We had to move back to Victoria so that Mum could be with her father. Whenever times got tough, Mum always looked to her parents for security.
Her own mother had died a few years earlier, and in the past year, we’d had our share of misfortunes too: Mum had suffered a nervous breakdown and spent many weeks in Riverview Psychiatric Hospital in Port Coquitlam, and Dad had lost his job at the radio station after the owner fired everyone after they tried to unionize. In the months since being let go, Dad had been working as a Security Guard, and didn’t enjoy it very much. It was just something he had to do to keep food on the table.
Both my parents had lost and struggled personally. Moving back to Victoria to live with our Grandfather was probably pretty hard on my Dad’s pride, but maybe everyone needed to regroup and rebuild.
We could ‘t take Sheba or any of her pups with us. Poppy lived in half a duplex with a fairly small yard – a far cry from the 77 acre transmitter site we’d lived on for the past two years. So we’d be saying goodbye to all our dogs too.
Before we moved away to Victoria, ten of Sheba’s eleven puppies were adopted into new homes, one or two at a time. It was very difficult to say goodby to them; my sister and I had named most of them. Dad had built them a large dog house with a built-in run, like small yard, enclosed with a children’s ken wire fence. The whole thing was filled with straw to keep everyone warm and dry. It had been so much better for the dogs then staying under our mobile home, where Sheba had birthed them.
I remember crawling into the large dog house, bringing cookies to my sister, who loved curling up inside with all the pups. We looked at each one, trying to come up with a unique name, saying “This one seems fat, let’s name him ‘Olio’. This black one has brown eyebrows and a moustache, so let’s call him”Grandpa.”
Sheba’s large litter was a varied mix of colours and styles: some of her pups were tan or light grey with fine, short-haired coats, some had thick curly black coats with brown muzzles and paws, reminding me of an aerdale we’d seen on the property once. One pup had a passing resemblance to a wolf. We’d actually seen a wolf-like dog at the far-end of the property, watching Sheba from a safe distance near treeline. We really thought it was a wolf. Obviously, Sheba had attracted a variety of partners.
Sheba had a little tan-coloured daughter, her youngest, which Mum named Ginger. Our Dad referred to Ginger as “the runt”. To me, that also made her kind of special – a literal underdog. I always felt like an underdog myself, being smaller (or just feeling smaller) than my peers, so I always rooted for the underdog.
Sheba and Ginger ended up being adopted out together. Dad told us that they went to live on a farm. We loved and missed all the dogs, but Sheba and Ginger especially. It was comforting to picture the two of them being free and happ booting around in the sun on a farm somwhere, loved by some new family. I pictured a big red barn, white rail fences, and the two of them running together through fields of tall grass. That’s the image I’ve always kept.
