Amy Sutherland - Rescuing Penny Jane: One Shelter Volunteer, Countless Dogs, and the Quest to Find Them All Homes

For our first dog, we wanted a clean slate, to be there from the get-go, from the eight-week mark, when it is love at first sight for the puppy and for you, when you can easily scoop him up with your hands and nuzzle your nose against his soft belly. We had our hearts set so firmly on an Australian shepherd that we never even thought to go to an animal shelter. Instead, on an early spring night in 1998, my husband and I barreled down the highway from Portland, Maine, to a country town in southern New Hampshire. The breeder had told us on the phone that she had three available pups. By the time our car wound up the curving drive to the hilltop farm in the fading light, only one was left: a drowsy, petite female. This one was not up to snuff. She had, the breeder explained, too much white, which spilled down her chest and over each paw, in her otherwise-auburn coat to qualify her as a show dog like her father, the impressive Propwash St. Elmos Fire, who had a ruff as thick as a lions mane. The breeder would part with this too-white pup for six hundred dollars. We were thinking she might be our anniversary present to each other.

I have always loved dogssome might say, especially cat lovers, to a fault. Some people come around to dogs. I, the daughter of several generations of dog lovers, was born with this affection, just as I was with a love for patent leather shoes and swimming pools. I love dogs in the sense that I am aware of dogs many faults (the great swags of drool, the middle-of-the-night yips, the muddy prints they leave on leather couches and white linen dresses), but they still make my heart leap. I love them in the sense that I consider this deep affection an elemental part of who I am: a writer, a cook, a midwesterner, an eldest child, a tall woman, and a dog lover. When their guileless eyes look into mine, I feel they see the elemental me, not the human, but the being. As Gertrude Stein wrote, I am because my dog knows me. That makes for a simple equation: no dogs, no mewhich sounds about right.

Yet, for years after I left home and Ruby, our familys exuberant Lab mix, I was hopelessly dogless. I couldnt imagine the logistics of having my own pooch as I bounced from one tiny apartment to another, first on a waitresss measly salary and then on a newspaper reporters slightly measlier salary. All I had was a long list of names for the pups I would have one day: Fancy, Sister, Bunny, and Stella Rondo, the last inspired by my favorite Eudora Welty story, a name that few, if any, dogs could carry off. Eventually I married a man who was as nuts about dogs as I was. We bought a roomy, if weary, old house near an ample park. Landlords no longer controlled our lives. We could afford a veterinarian. Scott, my husband, worked at home. After all the years wed been forced to wait to get a dog, now that we finally could, we were seized with impatience. We wanted one yesterday.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor lightly patting the dozing pups small, fuzzy back, we began to fall under that spell that canines unwittingly cast. Images of beach walks and car rides with the young Aussie streamed through my mind. Dogs can too easily seem like yours, even a puppy whos having trouble waking from her early-evening nap. If we didnt take her tonight, the breeder declared, someone was coming in the morning to look at her. We didnt have a dog bed or food or toys or a crate. Our small yard was not fenced.

We named her Dixie Lou Devil Dog, the long name a nod to her show dog pedigree and the Devil Dog for the tantrums she sometimes threw when we tired of Frisbee and attempted to put it away. She woke me with whimpers at 5:00 a.m. each day. I gave up my morning meditation to sit on the floor in my robe and hold up a ragged piece of sheepskin that Dixie Lou loved to pitch herself at over and over. Her puppy teeth cut my hands like razors when we played tug. She insisted I toss her a tennis ball while I cooked dinner. She dug holes in our newly seeded backyard. Dixie Lou made me impossibly happy. Having a dog was one of those rare things in life, like Paris or the Grand Canyon, that were even better than what I had imagined. Way better.

Dixie Lou became our canine training wheels. Scott and I learned how to live with a dog, how to train one, and a good deal about how to think like one, at least a high-energy Australian shepherd who would give her life for the almighty Frisbee. We made some mistakes, despite myriad puppy classes and a library of training tomes. Though we did as books advised and led Dixie Lou over different types of flooring when she was a puppy, to familiarize her with the feel of them on her little paw pads, we somehow skipped linoleum, which is why Dixie Lou trembled at the mere sight of those smooth, synthetic tiles. She moved across them mincingly, like a new ice skater at a teeming rink. This ruined most dog-friendly stores for her, not to mention the vets office, where she shook and drooled with anxiety. Until Dixie Lou, I had not realized that linoleum lurks around every corner.

We also never thought to introduce Dixie Lou to ceiling fans. When she spotted her first one whooshing away in a hotel hallway, our pup crouched and froze. She peered worriedly at the whirring monster overhead, then pressed herself flat against the wall to avoid walking directly under the turning blades. From then on, whenever Dixie Lou padded into a new room, shed worriedly lift her eyes to the ceiling and check for spinning blades. I found myself doing the same, even when I was alone.

Two mistakesthats not so bad. We accommodated those, as well as a few of her other foibles, such as when she sometimes mouthed our arms or nipped at our coats when we tried to put her Frisbee away, what we called a devil dog attack. We put up with her quirks because each time we walked through the door, Dixie Lou always greeted us as if we were king and queen of the Aussies, peeling back her lips in her strange, toothy grin, snorting loudly, and wiggling her bottom like a hula dancer as she circled our feet. She trailed us around the house, slept until we got up in the morning, and watched TV with us. Dixie Lou and I spent countless hours in the nearby park, where I discovered trails through the thick beach roses, learned the changing rhythms of the tides, and watched full moons set Casco Bay ablaze. After a day of squeezing every second out of every hour at the newspaper, I squandered time with abandon outside with my pup. I came upon baby snakes and plucked puffy milkweed pods for no reason. I found like-minded company during my rambles. I befriended a car mechanic whose clothes were so shabby that I first assumed he was homeless. He would walk Oscar, his amiable, water-loving Rottweiler mix, to the beach each night, even in the winter, for a saltwater dip. I chatted daily with a federal judge whose svelte, chocolate-colored standard poodle wouldnt come when he called. Zoe, His Honor would plead over and over as his dog galloped in great leggy circles around him. I listened to a sewage engineers dating woes while I wove my fingers through his old mutts wiry coat.

My redhead pup shaped my days into a soothing, steady pattern of outings and feedings, but she also reacquainted me, now firmly middle-aged, with an unpredictability that made life fresh in a way it hadnt been since I was a kid. A cat would send us both sprinting, Dixie Lou after the cat, me after her. If I tossed her Frisbee too far into the bay, I might find myself wading in up to my thighs to fetch the disk from the tides tight grasp. When I saw a ranger headed in our direction, Id slink down a side trail, even hide behind a bush, to avoid a ticket for having her off leash where I shouldnt. I climbed fences, broke trail for her through thigh-high snow, and wedged myself under parked cars to retrieve tennis balls. I found the old me, the tomboy who once spent whole afternoons looking for crawdads in a stream or throwing mud balls to the neighborhood Irish setters, the me Id lost to mortgages and deadlines and dinner parties.