Remembering Bella
By: Susan G Holland
Tags: Puppies, Pets, The Farm, Dogs, Tribute

by Susan G Holland

Bella was a pretty little pup from a mixed breed litter — mostly German Shepherd, but also something more shy — someone suggested it might be Austrian Shepherd, or maybe just “The Runt” of the litter.

Bella and her puppies looked like this.

Bella came to our Mennonite- country farmhouse as a half-grown rescue, but her puppies looked like this. It was long ago enough that I cannot find a photo — too deep in the storage, I‘m afraid.

She was shy and tentative. She grew into a fine looking creature, but held her ears down like this and would look me right in the eyes as if to absorb my mind through my eyes. We lived in that wonderful farmhouse for ten years.

Collegeville PA Farmhouse

Bella had the run of the place, and what a wonderful place for a dog with a creek and a big cow pasture (more about this anon) and cornfields and hardly any traffic!

Up the hill from the farm was another farmhouse, the home of the people who used the large barn behind our place for pigs and chickens and had his own cow barn up at the top of his hill.

Bella had some scrapes with the neighbors, but we probably did not hear about all of them, I reckon. But we did have one very troubling night when she went down the road the other way and got into the trash pile of some very nice Mennonite folks. They had put a left over leg of lamb in there, and Bella couldn’t resist.

Well, farmers have their ways, and Bella came back with a lot of buckshot sprinkled through her pelt — she was in shock and shivering and we took her right to the vet. The vet said it was better to just let her heal — leave the buckshot in — rather than traumatize her further by picking the little pieces out. Tranquilizers helped. We got to know the neighbors. They bought one of our cars when we got a newer one.

She did not do well in cars. She had amply demonstrated that on the way home when we first got her, and there was never a car ride without a very serious clean-up job afterward. She was always sick as a dog.

But she was beautiful, and dear, and she was our faithful dog. We kept her closer, not so free-ranging.

But alas — A cute young family (our landlord’s son and his wife and kids) lived down the road near the Mennonite family, and they had a turkey that had become a pet. Their turkey roamed free. And he liked to roam up to our house and get on our big front porch, stand on the rail, and take over the place. You could really tell he was there, not only from the turkey talking but from the leavings all over our porch and rail! Bella chased him, of course. And then she caught him. It was a tragedy. It was a pet. There were tears. But that’s the farm country, and we got over it. (Those folks moved in to the farmhouse when we left.)

What is a dog to do in a countryside like that? We were not going to tie up our dog or keep her inside all the time, and couldn’t afford to completely fence an area in. We just kept an eye out.

One day I had a call from the farmer up the road — the one who used the barn back of our house. The message was short and terse. “Your dog is chasing my dairy cows and we can’t have that — it ruins the milk! If you can’t keep your dog in, I will have to put out poison.” They were good people, but the dairy cows were their livelihood — not a hobby. And I was terrified with the concept of poison.

I was still emotional and recoiling from that threat the next morning, when I noticed that his cows were up behind our house eating up my vegetable garden! They had broken through their fence and were happily munching the tomatoes and lettuce and peppers up on our back yard! I called the farmer, and said (with a bit of tit-for-tat in my attitude) “I’m sorry to say that your cows are in my vegetable garden and I will need help herding them back into your field. Please come down right away.” (I always wondered if the cows had help in breaking through the split rail fence. Farmers have their ways.)

That herding episode was the first time I had ever had a longish conversation with that uphill neighbor in the nearly nine years of living there! We herded the cows and made our apologies and then chatted about other things — where we came from and how we got there…the history of the property…things like that. That farmer always dumped a sack of freshly picked corn on the cob on our porch on the way by during corn season.

Well, Bella and that neighbor’s beautiful German Shepherd got together too.

Bella was not spayed. Their dog was not neutered. One Sunday we had to go to church knowing that the two dogs were apparently stuck together up on the back yard. I had called the vet wondering what to do, and he said “She’ll let him go when she’s through.” She did, of course, we were relieved to see when we got home from church.

So, of course, we had puppies soon in a basket in the kitchen! Six of them. Just like baby Bella. Darling. Hungry! Messy!

They went from the kitchen down to the basement room where the washing machine was. And if it wasn’t food all over the floor at meal time, it was a lot of used-to-be-food that required unsavory cleanup, always. But they were not eating our table legs at least.

One day the son and daughter-in-law of the dairy farmer up the hill called up and asked if they could come see the puppies!

Well, they came, and we trudged down the narrow steps to the smelly basement room where all these little fuzzies were tearing around and looking very cute. We took them outside to a fenced in area and I watched while the couple looked over our brood. They were disappointed that the pups were all blond. They would have liked a better facsimile of their German Shepherd who had fathered the pups, with the handsome dark markings and all.

So we still had six pups. We also had rather immediate plans for a life-changing move from Pennsylvania to Washington State! A very long drive. Not an adventure we could take six pups and a carsick dog on. So one of the teariest days I ever had was taking those beautiful young pups to the SPCA. There were people with children in the SPCA looking to adopt. I left the pups, prayed for their adoptions, and hurriedly drove off before I knew the outcome. (Choked up just now writing about it.)

How did Bella get to Washington State? She got there in a red pickup truck that was hauling a U-Haul trailer in the blistering heat of August. The vet gave my husband dog-tranquilizers which made the dog pretty relaxed and very drowsy. She would recover overnight in a motel or campground, and get medicated in the morning each day. While she and my husband were driving, our three kids and I were visiting relatives on the east coast before taking off from Logan Airport for our new life out west.