29/11/2023
There are times when you realize that dogs think, reason, take action, all without any direction from you.
My husband and I, newlyweds, lived on a rural road in an old house I previously told you about, likely dating back to slave days. Or perhaps, sharecroppers. There were 3 rooms - living room, bedroom and dining room with a sliver of a kitchen two people couldn't stand side by side in. It even came with a skeleton key! {look it up, kids} It was 'heated' by one raised hearth gas heater. One of our cats would tight-rope walk across the hearth that first summer and come fall, had singed whiskers on one side. That happened only once, as you can well imagine.
The house sat high up, with 5 or 6 steps up, and stretched the length of the home; the front 'yard', mostly dirt, was rimmed with somewhat tall grass. There were two such houses, and in between, a 3rd house that had deteriorated and stood vacant.
A stray dog, one of many through the years, took up with us. Coal black and with the beautiful feathering of a spaniel, we named her Lady. She deserved nothing less.
Lady overcame much of her shyness and would let us touch her, but drew sharp boundaries - no coming in the house and NO car rides, preventing us from having her spayed. It was the latter 70's, we were 23 and knew nothing of trapping dogs, to take care of necessities. As you can imagine, Lady became pregnant.
A time, maybe a month, after the puppies were born, she came one day and led me to the access door to the crawlspace for the abandoned house. She was animated, not distressed, and I think she was ready to show off her brood. It had to wait..... neither David nor I had any inclination to explore the dark crawlspace.
I think it was only a week later that I awoke on a balmy Sunday morning, feeling the gentle breeze that wafted in through the open window. Such a lazy, dreamy start to the day and I lay in bed, listening the chorus of birds and..... puppies. Puppies?
"David! Wake up!"
"Huh?"
"I hear puppies! Do you hear puppies?"
" Yeah..... Ok..... Puppies."
"David?"
"Yeah?"
" We don't HAVE puppies."
"What?!" David was awake now.
We went out onto the porch and found 6 beautiful puppies, mini-me's of their mom, laying at the bottom of the steps. Remember the Hallmark style movies where you find a beautiful basket of puppies, resplendent with a large, glorious bow and trailing ribbons, at your front door? Well, Lady didn't have a basket for them and she wisely left them at the bottom of the steps so there were no casualties. As we admired the bouncing babies, we looked over and saw Lady, laying in the weeds off of the yard, watching her fairytale unfold. Bright eyes, wagging tale, she had blessed us and blessed her babies, who now needed more than she could give.
We took them in, of course, and within a week, Lady was venturing into the house as well. I challenge anyone to tell me that dogs - or cats - are incapable of love, of reasoning and that they do not have souls.
Done? No, there is one more chapter to my tale. It was six months later when we happened to bump into our neighbors at a store. With the abandoned house separating us, we didn't interact. We chatted and the conversation turned to Lady and her pups. Our young neighbors were awestruck that she had brought her 6 pups to them one Spring morning. 'Whoa... Wait!.... Pups? Six? No, WE got the 6 pups'........
'Oh!' Six? No, it seems that there had been 12 beautiful pups, a lot to ask of any human to care for. Lady had a very busy morning, making two deliveries of 6 puppies each. I'll never know if Lady was blessing two families because she loved and trusted them equally, or if she instinctively knew that 6 pups would get better care than 12. It doesn't matter. What mattered was the love and devotion of a mama dog. 💖
