Our Lady of the Strays (or how a collie lover ends up with no collies)

Val Quarles, artist

So now you know why I love collies, but it took me nearly half a century to own one.  I mean, I had Luke and before him Lando (and if you think you're catching a theme to those names, you are correct - bookish only children sometimes grow up to be nerds, what can I say?).  Luke was something with some collie in him.  My husband found him at the local shelter for my birthday.  Whatever he was, he was lovable - one of the sweetest dogs imaginable - who finally took his trip to the Rainbow Bridge at 16; no longer having to worry about me chasing him around with a brush (he hated being brushed and going to the groomer was torture - one time after I picked him up, he promptly took a dump on their floor just to show us all just what he thought of their careful work).

Lando was a border collie who came to me when my then boyfriend rescued him on a cold, sleety day from the shoulder of the southbound upper deck of I-35 in downtown Austin, Texas.  Not sure how he got there, where he came from or what his past had been, but the rest of his future was with us until he succumbed to brain cancer.

But the rest of the gang - and it was a full on gang most of the time - topping out at eight when we lived semi-rural on a couple of acres just north of Austin, was a mixed bag of whatever Fate brought my way.  And Fate just never seemed aligned to make one of those many wonderful creatures a collie.

I wasn't kidding when I first introduced my husband - Lando's rescuer - as being tolerant of the "always room for one more" personality.  And so we, over the years, "collected" dogs from all over the place.  A good friend of mine dubbed me Our Lady of the Strays at one point and created that "portrait" you see at the top.  It's a romantic notion of what I was.  Some might have something less kind to say about it, but it's true that after a while you get a reputation as the person who will take in anything.  My co-workers knew if they found a stray out in the field, they could bring it to me.  People forwarded me emails of dogs on 24 hour kill lists at shelters.  Neighbors who had difficult circumstances would approach me about taking their dogs (there's one situation that haunts me still where I should have initiated it and asked for a dog to stay with me).  And while it was mostly dogs, it wasn't always.  The last spring I spent in Texas, a couple I didn't know drove up with an orphaned fawn, just assuming I would take care of it (the herd of deer who hung out in my neighborhood took her in).  Sometimes I was a way station and could find other places for them.  But not uncommonly I couldn't, and they had to have someplace to live (right?), so they stayed with me.

At first, you think to yourself that you're young, there's plenty of time, and some other dog has an immediate need.  Then, when we finally hit eight, all of them relatively young at the same time, you realize that you're at capacity and you will have to wait (eight was too many, I'll confess, to care for on the level a dog deserves to be cared for - at least for us).  Then things happen to the humans in your pack that make caring for the dogs you do have a challenge because every moment of every day is a battle to keep those struggling humans breathing.  And, well...like a lot of things you begin your life intending to do, at some point, you wake up one morning and realize that your window of opportunity is closing.

I could accept never getting a law degree.  I could accept never writing that Great American Novel.  I could accept not being a world traveler (I'm a multiple dog owner - who's going to watch them after all).  But would I have looked back on life without a collie and find it filled with regret?

I'm sitting here realizing how lucky I truly am that I will never have to answer that question.  But my journey to being a collie owner was not without heartbreak.