Katharine: Wandabear

Jane's charming story of Sammy evoked memories of our dog Wanda.   Her face was rottweiler, but softened by the black labrador strain of her mother; her long legs   she owed to her german shepherd grandfather, and her overall colouring was that of her rottweiler father, Bruce - a handsome brute of very little brain who came visiting one time and knocked up our dog Allie.  We arrived home from vacation in Hawaii on my birthday in 1996, and Allie gave birth, unexpectedly,  to a litter of six pups that night. That was an interesting birthday present.

We kept two of the pups - Wanda and Otto (our sons were big fans of the movie A Fish called Wanda).  We had the pick of the litter - and our son Daniel was adamant that we keep Wanda because she was the most fun, she had the most spirit.  Yes she did.  I rather preferred a rather lollopy puppy who was inclined to sleep most of the time, but our sons weren't having any of it.   They of course departed quite quickly for Europe and college, leaving Phil and I to the hard work of bringing them up. 

And hard work it was.  We already had two dogs - a golden retriever and Allie, the puppies' Mom.  They were all outside dogs;  I wouldn't have them in the house.  Otto died in 2002, leaving a gap in our lives;  but at this point, Wanda, seeing my grief, attached herself to me  - and never let go.  When I walked through our house, her eyes would follow me from outside, from one end to the other.  We had a bond - on her part, it was one of unconditional love and loyalty, and joy when she was with us.

She travelled with us from California to France, via Frankfurt, in the hold of the airplane - emerging 22 hours later unscathed in Marseilles, where she scuttled quickly to a nearby grass verge.  She claimed our home in France as her territory - hopping up on to a stone wall and surveying the territory routinely.  No living being, human or otherwise, could approach without her all-seeing eyes. Her days were filled by stalking gekkos along the sunny walls - she never got one, but never stopped trying.

Wanda died the day before our shared birthday, in 2008.  That was the least happy birthday I've ever experienced.   When I spoke to our old friend Ceclie, who had taken another of the puppies from the litter in 1996 (and the one who appeared to be Wanda's fraternal twin), Ceclie told me that he had died 10 days earlier.  Big dogs don't have a long life.

Our sons were brought up with four dogs in their lives;  now we have none.  But we have our memories, and as I work through my major winter project of transferring family videos into iMovie, film of our dogs crops up and evokes feelings of love and loss and the knowledge that even though time passes quickly and our lives move on, she will always be in my heart.