A quote: “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” ~~ E. M. Forster
I’ll start with a story …
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Mid-twenties, bad break-up, quit job, moved home. Or not quite home. The family summer cottage up a canyon within shouting distant of the ocean. Decidedly primitive – well-water, outhouse, no electricity and unseen from the highway below.
In other words, a perfect place to stew, rage, and eat worms.
My second week, I heard whimpering down the path to the beach and found a ball of fluff in the tall grass.
A puppy covered in burs and foxtails. I was shocked, picking her up and hurrying back to the cottage. I fed her scrambled eggs and carefully combed out her coat. Within the hour I was besotted.
We stayed the whole summer … Lucy grew into her big feet, a mutt of questionable parentage. I left the door open for her and she never strayed far. Sunrise and sunset, we walked the beach. She got me through the summer, to fall when we both went back to the real world of work and walks on a leash.
She was a great judge of character and when we both fell in love with Bill, Lucy walked the aisle, too.
There was always summer on the beach. The three of us, then four, then five. Lucy bounding along the surf with “her” children. Sleeping snuggled between sleeping bags on the cottage’s floor.
Her muzzle was gray, her eyes cloudy when her back legs started giving out. Lucy never complained, even as Bill carried her in his arms from the cottage to the beach for one last sunset.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
Cameron says: The memory is crystal clear to me. Her uncle had a beach house and he was willing to let us use it since as newlyweds, we didn’t have a lot of money. I’d never really been much of a beach type but the way her eyes lit up when her uncle passed the keys over sealed the deal.
It was on the second day when the dog came up to us. There was no collar and with this being the off season, it was obvious he’d been abandoned. He took to my wife quickly and it looked like we were going to have a dog. Not the normal souvenir but that’s fine.
Day three and the two of them were watching the beach. My wife looked at peace and I knew that I’d be working hard to maintain that.
As one, they turned to look at me. She smiled at me warmly and the dog’s ears perked up. I walked over to them, coffees in hand and joined them-
The doctor turned off the machines and looked at me. “I’m so sorry,” he said quietly.
I saw the smile on dad’s face. I guess he and mom were together again.
It was the summer before my senior year of high school. My folks had decided to go trailering through Michigan, up to the Straits of Macinac. We found a really nice campground right on the shores of Lake Huron where it was actually cheaper to stay five days than the three we’d originally planned. So we had a lot more time than we’d expected to explore the area, going up to St. Ignace and looking at the quaint little shops up there, things like that.
We’d originally planned to go to Macinac Island on our second day — but rain was moving in by afternoon, and my folks didn’t want to have the main part of the trip ruined by rain, so they’d decided that we should spend our first full day here just resting and enjoying being up here. My brothers got involved in a pickup game of basketball with a bunch of the other kids their age, but I was feeling rather disappointed and would rather stay by myself. So I want out to the lakeshore to watch the waves come in, each just a few inches tall, and imagine that I was a pixie looking at them like they were rollers on the Pacific.
Although all dogs were supposed to be leashed and kept in their owners’ campsites, there were several dogs that wandered around loose. Nobody ever said anything about them, and I wondered if they belonged to the owners of the campground. About midmorning, one of them came over, giving me a big doggy grin.
I almost told him to go home, but the words stuck in my throat. He didn’t try to jump on me or anything, just sat down beside me and looked out at the lake.
Around noon the gray wall of rain came across the water, and I had to head back to the trailer. Not that I would’ve been able to stay out there much longer, since it was almost time for lunch.
I spent a fair amount of time out on that beach the remaining evenings of our stay, but I never did see that dog again. Even weirder, I described him to some of the people who worked at the campground, and they all insisted that there had been a dog like that, but he went to Rainbow Bridge at a ripe old age the previous year.
It’s been almost twelve years, but I still think of it sometimes. I’ve never been one to believe in ghosts, even if I do like a good ghost story told around a campfire in a dark woods at night — but sometimes I wonder if just maybe there really is more to the world than we know.
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