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News from Bird Bottom Farm
Dogs and Diaries
 | | Three dogs joined Ursula Kilner in her yard last month to wish “Happy Holidays” to Voice readers. The five other dogs and three cats with whom she shares her home were unavailable at the time. Photo/Robin Gourd |
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By Ursula B.G. Kilner, Salisbury
For years I have admired friends who kept diaries, as I have always petered out each year around March at the latest. Right now I am completing four years of diary keeping, and the fascination of looking back and reading what I have put down on any particular date brings back that day very clearly. Why did I not discover this earlier in life? Who knows! We continue to uncover fascinating things about ourselves and the world around us.
I just received a book, Which Dog For Me? Maybe life at Bird Bottom Farm would have been much different had I read this before I got into animal rescue and multiple dogs. The one thing about Christmas lies in remembering what dogs have done on Christmas over the years. Now I wish I had kept diaries back years ago. When we lived in two and a half rooms on the fifth floor in New York City, I had to be content with a cocker spaniel who was let run on the roof of the next apartment building. (All the buildings had originally been brownstone family houses, so the roof of one would be lower then the roof of the next one, providing a kind of playground for this dog.) Once in a while, years later, I would ask myself, "What dog did we have in New York City?"
It seemed, as time went on, that we had always had dogs. Not true. Korea came along and my husband was recalled to active service, this time as a professor of English at West Point. We got our quarters in the fall of 1951—eight lovely rooms in a set of quarters built in 1862 for one captain. By the time we moved there the quarters had been divided, provided housing for two majors. (Inflation had already set in!) We had a chance to get a half-grown Dalmatian and I went and got her. She sported the name of Camouflage, or Cammie for short. Because of her medical problems we found her a suitable mate named Jigger, the firehouse dog in Highland Falls, the town just outside the West Point gates. Cammie and Jigger produced ten Dalmatian puppies and we kept one, Blots … for inkblots. This was the beginning of our household with multiple dogs. At West Point each set of quarters was allowed two dogs. Of course we had eleven dogs when the puppies were small, but in ten weeks we were down to the two dogs, Cammie and Blots.
What brought all this vividly to mind was a memory of our first Christmas with Cammie and Blots. We had a Christmas tree, and I went all out with looped tinsel and glass ball decorations, complete with a silver glass spire atop the tree—a live one, as manmade trees then looked very fake. Cammie and Blots watched the tree trimming with great interest. The only problem was the romp they had each afternoon during cold weather. Their romp went through the living room, around the dining room table, back through the living room and into the bedroom, over the bed and back to the living room and around again. Just as I finished the tree they began their romp. I went to the kitchen to start supper and heard a loud crash. When I dashed into the living room I saw what had happened. The two Dalmatians had romped around the tree, caught their necks in the looped tinsel and brought the whole decorated tree down. To make a pun, they both looked "hang-dogged." They knew they had done something naughty but did not quite understand what. That was the end of glass ornaments, and a new era of plastic and wood ornaments for the Christmas tree took over.
That Christmas is etched deep in my memory, but I did not keep a diary then, so what the next Christmas was like I cannot recall. We all have moments of saying to ourselves, "If only I had done …" and now, of course, it is too late. Yet the past four years have really resulted in my keeping a diary, just because I couldn't remember specific events and when this or that happened. There is a saying that something good comes of almost everything. Not being able to remember individual events and when they happened finally did prompt me to keep a diary.
I hate to think of all the Christmas Days and celebrations I remember only as a blur, one event spread over many years. Yet the first Christmas with the two dogs remains a very distinct memory. At least that Christmas will be remembered for its unique event.
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