For twenty-eight years in a row, I owned two large dogs at a time. Then after a three year break, in a sentimental moment, I took the plunge again, with my husband in mind. Stan was hankering after at least one dog. Sleepless on a Saturday night, I found one year old Buddy, the exquisite Australian Shepherd/Samoyed mix online at Petfinder.com. Buddy was my only online romance. When I was young enough to be looking around for a human partner, online didn’t exist. You had to meet guys in the flesh, for better or for worse. And it was both.
I saw Buddy’s picture, read his profile, and fell in love. The next day, Stan and I drove two and a half hours into the Colorado mountains just to meet him. Nothing in his glowing description had been faked. He was sixty pounds, beautiful, well trained, and as friendly as his online information had indicated. So we brought him home, and within a year found a Bernese Mountain dog puppy for him as a friend and life companion. Their pictures are below.
Lucy the Bernese was a lovable whack job. Over time, we discovered that her joints were bad, she developed chronic dry eye, which required many interventions per day, and she could twist Stan around one of her not so little dog toes. I do believe he got a kick out of indulging her impudent streak. I took a dominance position with her early on, because I knew she would be at least 80 pounds of resistance if she didn’t regard at least one member of her human family as boss. Part of her wackiness was to run up to people she didn’t know, barking wildly, saying, “Who are you? Who are you?” As far as they knew, she was shrieking, “I want to kill you.” But if a visitor responded to her with friendliness and reached out a hand, she would turn tail and run. Go figure. If a burglar came to the house, I hoped the the intruder would run first.
In honor of Miss Lucy’s memory, I wrote a frank obituary about her actual personality and also wrote, “Dog in Charge”, which will tell you how things were at our house.
<img src=”https://susanrosesinginggrandma.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/img_3532.jpg?w=300″ alt=”IMG_3532″
width=”300″ height=”225″ class=”alignnone size-medium wp-image-760″ />
Susan Rose: Singing Grandma 
