Kings Valley Keepsake

This morning I woke up gasping for oxygen with twists in my hair.
By evening, I was breathless for another reason. I cannot believe how much my heart has ached for a collie. I cannot believe how beautiful she is, how that elegant steady dog is going to be mine. It takes my breath away.

She already has a TT and an HC…three more titles and we can be a VCH. Therapy and obedience. For certain.

I am a little afraid that I will lose the story, but I think it will actually gel and clarify as I move a little away and start to capture it. The story of Watching her in Albany and thinking how calm, how downright bored she seemed. And steady. How I kept spotting Leslie in the crowd in her blue velvet suit with Lindsay beside her.

How the rain slicked the highway to Monmouth. The sign “KINGS VALLEY COLLIES” at the bottom of the road. The rain black gravel up the hill to the gate and the smell of wet trees and winter mud, the cold edges of stones, the small pieces of blue that appeared in the sky.

The echo of collies barking in the woods. The collies running the fence with muddy legs. Walking done the road where the huge tree with the bench had stood, where Mark had gone with Simon…walking down that road with Lindsay and my muck boots and feeling like I had waited so many many years for this feeling: the leather in my hand, the wide back, the full coat moving beside me…How my whole life has wrapped itself around this image…. and how this is about to become the fabric of my life. Truly a vision materializing out of the mist.

And the sharp concern watching little Sonny’s sweet face contorting n a snarl as she poked her long nose in towards him…and yet how easy her manner was. A little persistent…but manageable. And then Lindsay stretched out on the floor near me and Flynn and Sonny right there too. Seeing Mark kiss the top of her head, realizing that he too was going to fall so deeply in love with her.