The Red Admiral Butterfly (Vanessa atalanta) is supposed to be quite common in our area,
yet, I don’t ever recall seeing one in my garden before.
I guess the Butterfly Bush was just too tempting!
What’s mine is yours little friend. Come back and visit soon.
Typically, a bee will travel about two miles in search of food. When nectar or pollen is scarce, the journey can extend two to three times as far. To a tiny bee, that is a great distance flight and a long, exhausting way home to the hive.
For the first part of their lives, “home” for Lilly and Lucy was the streets of Pakistan. Scavenging, starving, relying on the mercy of strangers and garbage scraps.
Home for Erika and Gwen is the United States. But as Foreign Service gypsies, their current home is Pakistan. They have traveled the world to often dangerous places: Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, and more. The locals can be hostile, and, as auditors, they are not exactly welcomed by their peers, either. It’s a lonely and isolating life filled with security alerts and lockdowns, but they find the work fulfilling as their purpose is to ensure that foreign aid gets to those most in need. With frequent reassignments, they try not to make attachments. But when Lilly and Lucy crossed their paths, they simply failed to look away.
Lilly was one at the time, half-starved and missing a back paw. Lucy was an eight-month-old bag of bones, staying by the side of her mother and her latest litter of puppies. Erika and Gwen took them in, nursed them back to health, and they found a new home together. The two became inseparable.
When both Erika and Gwen learned they would be redeployed to new posts and tiny apartments without the benefit of yards, the panic set in. Against all good sense, they had fallen firmly in love with these dogs, now three and four, and there was no way they were abandoning them. The expat community is large and, like the military, they do their best to have each other’s backs. Erika and Gwen explored every avenue but were quickly running out of options.
A distant connection and recent adopter suggested Homeward Bound. As difficult as it would be to give the girls up, they knew that a permanent home was what they needed and deserved. They reached out to us, hoping that, if their dogs couldn’t pass for Goldens, they might find some golden hearts among us. Of course, we said “yes,” which is how Lilly and Lucy began the longest way “home.”
I wrote about them for the rescue to begin to get the word out.
On Thursday, after two days’ journey across one-third of the globe, Lilly and Lucy arrived in San Francisco where Judy, one of our transport team members, and I met them.
Tired and confused, it took almost three hours to get them off the plane and out of customs. They still had to endure the long crawl through rush hour traffic back to the Sacramento Valley. It was nearly dark when we got back to the rescue, a twelve hour day.
We let them out of the van and took them to the Park, where they ran – and ran – and ran.
I don’t think they had experienced that much open space since their days in the streets. Exhausted, we gave them dinner and put them to bed – together.
They have adjusted well,
enjoying the open country space,
their feeders and dog walkers,
and their visitors: the couple that connected them to us.
For Erika, Gwen, Lilly and Lucy, it has been a very long and stressful journey. There is one more to go. After we have a chance to spend some time with the dogs and gain a full understanding of their needs, we will help them to find their most important home: their forever home.
With the Sierras above us still capped with El Nino’s snowfall, the rice growers have flooded and planted most of their fields this year – turning Homeward Bound into lakefront property for a few months. The more than 500,000 acres of the valley’s rice lands are located along the Pacific Flyway, and the flooded fields provide critical migration corridors for shoreline birds and others.
Looking out from the garden, I saw this long dark line of what looked like turkeys pecking at the marshy field.
Sadly, I did not have my long lens (naturally!), but I could get close enough to ID them as White-faced Ibis – a bird I had not seen in the fields before.
Apparently, their numbers declined dangerously in the 60’s and 70’s due to DDT contamination and habitat destruction. The inland population has rebounded somewhat in the past few decades, but the pesticides used in rice farming are still a concern.
These dark birds with their long bills and metallic coloring wade through the fields picking their way through shallow waters looking for a meal: invertebrates, crustaceans, frogs, and fishes.
Until, you spook them, of course!
In the garden, we make life, death, and death-delaying decisions all the time. For the Iris to live, the snails must die.
For the bees and butterflies to thrive, we endure bugs.
And although a plant’s whole purpose is to flower and set seed, we take its buds to extend its season.
A garden isn’t really nature; it’s working with – and sometimes, against it, to achieve our wishes.
With people and our animals, we often work against nature as well. But life-extending and ending decisions are obviously different. Key factors enter the equation: how much can they – or we – bear? Is it better to say goodbye today, or extend today into as many tomorrows as we can get? Is it too soon? Or too late?
People (hopefully) draft directives to guide and free us from the burden of these decisions. Not so our pets, who look to us to ‘know.’
There are “five freedoms” that guide rescue. They are helpful, as well, when faced with the impossible and emotional life and death decisions made for our animal family members.
Freedom from hunger or thirst: is my pet able to feed and drink, or am I able to assist without causing the animal undue distress?
Freedom from discomfort: there are times we choose painful courses of treatment when it means many good future years, but for those with a terminal illness, ask: is my companion comfortable while living with the disease?
Freedom to express (most) normal behaviors: can they still do the things that make them happy?
Freedom from pain, injury or disease: can pain be managed at an acceptable level; will the proposed treatment create further complications that jeopardize quality of life?
Freedom from fear and distress: can a better quality of life be achieved by declining life-extending treatments, even if it means fewer tomorrows?
The right choice isn’t always the easiest one.
I’m thinking of my sister and her husband who, yesterday, made the right decision at the right time for our father’s dog.
Had they not taken Butterscotch into their home six years ago, they would not have been faced with this weight or today’s sadness. But Butterscotch would not have had six years of love and happiness with them, either. Her post is here.
At 16, Butterscotch showed my sister the signs, and she had the courage to see them. Butterscotch earned her freedom from this earth and what had become its pains. And my sister and her husband earned their guardian angel wings.
“Dogs’ lives are too short. Their only fault, really.” ~ Agnes Sligh Turnbull
Fly free, sweet Butterscotch. Until we meet again at the Rainbow Bridge.
Along with 100-degree temperatures are the season’s latest arrivals: Matilda Poppy,
Hollyhock,
Coneflower,
Lantana,
Coreopsis,
Daylily,
And very busy bees. 🙂
Take a bow!
As the summer heat sets in, I prefer to work the garden in the early evening whenever possible.
The Delta Breeze blows lightly to cool the valley, and the setting sun saturates color and creates little jewels through the lens.
“The pale stars were sliding into their places. The whispering of the leaves was almost hushed. All about them it was still and shadowy and sweet. It was that wonderful moment when, for lack of a visible horizon, the not yet darkened world seems infinitely greater—a moment when anything can happen, anything be believed in.” ~ Olivia Howard Dunbar, The Shell of Sense
Unlike the morning which is always chaotic – the gardeners and the dogs racing against the sun and the heat of the day – the evening is productive but blessedly peaceful.
The bunnies, lazy lizards, and settling in birds keep me company as the dogs fall into an exhausted hush.
Twilight is a magical time giving rise to winged beauties and fairy tales – when “anything can be believed in.” Like Bing’s “going home.”
Bing came to us all the way from Taiwan. He’s been home before – unsuccessfully. It was all too much for him then: too much temptation, too many ways to get into trouble! He hollered at other dogs, hunted cats, and little critters best beware.
But people? He has always loved people.
He went home; he came back. He went home; he came back. But something interesting happened as Bing waited in our care: he changed. Not completely. But maybe, just enough. So much so that, last week, he even accompanied one of our volunteers to the annual reunion picnic.
He behaved like a model citizen in a venue filled with dogs and chaos, winning everyone’s attention and praise.
Bing must have felt like a prince at the ball. Transported in style; meeting friends old and new. When the clock struck midnight, he probably assumed his Cinderella moment was over. But by proving himself in a most unexpected way – he earned his “going home” papers, instead. Lorey, one of our devoted volunteers, made him her own.
Photo courtesy Rob Kessel
Anything can happen. Anything can be believed in. That’s the magic of the garden at sunset – and this place we call Homeward Bound.
My name is Hope. Aka “Tootsie.” Otherwise known as the “Come Back Kid,” “Braveheart,” “Too-Smart-For-My-Own-Good,” and “Houdini.” The latter being how I found myself back behind bars.
I’m here with my sister, Faith. Aka “Adorable,” “Sweetness,” “Girl-With-The-Green-Eyes,” and “Tag-Along,” – meaning I’ll follow my sister’s lead wherever it takes me, which is how she, too, became incarcerated.
We spent the last week visiting with the gardener lady and her big dogs. She felt like our Aunt Jody could use a well-deserved break. We think Aunt Jody was secretly betting that we’d be back in 24 hours! LOL. It’s not that we are bad pups. It’s just that we are a lot of work.
So who better to take care of us for a while than a gardener: already a believer in what faith and hope can do when paired with effort. Where others see a blank slate of dirt, a gardener sees a landscape transformed – trusting in the potential.
While all puppies are work, we were born with this extra special thing called Megaesophagus. It means that the tube that sends food down has a tendency to return it if we don’t eat upright and stay that way for a while after each meal.
Gravity is our friend, so we eat in a Hello Kitty® chair. Humiliating, right?
Couldn’t they make a Hello Puppy chair?
But we know the drill, to the point of seating ourselves. Just watch this:
And when we get bigger, we’ll eat and rest in a real dog, specially made, Bailey Chair. There are lots of dogs like us. They make us extra adorable so people will overlook our special needs.
After we eat, we sit upright on the gardener’s lap or standing between her knees while everything makes its way to our tummies. We watch the birds and squirrels in the garden or all the moving pictures on this big black box. We have developed a fondness for The Food Network, TLC, and movie classics. I’m sure we could grow to love sports, too – but that’s not her thing.
We play hard. Really hard. With each other –
And our friends.
But when we’re done, we curl up and snuggle. Sister love.
All of this to show that we can fit into someone’s life and home without too much trouble. We hope that our special someone will see it that way.
We’re going back to Aunt Jody tomorrow. The gardener’s big dog has some medical stuff to do and would prefer to do it in “peace and quiet” – whatever that is.
And Aunt Jody will be on the lookout for special people for us. It’s easier to win your heart when our cute faces are in yours.
So do us a favor? Don’t mention the chewed wall, great toilet paper rolling contest, or how we like to dump our water bucket to make giant puddles. Let’s just say we are cute, cuddly, and endearing – and leave it at that! Oh, and if you have a spare hacksaw – send it our way??
Sincerely,
Faith and Hope (aka Tootsie)
As they have grown, Aunt Jody has been working with the girls and figured out how to feed them differently so they can be as close to “normal” dogs as possible, now. No more special chairs! The key is in getting them to “graze” on their meals instead of wolfing them down. And they are doing great. So great, in fact, that Hope found her way home!
This means that sweet Faith is all by her lonesome. She is hoping that she, too, can find her someone special – preferably someone that either works from home, or is home often. We’re putting the word out and hoping you will share. Let’s get this adorable girl with the gorgeous green eyes a home of her own!
“Once you choose hope, anything’s possible.” ~ Christopher Reeve
Shake on it.
Gardens For Goldens 