When January rolls around, I remember with fondness our family’s January dog.  We, my husband, our five children and I, lived on a fairly large piece of land with neighbors who had chickens, and horses, and various pets.  We had never owned any kind of pet except for a cat, but as the children aged up, they began begging for a dog.  Finally, I decided to purchase a Beagle puppy from a neighbor who raised them.  It seemed reasonable to me that the Beagle would be small, and because we knew our neighbors really well, the puppy would be healthy.  However, someone up there had different plans.

One afternoon in January when the kids were walking home after school, they found an abandoned dog in a ditch and took turns carrying her home.  Leaving her on the front steps, they nagged me to give her something to eat.  “She is cold and hungry, Mom,” said oldest-girl.  I did not have anything in the house for a dog to eat, but the children themselves decided that they would give the dog some breakfast cereal with milk.

I suggested that they fill only a small plastic bowl because I did not think the dog would eat Fruit Loops, which the children had chosen to feed her.  To my total surprise, the dog lapped up the Fruit Loops and milk, and the kids filled another bowl for her.

Once she had eaten her fill, the dog settled down on the front step and curled up.  However, she shook from the cold and oldest-girl asked me for something for the dog to sleep on.  Finally, I found an old blanket, which I had in my rag bag to cut up for cleaning cloths.  Lifting the dog off the top step, the kids put the blanket down and then laying the dog in the middle of the blanket, they wrapped her up.

I thought that the dog would not stay the night, but when I checked on her in the morning, she was still lying on the blanket.  Once again, the kids fed her cereal and milk, and the dog gobbled it up.   Before the children left for school, they begged me to let them keep the dog. I thought the dog was probably sick and would not live, but I gave in and said that when the kids came home from school, we would take her to the vet.

Later that afternoon, five kids and I loaded the dog in the car and drove to the vets.  The very kind animal doctor explained to us that sometime in the last month or so, the dog had given birth, and now she had a bad infection.  He offered to keep the dog at no cost for a few days to see if he could get her well.   He asked if we had named the dog, and I spontaneously said, “She looks like a pansy flower to me, with her dark eyes and yellow and brown fur.”  And that was that, the dog was Pansy from then on in.

Each afternoon the oldest-girl called the vet’s office and finally after five days, he said that Pansy was well enough to come home.  When oldest-girl asked if the doctor knew what breed Pansy could be, he laughed and told her, “A Heinz 57.”  But then he said, Pansy was probably some kind of a Collie or Shepherd mix.  When we picked her up from the animal hospital that day, all thoughts of a Beagle puppy flew out the window.

Pansy turned out to be a wonderful dog.  She never left the yard unless someone took her out.  She never barked, and if one of us approached her with something in our hands, she cowered and shivered.  It was obvious that she had been abused and finally abandoned.

One evening when I came home from teaching a class at the local community college, Pansy greeted me as I opened the car door.  Her behavior was really unusual as she would not let me step out of the car and kept getting in my way.  Finally, for the very first time, she began to bark.  She was so loud that my husband came out to investigate.  When he walked around the house, he found that a brand-new hammock, which we had just tied between two trees that day, had been cut and taken away.  Pansy had kept me from getting anywhere near the thief stealing the hammock.  We never heard her bark again.

One funny talent that Pansy had was to herd the children.  When they went swimming in the nearby sound, Pansy would jump into the water with them, nose them until she had them all bunched up together.  Then she would circle them keeping them in a group.   I thought she must have had Border Collie in her genes.

Pansy was with us for seven years, and when we had to put her to sleep, I sobbed right along with the kids.  Our kindly vet offered to bury her, and we left her in his pet cemetery.  Other dogs followed Pansy, but in my mind, none could ever really replace our January dog.