A SOLUTION TO DEPRESSION

Lately I have felt sad.  Depression has hit me like a ton of bricks.  Every day I work a little to get past these feelings but it seems to be a slow process.  I feel better for a little while and then I fall back down into the dumps.  Someone suggested to me that I write it all down.  Someone else told me how much they loved my stories and how they wished I would write them down and tell them to more than one person.  Putting the two thoughts together, here goes...

I'll start with a story about the two black labs that live in our back yard.  The two of them look a lot alike, being black labs both female, both fixed, the 'puppies' now grown are the the offspring of Gypsy.

THE STORY OF GYPSY

The story Gypsy goes like this.  Gypsy is half German Shepherd and half Timberwolf.  My son Joshua got her.  He made arrangements with someone in Lafayette, Louisiana to take a puppy when the litter was old enough to leave the mother shepherd (who'd been bred with a wolf).  Before he and his new bride could get the new puppy, though, someone hit his car that had been parked on the street in front of his mother's house. The Lafayette policecould do nothing more than take a report and he had only liability insurance.  Since he had lost his ride to work he called his job and when he said he could not make it in, they fired him on the phone.  He made arrangements with his Dad to come to our house in La Porte, TX.  The last thing that happened before Josh left Lafayette was that the people with the puppy told him he needed to come and get his dog.  So in mid June of 1999 Josh and his pregnant wife and a six week old puppy moved in with us.

I'll make this part of the story short.  Gypsy was a ball of fur when she was a puppy, but she got big fast. Gypsy lived in the back yard of our subdivision house.  She loved it when anyone came into the back yard and gave her company. Gypsy loved to eat, but most of all she loved being petted.  Gypsy was trained.  She could  sit and shake and jump up to hug an adult or squat and reach out with her paws to hug a little one.  Did I mention that we had a little one at our house?  Josh's daughter was born end of August, 1999, and Gypsy was her dog.  The two of them were practically the same age.  My son, 7 years Josh's junior loved the dog too, and when Josh and his new family found another place to live, Gypsy stayed with us and became Uncle Sonny's dog...and eventually Gypsy became our dog.

ARKANSAS

In 2007 my husband and son and I moved to retire in Arkansas.  I will never forget moving Gypsy to our new home.  We had a huge U-haul truck and I was going to drive our little SUV.  Our granddaughters' stepfather had loaned us a dog crate that we hoped would be big enough.  Our big tall friend Ranzy was there helping us to pack the truck.  He and my husband decided to put Gypsy into the crate and then see if they could lift the crate up and into the back of my vehicle.  That worked but the cage was so big it went from side to side in the car and there was not any way to open the door on the end of it without taking it back out again.  I felt so sorry for the dog I left right then, knowing that I had about a 7 hour drive to bring Gypsy to her new home.

Gypsy was a wonderful passenger.  I was a bundle of nerves trying to stop and start slowly so she would not be tossed around in her crate.  I talked to her constantly, and Gypsy never seemed to be bothered but I was a terrible mess.  I got all the way to Atlanta, Texas, more than half the trip before I realized that I needed to stop and get something to eat and stretch my legs.  Gypsy made no fuss at all...she just sat calmly in her cage while I went inside a McDonalds to use the bathroom and get some french fries and some water.  Back on the road again, I got to the welcome center in Arkansas just east of Texarkana and thought I would stop again and maybe let Gypsy out in the dog park there.  But, when I was parking, I saw Mike's big old truck and hurried to catch up with him instead of stopping.  When we got to our little town, about an hour later, Mike had to stop in Bismarck to get gas.  I drove on to our new house.  I don't know if Gypsy smelled that Sonny was there or how she knew, but for the first time since we left La Porte the dog who had been so awesomely patient began to try and move around in her cage and make whining noises.  As soon as I got to the house I went inside to get Sonny and he and I lifted the cage out of the back of the car and opened the door and you never saw any dog so happy, not so much to be out of her confinement, but she sure did seem happy to see Sonny again after not seeing him at all for about six weeks!

THE STORY DOESN'T STOP THERE

The next part of the story takes place about two months later.  Our house in Arkansas has a couple of acres of land that goes with it and it is surrounded by trees that stretch for miles behind us.  It was a really big place for a dog who'd known only the back yard of a subdivision house her whole 8 years of life.   Too, we were worried that if we let her run, Gypsy would scare someone (she looked so much like a wolf) and get herself shot.  We tied her up, but her leash was short and confining.  We got a swivel and a long chain and tied her up to that.  Gypsy did everything she could to get loose.  If we put her near a tree, she would run around and around the tree until she had no slack on her chain then throw herself against it trying to get it to break.  Every morning it was the same tangled chain story and every day we would try to figure out a way to give Gypsy some freedom without having her take off running to explore her new world on her own.  In the end, we decided to fence the yard, so we got some of those metal posts that you push into the ground and some of that wire that has the big 3" squares in it and fenced her a yard.  After that, Gypsy spent most of her time lying inside the yard, in fact, lying in front of the french doors outside our bedroom.  Never once did it occur to me that the dog could get out of that fence anytime she wanted.

In late fall, right after Halloween, Gypsy started howling lots more than ever before.  We ignored her or sprayed her with water and made her quit, but apparently although unnoticed by me, after not having done so for years, Gypsy had gone into season.  Two black labs, one old and the other young came to visit her.  The young one was so spry that he could leap over that fence, no problem.  And he did.  When I would walk out the back door, that black lab would be over that fence in a flash!  The old one didn't jump.  He'd go around the bottom of the fence, pushing on it until he found a place where he could push himself underneath.  He didn't run when I came outside, though.  He just didn't budge, no matter what I would do.  I could scream at him, threaten him, hit him, kick at him and all that old dog would do is stand and look at me.  He would not leave until I went back inside.  Once I'd see him leave see the spot where he got inside our fence so I could take out the slack. I never saw either dog hooked up with Gypsy, but Mike told me that he did.  And after a few days, the black Labs didn't come back any more and not long after that, we put in a chain link fence that was nearly six feet high with real posts and locking gates.

In March, the tv weatherman predicted snow.  Mike's brother had said to let him know when it was going to snow and he and his wife would come up to visit us.  When he and his wife got here, we had a great visit the first night, going to get Arkansas barbecue and visiting the bakery and buying wonderful desserts.  On Saturday we went to antique stores and again had a good time...and when we got home, the temperature started to drop.  Gypsy was a mess, crying and whining and trying her best go go under our back porch, digging a huge hole under there to get out of the wind.  We tried putting her on the porch, but she didn't stop whining and crying.  Finally we decided that since she had not ever seen snow before we would put her inside on the sun porch and block off her entry into the house.  All was quiet, and we slept thru the night and the snow came down and turned the whole world white.

The next morning when I got up, Mike's brother was already awake and had poured himself a cup of coffee.  When I got into the kitchen, he said to me, "I think I hear more than one voice out there on that sun porch.  When I checked, sure enough, Gypsy was guarding a little black puppy, no bigger than her own paw.  She seemed excited for me and everyone else to see what she had done. She kept licking it and muzzling next to it and practically showing it off when anyone came to check on her and her tiny offspring.  Thank goodness that dog only had one puppy...I read where a wolf could have a dozen puppies and a shepherd could have as many as sixteen!  Good night!!

The next day, again my brother in law was awake before me.  And when I went down to the kitchen, he told me that he thought there were two puppies.  What??!!  Impossible.  It was over 12 hours that we waited for Gypsy to be finished with her birthing and nothing happened and she didn't seem to be in labor any more.  But out on that back porch, Gypsy had two little black babies!

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

And that's the story about how today we have two black labs living in our back yard.  It isn't the whole story.  I haven't told you yet that Gypsy died last year at the age of 13.  (There is a blog about that, but the date on it is far back from this one.)  I haven't told you that we call the black dogs Red and Blue--which is another story.  At first we'd named them Saturday and Sunday, but we could hardly tell them apart they looked so much alike.  Mike got them collars when they were about six weeks old.  The collars were red and blue, so we put them onto the puppies and renamed the dogs Red and Blue.

GYPSY'S PUPPIES WERE MOVED OUTSIDE.  THEY ARE SEVEN WEEKS OLD.

RED AND BLUE AT 17 WEEKS OLD

GYPSY WITH RED AND BLUE AT 20 WEEKS OLD 

RED AND BLUE AND GYPSY IN THE WINTER SNOW OF 2009

I haven't said that we nicknamed them 'our dog alarm' because they bark and run from gate to gate when anyone so much as pauses at the far end of our driveway and they don't stop until we come out to greet our company.I didn't tell you that we can now tell the puppies apart, or that Blue is nearly blind or about how just like Gypsy their favorite thing even above eating is to be petted.