He has boundless patience with her, far more than I do. Far from that moment when I first brought her home as a puppy, 19 years ago. Then, the sight of the scrawny little miniature poodle had offended him. He had sniffed, he wouldn't have minded a 'real' dog in the house, not a rat posing as a dog.

Before long the little rat was placed on his chest at night when it was tired from a day's play, to sleep in peace, while he watched television. Now, 19 years later, blind, deaf, and her fastidious awareness of everything around her pretty well gone, she is heavily dependent. Even her sense of smell has been impacted. Many of her teeth are gone. She is confused at the best of times, upset at the lapse of her senses at the worst of times, and fretful. For the most part, however, she is resigned to her condition and copes with it fairly well. Even though she has to be physically brought directly before her food bowl, and she has likewise to be physically guided and encouraged to drink water.

We have to make certain assumptions related to experience respecting her need to urinate and defecate, hoping to manage to guide her to the outdoors - actually carry her down the steps of the deck which she can longer see on her own and which she had taken, blindly, to attempting to leap, instead of making her way gingerly down them, lest she come to harm - depositing her in the backyard, hoping she will perform.

She doesn't always; her bodily routines have been just as upset as any other of what were once her routines. Her beloved tennis balls which once meant the world to her have languished unrecognized for years. She has fallen unwittingly down the stairs so often we have had to place protective gates around them, just as one would with an infant.

When she is not sleeping she will pace restlessly throughout the house, without stop. In the process, bumping into immovable objects; chairs, tables, walls, whatever happens to be in the way of her progress. Occasionally, those 'bumps' are loud and wince-inducing - by us, not her - she simply shakes her hoary little head and continues her peregrinations. She will stop only when she is lifted onto the sofa where she has long been accustomed to sleep; only she is no longer capable of leaping there on her own.

At night, she sleeps as she always has, on the little loveseat in our bedroom, across from our bed. Because she kept falling off, no longer aware of physical parameters, my husband built a portable gate to enclose her there, once she was prepared for her long, night-time rest, along with ourselves in bed for the night. Last night, as has happened before, she did nothing, no evacuation, no urination before bed-time. Despite that it was raining heavily, and she was wearing a raincoat to protect her aged body from a complete drenching, she simply wandered aimlessly in circles without relieving herself.

That relief came while we were asleep, while she was up on the loveseat for the duration of the night. As has happened before. My husband awoke, took stock of the situation, changed her linen (we maintain a bedtime 'blanket' stretched taut over the loveseat for her), washed her feet which had become soiled, settled her back down, then took the soiled linen downstairs to the laundry room to wash it by hand in hot, soapy water.

And then, at half-past four in the morning, those tasks completed, he decided to set about using his newly-acquired bread maker to bake himself a sourdough loaf for breakfast. Which was the fragrance that pervaded our bedroom hours later, as the bread was fully baked.