by Sandra Lee
My ever-supportive, dog-loving dad, Dixie Lee, deserves a very special mention. He married a beautiful woman, Valda May, whose love of dogs became a family trait. Dogs were a part of my family before I was. Our first family dog was a magnificent mongrel, as have been the three that followed, Ruffles, Zak and Jake. The first, Poncie (named after an Hawaiian actor), arrived about ten months before I did, just as my brother Gavin began crawling. There is a photograph to prove it. My father gives it pride of place, on the kitchen bench in the same house to which that first pup would return. The photograph features my mother, beaming from ear to ear, crawling after a litter of pups trying to choose which mutt she and her baby boy will take home. The choice was made for her: by the pup. He chose my brother. Whenever I look at that photograph now, with my mother gone seventeen long years and decades too soon, her face lit like sunlight as she gently herds the pups, I pinpoint where my dog lover-ness came from. It is genetic.
Final thanks must go to another mad dog lover, JP Clemence. I am fortunate to have a wonderful husband who makes me laugh and who agreed to upturn our lives and take in our own rescue hound, Seisia. She was a fearful and starved pup covered with mange when our neighbour, Chris Hooke, thankfully and heroically plucked her from a tiny town called Seisia in Cape York. We are even more thankful that he couldn’t keep her.
Seisia is a black mutt of unknown pedigree(s) and age. She has a grey muzzle, a white zig-zag blaze on her chest and was undeniably naughty the first time I met her. But when she disobediently leapt up on me and raced around with a mouthful of toilet paper, I was hooked. It is almost as if a subsonic ripple of energy (or was it love?) had passed from me to her and back again. I am never happier than with husband and hound.
Sandra Lee
Sydney, 2011
