A Cup of Comfort for Dog Lovers II by Colleen Sell

Author:Colleen Sell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Adams Media, Inc.
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

What’s Good for Lily Is Good

for Me

About a year and a half ago, I did something I’d vowed I’d never do—I bought a pure-bred dog online from a breeder who lived about two thousand miles from me. I used PayPal to secure the deal. The breeder popped Lily into a crate, loaded her on a plane, and sent her to me via American Airlines. This is no pound dog. Lily is an Old English sheepdog with a white face, white ears, and a distinguished AKC lineage. Her official name is “Panda Lily,” and it is largely because of her that I moved out of the Hartford suburbs to a farm in Vermont, where the pace of life works better for her and for me.

Our life in the suburbs consisted of a fairy rigid routine based around Lily’s bladder. We started the day with a short morning walk. Lily then spent the next seven hours in her crate waiting for me to return from work, when I would release her into the back yard, where she could pee and frolic while I did chores. After dinner, we’d make time to follow the dog-training video that came with her AKC papers to make sure that she obeyed our commands. We’d then take another walk or I would send her around the block with one of my children. While Lily never lacked for love and attention, she grew up in a fast-paced world determined by hectic human schedules.

Enter Lily’s life: Sammy and Dutch, two full-grown, one-hundred-twenty-pound male sheepdogs. Enter my life: Bernie, a one-hundred-seventy-pound Vermonter who lives on eighty acres close to the Canadian border. Lily and I suddenly found ourselves traveling north on weekends to visit these three guys. For Lily, these visits set her doggy spirit free. She cavorted outside at will, never had to ask for permission to pee, and clearly thrived in a world where dogs and humans co-existed without pre-planned exercise schedules and container crates. For me, I discovered a world that valued independence and solitude and allowed me to set my own pace.

The decision to move to Vermont permanently did not happen overnight. Those first weekend visits to Vermont planted the seed of possibilities for me, Lily, and my children. It took only a few visits from Sammy, Dutch, and Bernie to make me realize that the outskirts of Hartford, Connecticut, was no life for them. Although Bernie was willing to make the move south, I simply could not imagine how we’d all do it. We planned out a backyard pen and thought about buying a new mega-SUV that could cart us all around, but these plans never survived a three-day weekend in the serene beauty of Vermont. I didn’t need to hire a doggy psychologist or a children’s therapist to know that what was good for Lily was probably good for me and for my children.

We moved to Vermont, and Mother Nature took over. Instead of looking to me for her every need, Lily now knows what to do—she follows those doggy instincts that the suburbs tried to stifle.

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