Getting Millie - Part II
Not every dog is that special one who connects to your soul like my big sweet Newfoundland, Lucille, did. She was the gentle creature who’d taken me through the death of my sister, family problems, surgeries, the isolation of Covid. For me, her departure was one of the great tragedies of my life. And so, as soon as she was gone, I set out to find another dog. As it turned out, I should have waited.
THIS IS PART 2 of a SIX-PART STORY
After the loss of my fabulous Lucille, I was desperate to get a new dog. My older daughter, Jofka, told me about an ad for Newfie mix puppies on Craigslist. Puppies? I wanted a dog who was at least a year old and had some training. But I didn’t listen to myself.
The puppies in question were somewhere outside Waco, no address listed, just a map with coordinates. We piled into the car, me, my housekeeper, Lez, and Jofka. This was going to be an adventure.
We installed Lez, an immaculately dressed and bejeweled Latina, in the driver’s seat, and off we went. In the beginning stretch, about twenty minutes outside Austin, we began to see pro-life signs – miles and miles of billboards showing enormous pictures of babies with captions that read: “At fourteen days, my eyes open.” (The captions are not necessarily factual.) Already we felt as if we were in the boonies.
At some point we left the highway and started driving on unpaved country roads. It was a scorching day in early August. Behind the wheel, Lez was muttering to herself. She was a city girl, with no taste for the hinterlands or the beauty of bucolic landscapes. She wanted to be back where there were stores, restaurants, strip malls. But we were in the middle of nowhere and all we saw around us were acres of dried brown fields and gigantic wind turbines that towered over everything, eerily dotting the terrain. Eventually we pulled up in front of a gate with a sign above it that read: “Redd’s Ranch.” A man in his early forties with rotting front teeth opened the gate and waved us in.
Lez refused to get out of the car. She turned her rings around and put her hands in her lap. When Jofka and I climbed from the car, she yelled, “Put your masks on!” even though we were in the middle of the countryside, miles from crowds or spreading virus. But Lez was as bossy as an army sergeant and we did as she said, quickly slapping masks over our faces and looking like idiots as we stepped gingerly across a rutted, dusty field dominated by two derelict-looking trailers. It was so hot that sweat immediately began to trickle down my back under my shirt. Ahead of us, baking in the sun, lay an enormous enclosure filled with at least thirty small black puppies.