey colored, and always seemed to be full of patience. Her body was sand-colored, but her back and tail were mostly blackish brown. Part of her face was black too, though only the top. She was on the small side, even though we had been determined to get big dogs.

Cyclonewas fun and frisky, until she got sick. Then she became crazy skinny, and you could see her ribs and bones sticking out at odd angles. No matter how much we fed her, she stayed small and scrawny. The vet said she had a parasite, but none of the medicine we gave her were helping at all. Finally, we decided that she might need to be put down. So we took her to a different vet, who said the problem was tick fever. She also said that most tick fever medicines she had tried didn’t work, but she liked to try and heal dogs before she put them down. But Cyclone was too far gone, and the vet agreed that the best thing would be to put her down. She is the only dog we’ve ever had that got put down, but all of them have died to tick fever so far.

Tsunami– This dog was sly. She could slip out of your fingers like none of our other dogs could. She’d somehow slide right by you and out of the yard. She looked tricky too. Or at least she did to me. Her fur was a brown color, with different lighter spots in places. Her eyes were really the same as her sister’s, but since they were surrounded in that mysterious brown fur, they seemed all the more mischievous rather than compassionate.

She never seemed to trust anyone completely. If you gave her a bone, she would immediately run off to her tree and chew it, always keeping one eye on you. If you started to walk towards her, she would dodge around, thinking she was in trouble. But as time went on, she learned to trust us more and more. She wouldn’t run from us as much, though it wasn’t extremely uncommon for her to, and she seemed to know that we were her friends.

After Cyclone died was when I started noticing the change. She would now sit outside our window, staring at us, with her chin resting on the sill. If we made eye-contact with her, she would start whining at us, and of course we just had to go outside and pet her. Once she got so lonely, she jumped up into a flower bed, looked in the window, and whined like crazy to get our attention.

She was very frisky and playful. We would cut down palm branches, drag them on the ground and through the air, watching her leap and flip to catch it. Once she had a firm hold on it, tug-of-war began. She always won, of course.

It was hilarious to see those dogs dash around the yard chasing each other. It always surprised me how fast their little short legs could take them. Frisky, sly Tsunami with sweet, sparky Cyclone. Those two made a nearly perfect pair, considering they’ve had quite a few squabbles together.