Frosty - I'm going to wash his face!

Frosty was a smaller, petite silver miniature poodle who was bred by an amazing woman named Monique. Monique was a dog judge and she walked with a limp because, when she was a young school girl in Paris, the German's shot her in the hip when they occupied the city. She adored her silver poodles and over the years, she allowed us to become owned by two of her special ones, Frosty and Sterling.

Frosty came to live with us as young puppy. One of the charming things about young silver poodles is that they are almost always born with a black coat that "clears" to the silver. Frosty was that way. At 8+ weeks, she was a tiny silver nose peeking out of a black fuzz ball. And that is how she earned the name Frosty. She reminded us of a puppy sticking its nose into snow and coming out frosted.

She didn't like to show, largely because there was nothing about showing that excited her. She ate almost enough to live; food was, to her, a necessary evil for living and nothing more. Nothing excited her: not steak, not liver, not even hot dogs! Well, there was one food stuff she liked a bit and that was whipped cream, not exactly good ring bait. We used to joke about saying to the judge, "excuse me a minute while I whip up some cream for my dog." Perhaps we could have carried a Reddi-Whip can into the ring? We tried toys, leaves, anything we could think of, and nothing worked. So after a short show career, Frosty retired to the obedience ring, where she earned a CD. Somewhere along the way to CDX, she decided that was enough obedience and sat down one day and stopped working. When Frosty decided something, there was no point in discussing it further. After that time, she spent some time with pups and most of her time on our couch.

There was one thing that Frosty did with a passion, and that was cleaning faces. She cleaned her puppies faces and she cleaned everyone else's face as well. Also feet of humans. Whatever Frosty wanted to clean, it got clean. I never knew a 12-14 pound poodle could have so much force in her paws when she clamped your foot down! As for the other dogs, they learned to let Frosty clean their faces when the mood moved her. It was easier to give in to her. Made the ordeal shorter, too.

One of our favorite memories of Frosty was when she and her son Beau were sitting on the back part of the sofa in the motorhome. It was during a break on one of our trips and the dogs were relaxing here and there in the coach. Many of the poodles liked to sit on the back of the sofa, and this afternoon it was Frosty and Beau.

We were sitting in the dinette across from the sofa just looking at the dogs, the coach, this and that. All of a sudden, both Bill and I saw two looks cross Frosty and Beau's faces. Hers said: "I could clean his face!" and his said, "&^00^% - She's going to clean my face!" and before Beau could move off of the back of the sofa, Frosty turned to him and started cleaning his face. Poor Beau. I am sure our laughter made his agony that much worse. My only regret is that we did not have a camera at that moment. Beau's regret was that somehow he ended up sitting next to Frosty.

As I said earlier, when Frosty decided something, it was decided and the case was closed. Period. She wasn't Alpha, she was just Frosty.

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