PETS INSPIRE WRITING AND TEACH NUMEROUS LIFE LESSONS

Pictured: Little Lucy in her first year at Dogwood. Her adventures filled several journals and led to bigger and more elaborate plot devices!

I used to buy two newspapers every Wednesday: one for me, and one for Momma.

I did this because I always got such a thrill out of seeing something I wrote in print.

Don’t get the wrong idea.

It’s not that I love myself that much, or try to pat myself on the back for anything. It was such a thrill because, in school, I was always told that I couldn’t write worth a flip.

Writing has always helped me to escape, to express the thoughts that crowd my dysfunctional brain. But in college, I was advised to reconsider my passion. I tried hard, but wasn’t getting anywhere. So I got a job and dropped out.

Eleven years passed. I re-entered college and decided to try again. This time my writing was diagnosed with a different malady: it had no style. I was nudged towards news writing, which bored me to tears. I got the degree, put my pen down, and moved onto other things.

One of those things was a 10 week old Labrador retriever pup named Lucy.

As Lucy grew, I kept a little journal of her mis-adventures at Dogwood. Every cute, silly thing that she did became words on a page.

Soon our fur family grew, and the adventures I penned became epic tall tales of disaster and mayhem. The original “big three”: Lucy, Charlie and Pearl, filled my life and the journal pages, with fun, love, and craziness. I began to run out of journal.

Then I found the Pet People blog on the Leaf Chronicle website. I shared my kids quirks, and their horrible habits, and found kindred spirits who were writing their own fur-boding tales.

After Hines arrived, I started writing the column in the Leaf Chronicle. The mischief of my still growing brood leaked into the regular stories about fostering, adoption, and rescue. Daisy arrived, Pearl left us, and the last two felines, Bart and Sebastian settled in, and the fodder of their absolute bonkers behavior just kept on rolling onto the page.

I became the personal biographer to my own Royal family, and they gave me more material than I could write.

Aside from the humor and mayhem, reflecting their lives in pen and ink has taught me much: patience, perseverance, faith, and the simple fact that miracles are possible.

I am a better person because the Almighty brought Lucy, Charlie, our beloved Pearl, Hines, Daisy, Bart and Sebastian into my life.

Because their bad behavior was just too good to keep to myself, I did end up being a writer of sorts.

I wondered out loud once, why had my college writing flopped so badly.

The Better Half had the final say. “It’s clean, it’s funny, it’s sad, and it’s honest, and there is nothing wrong with that.”

I may never write the great American novel, or be the next John Boy Walton, but that’s OK. I have something much more valuable: a furry cast of characters who continue to fill me with wonder, who are always up to no good,… and will never be able to hold a pen for signing litigation to sue for me for copyright.

Well----maybe Hines could.