Christmas miracle: Lost dog reunited with family
Published: December 17, 2005
The tears for Gracie this week were tears of joy.
She came home to her family after being lost for nearly two weeks.
“She didn’t even act like she’d been gone,” Elizabeth Jones said Friday. “She just came straight in and went to sleep on the couch.”
Jones and her husband, Marty, had been dreading Christmas without the company of Gracie, a 2-year-old weimaraner the newlyweds adopted about two months ago.
Gracie disappeared on Dec. 1 from Marty’s father’s farm.
She wasn’t wearing a collar at the time.
For the Joneses, the following days were spent in a frantic blur of checking - and rechecking - local animal shelters to see if Gracie had been picked up, and posting fliers about the missing dog all around the community.
Last Saturday, the Times-News ran a story about their search.
Elizabeth said the response was overwhelming.
No one who called that first day had Gracie, but several people said they’d seen a dog that looked like her at one place or another. Many of the callers offered words of encouragement, Elizabeth said.
“It kept my hope alive,” she said. “I really felt like she’d come back - and she did.”
The call she’d been waiting on finally came Tuesday evening.
“He said he just found her wandering around near his driveway,” Elizabeth said of the caller. “And later that day he went to the grocery store and saw one of the fliers. He went home and called her name, and she responded. He called us right away.”
She said the man lived about a mile and a half from her home.
The moment when she was reunited with Gracie was “absolutely wonderful,” Elizabeth said.
The couple’s other dog, a 7-year-old Doberman named Taz, was equally happy to see Gracie, Elizabeth said.
“He was ecstatic to see her,” she said. “He started giving her a bath as soon as she came in the door.”
Now Elizabeth and Marty have some words of advice to other pet owners.
“I’ve made great efforts to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Elizabeth said. “I’ve made sure she’s got a good collar and her tags on all the time. I would urge everyone to do that. You just don’t know what it’s like until you lose a pet. You think ‘it’s not going to happen to my dog. My dog is never going to run away.’ Well, you never know. You just never know.”
One thing the Joneses do know for sure: “It’s going to be a happier Christmas at our house.”
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