Love is a four-legged word
By Ashleigh Plemper
Farmer Staff Writer
“You see this?” laughed Cindy Willey of Watford City as she blow-dried her Neapolitan Mastiff, Pluto. “He’ll come running from the other side of the house because he just loves to be blow-dried.”
While Willey is excited to welcome her first grandchild by her youngest daughter in June, it’s the addition of Pluto, that’s helped her replace sorrow with joy after the loss of her brother last year.
“Pluto has brought a lot of joy to my life,” Willey says. “At times when I didn’t think I could smile, Pluto made me smile.”
As Willey looks forward to Pluto’s first birthday, it also marks the date she didn’t celebrate.
It was the end of a busy shift at Burrito Bros. in Watford City when the manager received a notification from an unrecognized number that matched the area code of her home state of Missouri on March 22, 2019.
“It was a Friday,” Willey says of the untimely evening when she received the news that her brother had died.
“He always had a joke to tell and he was the happiest person I knew, even when tough times were happening,” Willey says of her brother.
Many of the moments Willey shared with her brother were laced with happy memories. It would be an early tragedy that bound the two siblings together for life.
“We lost our brother who was between us in age when I was five years old,” Willey says.
Over the next month, as Willey began to accept her brother’s passing, her husband, Bob Willey, felt it was time to do something they had always dreamed of. And that dream was to add a dog to their family.
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