Today I’m welcoming a very special guest poster to my blog – my mom. She doesn’t have her own blog, though I keep telling her she should. She’s been writing and sending me things, including this, which made me cry so I’m sharing it with you, many of whom I know will relate.

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Once in a lifetime everyone should have a pet like Ginger. We’d gone to see the breeder’s cocker spaniel pups. I needed a dog. I had a house with a yard for the first time since leaving home for university 10 years before. A decade without a dog was enough!

It was outside the city, a large green piece of property. While we were talking, a little parade of rollicking puppies approached. In one of those moments crystallized in time I can still see them, rusty balls of fluff and one black one like the mother, resembling little bear cubs. Very little. She told us to ignore them. They were an accident resulting from a chance encounter between her border collie and an Irish setter.

It was too late. Ginger, as she came to be known, sat on my foot and the rest is history. She was one of the rusty ones and she was the best dog I ever had. She caused all sorts of people to get dogs. Little did they realize how much time and love went into training her in that era before children. She was smart like her border collie ancestors, and loyal. She was a reward in herself for the time invested.

Ginger raised our children, sleeping at the foot of their cribs and beds, protecting them from unknown perils, and herding them to safety when they were awake. She came uncomplaining on the 3-hour ride each way to the cottage every weekend and chased the cows off the hill so the humans could have it for the weekend. She moved to BC with us, sitting beside my husband expectantly and no doubt anxiously while he drove, because I had taken her children and flown to the coast.

On the airplane the man sitting next to my daughter asked where we were going. She told him we were moving to Victoria and her dog was driving there with her Dad. Without missing a beat he said, “Is she a red dog? They are right down there! Your Dad waved! They just went behind that mountain.” I think he had been eavesdropping but I’ll bet to this day Robin believes that we flew right over Ginger and that she saw us. [Editors note: I do not. 😉 ]

It will be 39 years ago next spring since we got Ginger but recently a friend asked about her. Too much time has passed and Ginger is no longer with us. The day she left us I cried for hours. I wish it were now because now they allow people to stay with their pets so they are not frightened going into that unknown place. Robin wrote an award-winning story about losing her dog and made her entire class cry. I still have her ashes though and I think perhaps someday they had better be scattered with mine. She was my friend.

Also linking this up with Mama Kat. I’d planned to post this and then one of the prompts was “a post your mom would write if she wrote posts”. Just happened to have just the thing!