Christmas At Sea Pines Cottage by Sally Smith O' Rourke

Author:Sally Smith O' Rourke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2009-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

The young lovers welcomed the confining gloom of the gray days and racing storm clouds, for they were then able to devote all of their time to their respective arts and to one another. During that period, their love blossomed; and their art, so they each claimed, was vastly improved. But before winter had the chance to set in and keep us bound to our island, the young lovers took a trip.

Robert and Laura went to Baltimore to be married the day before Christmas. Robert had a new blue suit, and his repaired prosthetic leg was now fitted out with a shiny black shoe that, Laura insisted, made his disability practically unnoticeable to anyone who did not already know of it.

If he disbelieved her, he did not say so.

After the wedding, they traveled to New York, where Robert met with a publisher who had expressed an interest in putting some of his writings into books and where Laura was anxious to visit galleries that might be interested in showing her work.

While they were away, I was sent off to Sam Wilson’s place on the mainland, where I resided in the kennels with the other gun dogs that he bred and trained.

It was a visit that I had dreaded, for the sting of my disgrace as a hunter remained fresh in my mind then and I still sometimes thought longingly of dimly recalled carefree days with my mother and my siblings, and of the great breed championships that were forever denied to me.

To my great surprise, however, when I arrived at Sam Wilson’s farm, I alone seemed to remember or care that I had once failed as a hunting dog.

Even more astonishing, the kennels were not at all as I had remembered them from my puppyhood. Now, cold, drab runs of concrete and wire housed even Sam Wilson’s most honored champions.

I could discover no sense of warmth or joy or hope, either in the steel bowls of tasteless kibble served once a day or in the constant confinement of the nervous, high-strung setters and retrievers who spent the endless hours between hunts and training sessions simply longing for a kind word from their human keepers or a romp in the surrounding woods.

By the time that Robert and Laura returned to take me home, I had come to realize that my life at Sea Pines Cottage was far richer and fuller than any that those sad, groomed hunting champions could ever dream of.

And I thanked the Maker again for having given me Robert, and now Laura, to watch over and to serve.

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