Dog Stories

Our family’s dog stories start with a yellow labrador retriever named Timmy-before we moved to the country.

Timmy belonged to friends of ours and had been given to them as a gift. Our friends had no children and frequently traveled. While they were traveling Timmy was boarded at a kennel. He refused to eat while the family was away and they were concerned about him. They asked us if we would consider taking him. We said that we would take him if he got along with our four boys.

Well, Timmy arrived and settled right in and was a delight. The boys played with him. The youngest one used him as a stool to climb up on the couch. The only thing he would not tolerate was to have a boy ride on his back His response when one tried to climb on him was to sit down - the boy would slide right off.

We had such a good experience with Timmy that when we moved to the country we invested in two more labradors….Tammy who was also a yellow lab and Black Jack who was a black lab. And our dog stories continued…

We bred Tammy to Black Jack. When her first litter of puppies was born, she looked around and picked one up and dropped it outside of the building where she had them. But after awhile she realized she was supposed to take care of them and she did so. She was a good mother.

Black Jack’s only fault was that he was very afraid of thunder and storms and he would do anything (including tearing the finishing trim off a door) to get inside and go to the basement when a storm came. And he seemed to know when a storm was coming…..even before the first crack of thunder.

The day we moved from our second farm to our third farm, Tammy had ten puppies and we transported them in a bushel basket as we drove the three hours to our new home.

At our third farm our new home was being built. We built a cabin and rented a mobile home and spent the summer living on our country property watching and helping the house progress. The boys slept in the cabin and the two girls slept with my husband and me in the mobile home. Tammy immediately took her puppies and put them way up under the mobile home which was parked on a hill. And each morning someone would have to wiggle up under the mobile home on their belly and get the puppies out. Finally we built a pen for them and they stayed there until they were sold.

At one point a neighbor who was moving had given us a St. Bernard and we became very attached to Heidi as she was called. She was very large and very gentle and after the labs had lived out their life span we then purchased St. Bernards and experienced a new era of dog stories.

We had a second Heidi whom we bred and she presented us with ten St. Bernard puppies. They loved to come out in the yard and jump from the breezeway onto the hosta that were planted alongside. When the weather was hot they would work their way under the hosta to stay cool.

She has been a great companion to both my husband and now to me. She knows the household routine and makes me stick to it. She too, is afraid of thunder and storms and insists on going to the downstairs…only she won’t go alone but insists that I go with her.

So when there is a thunderstorm, we descend to the lower level of the house...and write more family dog stories!