Some of you might recall our trip to Positano, Italy last year, when we stayed at Le Sirenuse, a breathtakingly beautiful hotel that is perched on a cliff overlooking the sea. During the tourist season, the world comes to Le Sirenuse, and the owners, Antonio, Carla and Franco Sersales, have hosted many famous and glamourous people over the years. During the off-season, they like to travel to the most remote regions of the world, because they are avid wanderers, ever-hungry for the sights, sounds and tastes of foreign lands.

Well, yesterday, I received an email from Antonio who told me that he has decided to start a blog. It can be found here and you will see that in addition to being an amazing business owner and photographer, Antonio is a beautiful, beautiful writer. He and Carla are such lovers of art and language that they host an annual writer’s conference that is run by Dani Shapiro – yes, the very same Dani Shapiro who will be doing a live chat with us in a couple of weeks about her book, Devotion.

Anyway, check out Antonio’s blog, and leave a comment, either in English or Italian.

I apologize for my silence the past few days.  Very caught up in certain goings on in the city. But I’m back!

As promised, today my friend Laura Zigman has generously agreed to do a guest blog about her experience with breast cancer.  We have been discussing this issue on the blog recently and I’m so honored that Laura is willing to share her experience, wisdom, strength and good-humored, no-nonsense advice with us.  After reading her blog, you’ll no doubt want to check out her books, so click on her name above, and you will find them on her website. So, without further ado ……here’s Laura:

Photo by Greg Martin

Hi Everyone,

I’m so excited to be guest blogging today on Ann Leary’s blog. Ann and I met recently after hearing about each other for several years through mutual friends and we haven’t stop talking since. I love her blog, love her books, love her hilarious goofy humor and her enormous sense of compassion and sensitivity to others — and clearly I’m not alone.  Every time she posts something new on her blog she gets a zillion comments from her loyal readers and I know she reads each and every one of them, because a week or so ago she told me that a few of her readers had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. That’s when she asked me to guest blog about my experience with it.  She knows a bunch of women who could have shared their breast cancer story — we all do, unfortunately, right? — so I was truly flattered that she asked me. But mostly I was amazed by her lovely and thoughtful idea.  This – building a sense of community – is blogging at its best.

And so here we are. I’ve been thinking for days what I would write about; what I would focus on; what, as people say these days, my “message” would be. Whether it should be funny or serious, whether it would focus on medical issues or emotional issues. And I realized that the topic I want to focus on — how not to feel like you’re failing at cancer – is the most important message I can share. If I can keep one women from feeling like she’s doing something – if not everything – wrong when she has breast cancer, then I’ll feel like I earned my spot on Ann’s blog.

First, let me start by giving you the broad-strokes of my story:

Almost four years ago, at 44, I was diagnosed with DCIS in my left breast. It was caught after I had a routine breast MRI (at my request: my mother had a double mastectomy when she was 42). Because there were several spots of DCIS throughout the breast a lumpectomy wasn’t an option: a mastectomy was necessary. That was the bad news: the good news was that because it was caught so early – Stage 0 – I wouldn’t need chemo or radiation after surgery. I was also advised to consider having my second breast removed since women who have breast cancer in one breast are much more likely to develop it in the second breast. I was also briefed on the various kinds of reconstruction options: implants, or the “tummy tuck kind” (ßa farce! Keep reading and I’ll explain). Two months after my diagnosis, I had the surgery – a double mastectomy with simultaneous tram-flap reconstruction. I was in surgery for 12 hours, in bed for 4 months, and couldn’t get out of a chair without being pulled out of it by my husband for almost a year.

Feeling like I was “failing” at breast cancer – and to clarify, the feeling wasn’t coming from inside me, it was coming from outside me — started almost immediately and continued on throughout my entire experience.  And whenever I experience something I always assume that I can’t possibly be so weird or so special that I’m the only one experiencing it. No matter what I did or said or chose, someone always had an opinion about what I was doing: or, to be more exact, that what I was doing was wrong – and I suspect most women feel that way, too. So what I decided to do is  provide you with a  map of The Breast Cancer Minefield. I hope you don’t end up needing it but if you do, unfold it and hopefully it will help you avoid these “You’re wrong!” pitfalls:

* Don’t feel like a complete hypochondriac if you are paranoid about getting breast cancer.

This falls under the No matter what you do is wrong! category. If you’re one of those women who is vigilant about getting mammograms and wants any available test for detection (like I was), do not change. This hyper-vigilance is a great thing. Ignore people who make fun of you for being such a breast-cancer nerd. Stand firm with your doctors when they try to talk you out of extra tests because you just had a clean mammogram or don’t have a family history of breast cancer. For one thing, mammograms are only 69% effective at detecting breast cancer, and for another, women who have no family history of breast cancer are only slightly less at risk than women who do have a family history of it.

* Don’t feel like a total loser if you haven’t been a complete paranoid hypochondriac about getting breast cancer.

A few years ago, one of the most famous advice givers in the world and a good friend of mine  – Amy Dickinson, who writes the nationally-syndicated Ask Amy column for the Chicago Tribune – admitted to me that she was finally, in her late 40s, having her first mammogram. Besides sweating out the test results (she was fine), she was full of shame and embarrassment and humiliation because she’d waited so long to do something she knew she should have done years ago.  I remember her emailing me from the waiting room and confessing her failure to take the most basic screening test for what runs in her family as if it were a sin and a crime. So. If you’re one of those women like Amy who hasn’t yet had a mammogram, do not don a hairshirt and self-flagellate. For whatever reasons you had for putting it off  – fear, fear, or fear – you are human and you must forgive yourself.  You must also, however, go get that mammogram now!

* Don’t feel like a complete idiot if you don’t (fully) understand your diagnosis.

One of the most ridiculous and almost comical parts of my story was that for the first week after getting the results of my needle biopsy and for almost an hour into my consultation with my surgeon (and head of the Sagoff Breast Centre in Boston where I live), I didn’t realize I actually had cancer. I’ll pause now so you can laugh, but I swear, when the radiologist first called to tell me that that I had DCIS – Ductal Carcinoma in Situ – she said, “Don’t let the word ‘cancer’ scare you – it’s not cancer. It’s pre-cancer.” I know she said that because I wrote it down, but as it turned out DCIS is cancer (duh) even though in my case it was caught so early it was deemed Stage 0 (I’d never heard of Stage 0 cancer.)  Worse than telling family and friends that I had breast cancer was the embarrassment of having to explain why I’d told them I didn’t have cancer the first time around. My excuse? I was nervous and cancer is confusing.

* Don’t feel like a complete moron if you don’t know everything there is to know about breast cancer within a week of getting your diagnosis

One of the first things you’re told after you’re told you have cancer is to learn everything you possibly can about your disease. The non-technical term for this bossy order is to “self-educate” because apparently you’re expected to “know more than your surgeon” about treatment options without going to medical school for 20 years. As with any piece of advice, the nugget here is a good one: you should find out as much as you can as quickly as you can so you can understand what the hell your doctor is telling you (unlike me who got all confused) and so you can find out the best surgeons and hospitals for your particular kind of cancer. However, you’re only human. You’re not going to be able to Google your way to a career as a surgical oncologist. Failing to be as smart as your doctor – who is a doctor because they went to medical school – is not a failure.  You’re just a (smart) person (with access to a computer) who got cancer.  Act accordingly.

* Don’t feel bad about yourself if you choose to have a single mastectomy or a double mastectomy.

This one sounds weird, I’m sure – maybe it’s the word “choose” – but a lot of what happens when you have cancer is making choices about how you’re going to treat your cancer. There’s lots of conflicting research out there, but there’s one thing that’s a complete certainty: No matter what you choose, someone will think you’re wrong and crazy for choosing it. For instance, there was a spate of articles last year in the New York Times and other publications about how women were being “overly aggressive” in their surgical options for breast cancer. Mostly they were talking about women who choose to have a double mastectomy when cancer is only found in one breast and how that was verging on the ridiculous because women were clearly “confused” about prophylactic mastectomies reducing recurrences of breast cancer. The thing is: the research shows that if you have cancer in one breast you are more likely to develop it in the second breast (which has nothing to do with recurrence). Which means that choosing to have a double mastectomy is a valid option to pick. I’m not saying it’s the right option to pick – I happened to pick it for myself and as it turned out, cancer was found in my “healthy” breast in the final surgical pathology report that came back two weeks after my surgery – but either option is valid. Whether you choose to have a single mastectomy or a double is your choice. You’re not over-reacting if you have a double, and you’re not under-reacting if you don’t.

* Don’t feel bad about yourself if you’re not one of those people who think their breast cancer is “a gift.”

Please. Don’t get me started on this gigantic topic. This is the motherlode of cancer failure out there and it’s heaped on anyone who doesn’t have a 100% positive attitude 100% of the time.  Barbara Ehrenreich, a brilliant writer whose most recent book is “Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” has a chapter in the book devoted to the notion of  “enforced cheerfulness” when it comes to cancer. For some reason, lots and lots and lots of people will try to get you to believe that cancer is a “fight” and a “battle” you can “win” if only you have a positive attitude. Try telling that to the families of all our loved ones who died from their cancer – try telling them that their daughter or mother or sister or aunt died because…she wasn’t positive enough. Again, while there’s a great nugget here – be hopeful and optimistic in the face of adversity – everything around that nugget is a set up for an epic fail: unfortunately, we can’t control everything. And one of the things we can’t control is whether or not we will live or die from cancer.  Walk for The Cure if you want to, Wear Pink and Buy Pink if you want to, think of your cancer as A Gift if you want to. But people should be allowed to have their own feelings about their own cancer. It’s normal to be sad or angry or tired or exhausted or negative or pessimistic when you have cancer.  Don’t let people tell you how to feel when you have cancer.  And don’t think there’s something wrong with you if you have days when you feel down.  There isn’t. Feel your feelings. They’ll pass.

* Don’t feel bad if you don’t want to become part of the official “cancer community.”

People grieve in their own way, and people handle cancer in their own way.  While sharing feelings and thoughts – like right here on Ann’s blog – is a fantastic way to share information and feel comforted by other people in similar circumstances – you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.  People kept telling me to join a support group but I didn’t want to because in my case, I didn’t really feel like I fit into a support group: most breast cancer groups were filled with women who were going through chemo and radiation and were dealing with all the side effects of those treatments. I wasn’t.  Luckily. Group-sharing isn’t for everyone. Sharing just with close friends – or strangers on great breast-cancer websites like the one I used to write for, www.mybreastcancernetwork.com — is okay, too.

* Don’t (implicitly) trust female doctors just because they’re female.

OK, listen, If you pay attention to one thing in my long blog entry please pay attention to this one: just because your doctor is a woman doesn’t mean she’s giving you the best advice or that everything she says is true. I don’t know how to communicate how important this is because this is how so many women think. It’s how I thought! So when my female internist tried to talk me out of having a breast MRI (even though I had a family history of breast cancer) and when she tried to talk me out of having the BRCA test for the breast cancer genes (even though I had a family history of breast cancer and the test is free to Jews like me [because Jewish women have a higher rate of breast cancer] and to many non-Jews with a strong family history), I almost agreed. Because she was a woman and of course a woman would be on my side and have my best interests at heart! NOT. And when my fantastic and brilliant breast surgeon and plastic surgeon – both women – told me that the recovery time for the gigantically huge reconstruction surgery I was going to have was 4-6 weeks, I almost believed them. Because they were women and of course women would be completely straight with me! NOT. Question all doctors all the time – male or female. They may not intend to be manipulative or misleading, but they often are. I refused to take no for an answer on the MRI, but I believed the revised 6-8 week recovery time I was told when I questioned the original estimate.

* Don’t feel bad if you don’t want reconstruction.

These days, it’s almost a given that every woman who has a mastectomy or double mastectomy is going to have reconstructive surgery – either with implants or through the use of their own fat and muscle. And yes, this is terrific: modern medicine at its best. Plastic surgeons can do amazing things these days and often times the results of breast reconstruction are really pretty great. But I’ve often wondered since The Year I Spent in Bed After My Reconstruction Surgery whether or not I’d do it again.  And I can honestly say this: I don’t know.  I do know this, though: I would think about it a lot more than I did.  At the time I spent all my energy deciding on what type of reconstructive surgery I was going to have — implants or the “tummy-tuck” version (which is far from the fabulous make-over procedure they lead you to believe it is). I spent zero time deciding on whether or not I was going to even have reconstruction. It’s a huge decision – in some cases, the reconstruction surgery is harder to heal from then the actual cancer surgery – so give it a lot of thought. Even though the results can be great, you don’t have to have reconstruction if you don’t want to.

* Don’t feel like getting breast cancer is a death sentence.

Because it’s not.  You don’t have to run out and buy a Pink Panther suit and be bullied into cancer-cheerfulness, but you don’t have to think a breast cancer diagnosis is the end of your life, either. For most women, it’s just a phase, a stopover, a place on the map we find ourselves and hadn’t planned on visiting. For most women, it’s a place we’re just passing through.

Last night I had dinner with my friend Candace Bushnell.  Candace, as you probably all know is the author of the famous book, Sex and the City, which spawned the hit TV series and film, and she also has written several other bestsellers including Lipstick Jungle (also a subsequent series), Four Blondes and most recently, One Fifth Avenue.

Well, Candace has a new book coming out which I’ve read and am very excited about because  its a “Young Adult” title, and it’s a) smart, b)  funny and c)  not about vampires. It’s called The Carrie Diaries.  It’s about Carrie Bradshaw when she was in high school, before she got all boy crazy and shoe-obsessed.  It comes out at the end of April so keep your eyes open for it.

And time for another installment of The Real House Dogs of Litchfield County.  In this episode,  the dogs try to sit and stay.  Lulu, the dog with “learning differences” has problems with impulse control, so you will see that she breaks the stay pretty quickly.  There is some crazy camera action as I correct her, then when I step back to shoot the three of them again,  I discover that Holly has thought of something funny to do.  Her wonderful flair for improv and camera-stealing tendencies are starting to try the patience of the other girls. Stay tuned.

I’m a little hesitant to blog about our puppy AGAIN.  You all will tell me if I’m getting to be a bore, right? I feel like the annoying mom who keeps showing pictures of her baby to all her friends.  But just …please :

This was Holly before our hike today.  Yes, she likes to sleep on the center console of the car!  Here you can see how she rests her hind feet on my legs and sleeps against the gear shift.  I think she likes the vibration:

I know.  I know.

Well, she was resting up for her big hike in the snow.  We’ve been hiking with my friend Marcia and her gorgeous puppy Gus.  Today Gus was sporting a very jaunty vest, due to the snow:

And Marcia’s beautiful daughter Ava joined us because she had a snow day.  Holly was rather taken with Ava:

Holly would like to be carried on snowy hikes.  It’s a lot of work for those little legs, but I encourage her to walk most of the way.  The whole point is to tire her out.

Eventually, though, if she starts to shiver, I end up tucking her into my jacket. It makes her happy:

Me too!

I was in the city today and had plans to meet a friend for lunch.  I noticed that the stores on Fifth Avenue already have their holiday decorations up.  Seemed odd on such a mild day.  But beautiful.

I drove past this little park on East 51st street that I had never seen before:

After I parked, I walked past it and saw people enjoying themselves in the area.  I don’t know if you can see it in the photo, but there’s a lovely waterfall in the back.  There was a big sign explaining that it was a “private space open to the public” and there was a long list of things you could and could not do.  You could eat this, but not that, drink this, not that, etc. Well, with the beautiful trees and the waterfall, I decided it was the nicest private space open to the public I have ever seen, so I took a few photos and was careful to eat and drink nothing.

After lunch I brought my friend back to look at the space.  All the people had gone, but I noticed a sign that I hadn’t see when I took the other pictures.

Still can’t read it?  It said this:

Okay, Private Space Open To The Public, get over yourself!  I mean you’re beautiful and everything, but no photos?  You’re too important to be photographed?

I now am going to make it my mission to mark the seasons by the changes in the Private Space Open To The Public. I am now officially its paparazzi stalker.

On Friday, I drove to Glastonbury, CT to meet up with three old friends –  Jackie and Jill Desrochers and Wendy O’Connor.  We all first became friends when I moved to Marblehead, MA, in the 8^th grade.  Jackie, Wendy and I used to ride together and Wendy went on to become a rather successful young eventer and then she moved to Ireland after college.  Though Wendy and I have stayed more or less in touch, I haven’t seen Jackie or Jill since junior high school.  That’s Jill on the far left, Wendy, me and Jackie.

So, as I drove to Glastonbury, where Jill now lives, I thought about all the old times with these dear friends and I became very nostalgic and a little emotional.  These girls were my friends at what was really the end of an innocent time – I know it sounds trite but its true.  Wendy and I used to spend hours in her room, sprawled across her bed, listening to Elton John and studying Millers tack catalogs, talking about all the things we’d need to buy when we bought our first horse.  Wendy got her first horse soon thereafter – it would be a few decades before I got mine.  Wendy had two German Shepherd dogs named Cory and Terry, I had two dogs: Beau and Gus, and Jackie and Jill had this amazing little dog called Putz. Yes, Putz.   Putz was a wonder dog.  He was a medium-sized mongrel who I met for the first time when he came soaring over the very high bottom half of the Dutch door that led into the Desrochers’ home. He knew about a hundred tricks.  We all lived on Marblehead Neck, which is like an island connected to the mainland by a causeway and every day “Putzers” could be seen by the morning commuters, making his way across the causeway to the mainland, where he would do his day’s business (there were several generations of Marblehead mutts who bore his trademark splotched coat and cocky attitude)  and then in the evening he could be seen trotting back home across the causeway.  He frequented Old Town, loved hanging around the landing with the other town ne’er-do-wells, meeting up with old mates and new girlfriends, checking out the shops, getting into scraps, etc.  Things were different then.  There were no leash laws and it wasn’t at all unusual to see dogs wandering along the aisles of Penni’s, the local grocery store.

Well, when I pulled up to Jill’s house, my head was all full of memories of our animals, and the fun we had and the trouble we got into and I thought I might just burst into tears of joy at the sight of my old friends, but when I climbed out of my truck I was distracted from my nostalgic reverie by a sound that I at first thought was a siren, I’m not kidding – it was LOUD and high and long and shrill, and as I drew closer to the house it became even louder and now sounded like the shrieking of tortured prisoners or dogs.  It was scary.  I was about to step back toward my truck when suddenly the door flew open and it was my dear old friends, just shrieking with laughter at me and my giant pickup truck.  I can’t tell you what a coven of screaming, laughing witches we were for the next four hours, as we looked at our old yearbooks and tried to explain to Jill’s teenaged daughters why we all looked like boys.  We tried to explain, but really, we don’t even understand it.  Everybody in our junior high school yearbook with the exception of Wendy V and Katie W (the prettiest and most popular) looked like boys EXCEPT FOR THE BOYS, who all looked like girls.

Last night I went to a dinner party to celebrate the birthday of my dear friend Marcia, and today we took Denis to meet somebody:

Today I received an email from the original man of the blog himself, our very own Alan, who very gently and quietly reminded me that his friend, author David K. Leff, would be reading and signing books at my favorite bookstore this afternoon.  So off I went at 2:00 to hear David Leff talk about his book, Deep Travel: In Thoreau’s Wake on the Concord and Merrimack.  His talk and his book are about what he calls, “a methodology for looking.”  They’re about looking mindfully at the everyday places and things and thereby gaining an understanding of their history and man’s part in it.

I lifted part of a review of the book from Amazon: “Leff follows Thoreau’s paddle-strokes not only by traveling the same rivers, but by creating a ‘fusion of inward and outward experience,’ incorporating essay-like musing about time and place—and the power of both stories and history to evoke them. Deep Travel is a primer on the art of ‘sight-seeking’ and ‘forensic observation,’ and Leff offers penetrating readings of the river, the vernacular landscape, and Thoreau.”—Ian Marshall, author, Peak Experiences: Walking Meditations on Literature, Nature, and Need and Walden by Haiku

David’s talk was very interesting and now I’m dying to get started on the book.  Outside the Hickory Stick we all posed for photos for the blogs.  David Leff has one too.  It’s here.

Now, I hesitate to show these pictures, but I will, as it will serve as a lesson to all you ladies.  This afternoon, as I headed out after hours squinting at my computer, I looked in the mirror and considered applying makeup.  Just a little mascara.  Then I actually thought: why bother, I’ll just have to take it off later.  And I also had the completely delusional thought: at a certain age, women look quite lovely without any makeup at all.

Somebody actually said that to me recently.  That women look “softer” without makeup at a certain age. Well, how’s this for “soft”?

That’s me with Alan, above. Yes, my face is so soft that my eyes have completely disappeared.

Here I am with David Leff:

Yes, I’m displaying my man hands.  No, I don’t usually wear my wedding ring.  Yes, I’m married.  Any other questions?

David Leff also writes poetry and so I will close with a poem that I lifted from his website:

Halftones

by David K Leff

Bathed in drizzle at dawn, I walk down to the river without
coffee or shower, the haze of slumber not yet fully lifted.
I’m quieted by a world hushed in a glaze of moisture. Light
slowly leaks into a dingy sky, creeps silently without wind
as fugitive wisps of ragged clouds drag mist across hills of
dew-lit grass. All is a muted charcoal smudge,
a sketchbook landscape.  Deep within the fog, on a leaden
millpond framed by a fretwork of gray tree-branch
shadows, geese softly echo each other, hoarsely calling
to ignite a pallid morning growing as vivid as the video
dreams that stirred me from sleep.

Photo by Devin Leary

We have had a lovely fall weekend, despite the fact that Denis wasn’t here.  Dev and I went into the city to attend  the birthday party of our longtime friend Richard LaGravenese.  Richard and Denis went to college together and then Richard wrote the movie, The Ref, which Denis starred in with Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis.  Since The Ref, we have remained very good friends with Richard, his wife Ann, and their daughter Lily, who is the same general age as our kids..

Lily is now a beautiful college student, majoring in musical theater and she sang “Unforgettable” to her father, which made me cry.  So sweet.  But it was a late night and it seriously took me all day yesterday to recover from the excitement and lack of sleep.

Now, I’m back to work on the animal book proposal.  It’s easy to be inspired when surrounded by your subjects, as I am.

Photo by Devin Leary

I get lots of feedback.

Here, Snoopy is trying to slam the laptop shut onto my fingers.  He doesn’t think much of my writing and believes I should get a day job.

Mark likes anything that is written about him.

Photo by Devin Leary

Many thanks to Elise, who mentioned this interesting New York Times piece in a recent comment.  It was in today’s paper, and discusses the ways scientists are learning that dogs are useful, not just for the blind but for people with many disabilities.  It says, in part:

“…over the last several years a growing body of evidence, culled from small scientific studies of dogs’ abilities to do things like detect cancer or seizures, solve complex problems (complex for a dog, anyway), and learn language suggests that they may know more than we thought they did. Their apparent ability to tune in to the needs of psychiatric patients, turning on lights for trauma victims afraid of the dark, reminding their owners to take medication and interrupting behaviors like suicide attempts and self-mutilation, for example, has lately attracted the attention of researchers.”

Very interesting.

Photo by Devin Leary

Well, this one doesn’t have to turn on lights or palpate my breasts for lumps or talk me off of window ledges or any of the other amazing things these fancy therapy dogs can do, but she is a great shrink.

She’s just a good listener.  She doesn’t believe in telling you what to do, but, rather, she listens quietly while you wail and sob and whine and complain and she lets you come to your own resolution, in your own time.  She’s like a blank canvas – allowing her patient (she just has the one – me – but I’m a full-time job) to project all her anxieties and fears and sadness onto her, which she absorbs, and reflects nothing back but an unconditional and all-abiding love. She’s a great, great shrink, and her hourly rate can’t be beat.

Photo by Phil Holland

I can’t bear to have that depressing grey photo in the previous entry appear at the top of my page.  Not with that depressing grey header. Fortunately, my friend, poet/professor Phil Holland has just emailed me these beautiful photographs from Greece.

He wrote, “On a warm day like this you can almost hear the pomegranates slowly ripping apart to expose their seeds like the baskets of rubies in the Sultan’s old palace in Istanbul.”

Very nice.

Photo by Phil Holland

The other day, I visited my friend Charlotte. Why?  Because Charlotte  rescues dogs from a kill shelter and one of her recent rescues just had a litter of puppies.

As many of you know, Denis has put a freeze on the acquistion of new dogs in the Leary household.  The kids and I are always whining about getting a new dog, but Denis always brings us around to his sensible viewpoint, which is that we have a very amiable pack at present, never a growl or raised hackle between them.  They’re all trained and relatively well-behaved and there is almost enough room in the bed for Denis and me to stretch out between them at night.

So I didn’t tell him I was going to look at the puppies.

I just went for a little look.

Well, I needed to see that Charlotte had everything well in hand!

When I got our of my car, I was greeted by Charlotte’s pack of small rescue dogs and in their midst was a wonderful female version of our former Pongo – a scrappy terrier mutt.

“Oh my God, I love her,” I said, pointing to the terrier, and Charlotte said, “She’s the puppies’ mom, Peanut!”

So into the house we went to look at the puppies.  Peanut trotted ahead of us and turned her head around every few seconds to bark and yap at me.  Her barks weren’t aggressive, nor were they entirely friendly.  She was stating, in no uncertain terms, that she had her eye on me; that if I thought she was going to let me anywhere near her puppies, I had another think coming; that I’d better just watch myself; that she knew a puppy stealer when she saw one; that she didn’t want my germs on her puppies, etc.  We proceeded through the house listening to Peanut’s list of things I could and could not do, and finally arrived in the bathroom where the puppies’ whelping box is kept. There we saw that one of the puppies’ elderly foster uncles (a portly and grizzled chihuahua mix) had stepped into the box to have a sniff. Peanut leapt into the box and sent him on his way with a long, low admonishing growl, then she frantically sniffed and checked all her pups, looking up at us every few seconds as if to say, “Did you see that?  That disgusting ….male …was in the box with my babies.  Did you see? Did you see that?”

After she gave her babies a snack and licked them all clean, she was much more relaxed and allowed me to hold them.  I want to go back and take some better photos and maybe we can help Charlotte place these gorgeous pups in wonderful homes.

Charlotte is very special.  She takes in dogs that are on death row at a Waterbury, CT shelter, and she has had great success placing them.  She ends up keeping some of the very old dogs that she can’t place.  She had found a home for Peanut soon after she rescued her, but when the prospective adopters learned she was pregnant they changed their minds.

After learning about the pregnancy, Charlotte decided to keep Peanut and the puppies until the puppies are weaned. On October 1st, Peanut climbed into her whelping box and began delivering her puppies, while Charlotte and the other dogs quietly watched.  She is a very dedicated and fastidious mother, dear Peanut, and has wonderful manners in the house.  I told Charlotte that if she doesn’t become too attached to Peanut, and still wants to place her after the puppies find homes, well…..

I showed Denis the photos last night.

“NO PUPPIES,”  he said.

Then he said, “The mom is cute.”  He asked me to hand over the computer so he could have a better look.

“She’s a Pongo, alright,” he said, smiling.