Category Archives: Life reflections

IONA DEBT OF GRATITUDE

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Jack and I went to the shelter to adopt a dog. We walked into the cages, and first on the right was a medium black lab mix. She was not jumping, unlike the blue heeler next to her and the big boxer across the aisle. The one marked “Good with cats.”

Our life required a good-with-cats dog. We are a feeding station for a trap-neuter-release team working on a colony in our neighborhood. Our two house cats have a catio, but outside our back and side yards are little kitty highways with rest stops and diners.

Jack fell in love with the black lab stray, brought in with another dog already adopted. The pair had been running down a groundhog and eating it, and they were covered in ticks and fleas to the point that our girl’s neck was raw with removal and treatment.

We took her for a walk. We walked her around the cat shelter area, including letting her sniff a kitten in the arms of another volunteer. She licked the kitten. My misgivings went away and Jack smiled. He was deeply in love.

So we put in the adoption papers.  Under “any reason you would return the dog” we checked “aggressed or harmed another pet or human at our house,” after a bit of discussion with the two people at the shelter on whether this would slow adopting.

On Monday we waited to hear. Tuesday morning, we drove to the shelter and found our application had disappeared. But the lady working there remembered us. The shelter director had said since we checked that box, he didn’t want to adopt to us.

Well, okay, but….. the lady at the shelter said she was willing to call our references. I dialed both and handed the phone to her, and she gave me something between a bemused and baleful look. She had meant, “I will call them and let you know” but we wanted to take the dog home.

After talking to the references, the shelter worker said, “I’m gonna go with my gut and trust you. Obviously we don’t want you to bring her back.”

Home we went with the dog. In the yard, she moved so fast chasing a cat walking by that she slid out of her collar and leash.

Okay then….. a prey drive is activated by running. We recalculated a few ways to keep our kitty friends safe and made the adjustments. A height extension to the fence—which she jumped the first day. Keeping her on a leash in the house until our cats were accustomed to her, which worked. Keeping her on a leash in the yard until we were sure no cats or chickens were loose in it; we keep our chickens in a pen, but the neighborhood has two ferals who fly in occasionally. Checking the yard worked until Iona jumped up, ricocheted off a shed wall, and knocked a feral chicken down from her roost in a tree some eight feet up.

When I went in the house, Jack was distraught. “We can’t do this.”

The reckoning followed. Jack wanted to blame himself for choosing her. I wanted to delicately yet firmly factor in that Jack is 82. Our beloved previous dog, Bruce, a docile and adorable 70-pound hunk of “I live to please you” in a pit bull’s body, had pulled him over walking because a squirrel made Bruce lose his mind for a second. “Heel” kicked in because we had worked with him, but Jack came home muddy and annoyed, and once, bleeding.

At 50 pounds of livewire, Iona was going to pull Jack over multiple times before we could get her trained. And the training would have to be done by both of us, every day, for about a year. I have what could be described as a demanding job, involving a fair bit of travel. Also Iona was still in the puppy energy phase, yet old enough to have some habits, the worst of both training worlds. Kill to eat. Chase what runs. Jump on the humans and grab their wrists in her mouth to greet them—and she hadn’t learned to regulate bite strength yet.

None of it was her fault. The situation was our fault. Accustomed to having ample resources to take care of dogs (five-year-old Bruce required surgery when he came to us) we never considered that the resources of time, youth, and strength would be most important in training a younger dog.

We should have selected the six-year-old boxer marked as good with cats at the shelter. But we took Iona, confident in our abilities, not realizing that they had dissipated over the last six years as Bruce aged and left us, placid, docile, and cosseted.

So we had to face the reckoning: take Iona back to the shelter and say “you trusted us and you were wrong.” With the additional difficulty of Iona having killed a chicken hanging over her head. We would mark “not good with livestock, will chase cats” and Iona would die in the overcrowded shelter.

Nope.

Plan B: get online and admit failure and ask for help and accept that we would be yelled at for what we already knew was our mistake. We did Plan B.

And got the sweetest surprise of our lives.

Jack and I have rescued cats for about 15 years. All our dogs since our marriage have been rescues, in Scotland and in the States. So when we put our “we need to rehome Iona” message up, people inside rescues began sharing it. And saying things like “these people are smart and kind and wouldn’t rehome this dog unless they had to.” “These are two of the nicest people ever and they recognize the lab energy of this dog will not fit their homestead.” Etc.

We got 4x-removed shares from friends who shared on our behalf. And people were so kind. They identified the problem: these naïve well-meaning people got a lab. They can’t deal with a lab. They are committed to the lab getting a good home this time. They won’t take the lab back to the shelter.

And we got a text message from Barbara, musician and manager with the band IONA. (So maybe she felt a vested interest.) About a decade before, IONA had been featured at the Celtic Festival Jack and I organized in Big Stone Gap, where we ran a bookstore. At the after-party in our shop, their bass player Chuck adopted one of our kittens. He watched the dominant bully cat cuff the little orange butterball off a perch twice, and admired his pluck. Then the kitten walked across a sea of legs to sit on Chuck’s shoe. He had been selected.

The other band members rearranged their instruments and the tubby orange kitten (now named Dylan) went home with the band. Chuck and his wife Brenda (who had been consulted by phone during the afterparty) loved Dylan for years, until Chuck passed from cancer. Brenda continues to love Dylan.

And was prepared to love Iona, we were told by Barbara, and given Brenda’s contact details. A phone call later, we were convinced her fenced yard, loving heart, experience with dog training, and understanding of Iona’s loving heart and lab energy had landed our girl on her four feet.

We arranged for Brenda to come meet the dog, and if all went well, take her home. Enter the shelter. The woman who had believed in us told us we had to bring the dog back to the shelter. We understood: the pattern had a bad optic, someone adopting and almost immediately rehoming a dog. Not a good look.

But she was again gracious enough to listen to our explanation, to understand that we wanted to keep the dog out of the shelter as it was now crowded, and we wanted Iona to never have another chance to endanger her own life by going after livestock. She was going to be a pampered pet in a suburb with a high fence around her very own backyard, free from other animals. Dylan was a couch potato house cat and in no danger from her. It was, in a word, perfect.

For the second time, the shelter lady showed her commitment to animal welfare with flexibility.

Iona has a spay appointment and a thousand chew toys, and a mom who works from home. Brenda has joy in her voice as she describes adopting a dog named Iona from the people who gave her husband such joy with Dylan. (She told us the sweetest story about Dylan climbing onto Chuck’s chest during his final two weeks, comforting him when he felt poorly.)

Jack and I have learned our lesson. Lifelong animal lovers, we recognize the limits—not of our love, but our abilities. We’re gonna give ourselves a month to rest up, and then we will look again, with more discernment, for a dog to match our lifestyle: sedentary, spoiling-ready, small enough to not pull Jack over, with a big bark and a bigger heart.

It is a happy ending. With many options for a newer, smarter beginning.

The Last Day

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 And then we woke up and it was the last day.

Dunfermline’s Keavil House hotel came complete with a Scottish fold cat who appeared outside our garden room windows. “Garden room” is a euphemism for “you have a door that opens into bushes near an abandoned greenhouse.” The adorable little grey Scottish fold (those are the ones with the cute ears folded over) apparently frequented the greenhouse for mice. Which would explain his pulchritude.Tho’ he was but little, he was tubby.

And expectant. I spent several minutes attending to his petting needs in the abandoned greenhouse. I also took a sleeve of old planting pots from the greenhouse. (Which, trust me, had been abandoned for at least three years, judging by the spiders). Somehow, I feel good using these pots for my American tomatoes. They were new, although very old, so don’t get excited about diseases and stuff. Scottish souvenirs can be practical.

Harry, an ardent cat fan, was not so lucky to see our new friend, although he did search the grounds.

Off we went to see the kelpies. These are horse head statues 98 feet high, made of thousands of little sheets of metal. They are gorgeous, and their models Baron (head up) and Duke were working Clydesdales. Kelpies, aka brumbies, aka water spirits/sprites/horses, are figures from folklore. Keplies are… unpleasant, yet functional. Water horses would come to you at the edge of some running water and be all sweet and “please feed me an apple you sweet young thing and please get on my back.” The second you did they dove down to the bottom and drowned you. Very useful for keeping kids away from deep water.

From the kelpies we went to another miracle of modern engineering: the Falkirk wheel. This is an elevator for boats. It connects the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal in Scotland. These canals are not even with each other, so you put the boat in the wheel and it turns and drops you off at the upper or lower other canal. And the one thing everyone in the world who has ever heard of this wheel knows is the famous line: “It takes the same amount of energy as boiling a kettle for one revolution of the wheel.”

I hope whoever wrote that is still getting royalties.

The wheel is cool, but my favorite thing about the place is a Roman fort ruin. You have to use a lot of imagination to understand the fort, because it’s basically a line of moss covered rocks now, but how awesome is it to stand where the guys who were in Scotland when Pontius Pilate was born once stood—bored out of their minds yet nervous and on the lookout for Picts? It feels like the ground beneath your feet is telling you stories.

Maria and I walked there, girl chatting, and back again while the rest watched the wheel. I don’t know if Mr. Fox managed a ride on it, but the rain came on and we all dashed for the van.

From Falkirk we were headed to Doune, but everyone needed lunch and a toilet. We stopped in Dunblane. Yes, THAT Dunblane if you are thinking of Scotland’s only school shooting, back in 1996. Andy Murray, who grew up to be a famous tennis player, was a child in that massacre. Dunblane now has a golden post box and phone booth in honor of his Olympic triumph.

Again, some of the best things in life are unscripted. It was wet, it was rainy, there were only two restaurants and two thrift stores in the town, and the restaurants were crowded. I parked Jack on a sheltered bench with a hot pork pie from the local co-op grocery, and was headed to the public toilets when I saw a sign:

Scotland’s oldest lending library. Open to the public.

Well then!!!

I spent a happy hour being allowed to touch first editions on vellum of the works of Burns, Locke, and other famous Scottish authors. Leighton library had belonged to a rich white guy who built it to deliberately let rich white guys borrow his books–for his own reasons. You can read about the library here, but there is nothing like someone interested in your tiny little museum to make your day as a museum guide. The authoritative scholar, the sweet volunteer, and I had a blast talking books and ideas and history that rainy afternoon in Dunblane.

And I forgot to go to the toilet.

Off to Doune Castle we went, and everyone in the van had a different reason for being excited about this. First, Doune Castle is the one mentioned in the famous ballad The Bonny Earl of Moray (Pronounced Murray) You can read the words here, but the refrain of the ballad says long may his lady look from the castle Doune, and people assume his wife is standing on a turret longing for him. It was his mother, and Doune and down in Scots are pronounced the same. The big irony of that is, this is also the ballad that gave us the word Mondegreens, the term for a misunderstood song lyric. “For they have slain the Earl of Moray and laid him on the green” became over time a woman’s name who had the misfortune to be with him: the non-existant Lady Mondegreen.

The story of Moray’s actual death is one Jack and I tell often, and we spared no details on the van, but I’ll let you read about it here after you finish this post. It’s quite the story.

Meanwhile, two other reasons people were excited about Doune Castle existed: Monty Python, and Outlander. Both were filmed there. I picked up a rock in the courtyard for our friend Karen, who was watching our garden while we were gone and is a big Outlander fan. Oddly enough, Game of Thrones also filmed scenes at Doune, but nobody mentioned it. We were perhaps a more pacifistic group of TV watchers. Jack, btw, is a huge Python fan.

Doune Castle’s other history is also interesting – the usual stories of intrigue, murder, and plot. I’ll tell you one thing about visiting ancient rich people’s homes in Scotand: it reminds you what’s important, and what isn’t, just like leaning against the Birnam Oak. This too shall pass, be careful what you spend your time on because a thousand years from now you could be just another tourist attraction, a mossy wall with a weird vibe, or a tree planted by water still growing. What are you doing with your life, the stone walls of Scottish castles ask. And is it important?

Doune Castle behind us, the group was something between somber and exhausted as we headed to the airport hotel. Tomorrow various members of the group would fly at different times to different places—although Andrea and Harry, Cassidy, Jack and I were all on the same first flight to Atlanta.

The group wanted to do a last night bond, but we also had zippo will to take the tram back into Edinburgh and fight the crowds for an evening meal. So we cozied up in the hotel and ate whatever was on offer and had a good time.

And Harry got the last word. The next morning, Andrea was at the hotel door at 8 am for a shuttle to the airport five minutes away – for a flight that left at noon. We had said Cassidy and our party would join them for 9:30.

Andrea smiled at us. “I hope you don’t mind, when the shuttle comes, we’re going to go ahead and get on it. We will see you at the flight boarding.”

I smiled back. “I understand.”

Sitting next to his wife, Harry shook his head and said, without emotion, “No you don’t.”

Best parting line ever.

And we all flew home and began posting our pictures and telling our stories and savoring the cheeses we smuggled into our luggage and thinking about maybe going back next year.

Actually, next year the tour is the Highlands and Islands, so it goes north and stays there for the most part. The only overlaps are Edinburgh and Fife’s East Neuk. If you’re interested, shoot us an email or FB message. We believe this will be our Last Tour Ever. (Of course we said that in 2022 too, but this time we mean it.)