I scraped up my housecleaning money to buy Lucy. I had been wanting one of these dogs for years and I didn’t want to place the burden of purchasing her on my maxed-out husband’s teacher salary. I also wanted her to be MY dog. Lol. So I started cleaning houses once a week and I set it aside in the drawer by bed. There were only so many days I could manage it during the homeschool year, so it took a long time to save that $1500. And leaving my 7 kids home with chore and school and babysitting instructions was tough on them. And me. My oldest was 15, the youngest 1. Many days I’d come home to another disaster to clean up and fussy, fighting kids. Clean it up, make dinner, put them to bed, what are we doing for school tomorrow?? Crash. I don’t know how working moms do it! My measly 5 hours a week just about killed me. It seemed crazy that I was taking this hard earned money, money that could very well be used on 1000 other purchases, to use for a dog. And then on top of it feed and care for it… I could only hope that everything I’d heard and read about these dogs was true. I mean who wouldn’t want a dog that actually came when you called, waited for your next command, watched your body language and responded to your tone of voice? Ridiculous movie dog, right? But it was a dream that I had always had, for a dog like that. Just like my
Gramp’s dog, Lady. The old pictures and stories always fascinated me. She looked just like one of these Scotch Collies too. She was the family farm dog ever since my Gramp was a young boy growing up in Maine. She worked the animals with his father, she was right there with them all the time. Her last moments were spent running after my Gramp down a mountainside and her heart just stopped. I remember him saying, she died doing something she loved.”
My dad and his parents, too, had stories about their family dog, Boots. He wasn’t a Scotch Collie though, but a closely related English Shepherd (this breed actually originated from the Scotch Collie). Stories about him were legendary. How he led my grandmother across town to my father who, at age two, had somehow wandered to the park and was standing at the edge of the water when she got there. Boots saved him from drowning. That was just one story. No dog could ever meet my father’s expectations after the magical boyhood experience he had with Boots. I longed for that magical dog. The one I was going to tell stories about.
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