For all the competing I did with Stanley, it’s surprising to me how little of that I can distinctly remember. What I do remember, vividly, and still miss, was his obsession with carrying things.  On just about every walk he’d find a stick, maybe one a few inches long, or just as likely some eight foot branch off some tree I’d recently trimmed, and regardless of size he’d drag it for hundreds of yards.  Just because he could, I guess.  I remember that if all the sticks were buried under snow, I could pretty much depend on him at some point ambushing me and grabbing the glove off my hand.  I let him think I was surprised and chagrinned by his sneak attacks. He seemed to think they were hilarious.  I remember how on almost every walk, at some point he’d throw himself down on the ground and roll around out of what appeared to be just sheer uncontainable happiness.  I remember he fetched me a moose once.  I remember one time at a herding practice session he and I got suddenly trapped in a small pen with a single ewe that had already wrecked one person’s knee earlier that summer.  I saw the ewe lower her head and take aim.   Stanley jumped forward, deliver one quick nip to the ewe’s nose, and she backed up a step.  That gave me enough time to squeeze the two of us out the gate. When I bent to give him a well-earned butt scratch, I could feel Stanley trembling, and he wouldn’t go back into a pen of sheep for a few days after that.  He wasn’t a fearless fool, but when he saw what needed to be done he did  it. Soon after his twelfth birthday, in less than a week he went from being a joyful senior who still loved to ambush me, to a feeble old dog with a worn out heart.  When I took him out for what I knew would be one of our last walks together, he caught sight of my flock of ducks loose in the yard. He mustered up the energy to trot over and move them back into their pen. My first impulse was to stop him, to spare him any exertion, to ration the finite number of heartbeats he had left as stingily as I could.  I’m glad I resisted the impulse.  Within a few more hours he used up the last of that supply of heartbeats. I remember though that doing chores was his joy and his pride for all of his days.   Having him as my friend has been one of the great privileges of my life.

                 

Kelly came into our lives 9 years ago.  She was extremely out of condition, had a very rust colored coat and was afraid of her own shadow.  I wondered what I had done as I had to “walk her down” every time we wanted to bring her in or do anything for the first week.  She dived under our kitchen table every time anyone came to the house and paced around the small wall of the kitchen, dining room, living room almost continuously.  She gained her confidence slowly- herding with her really helped that.  She did a nice job on sheep, but one day she couldn’t keep up with them. At that time we discovered she had a heart murmur. So we went to ducks.  She couldn’t move ducks without barking at them, at least that is how she thought it worked.  Thank goodness she had a great de-bark!  I remember her pushing Suzanne’s black ducks with her nose when they wouldn’t move.  She earned a HIT on Course B.  I was able to get that final major on her to earn her Championship.  We tried other venues, but herding was where she liked to be.  Kelly always kept you on your toes.  Like when the wind was blowing at an agility trial and she tried to go through the bars of the wing on a jump or when she was in the obedience ring for her try at another CD leg and on the long sit she looked down one side and all of the dogs had gone down (except for the very 1st dog), she looked the other way and all of them had gone down.  She looked at Tanya and you could just see her think, “I must have misunderstood and I am wrong, I’m so sorry”, and she very carefully and slowly laid down.   When she got to her senior years she would finally go up to men and greeted everyone that came to our house.  She will be greatly missed and I am so glad that I went that day to Portland with Kathy Vineyard to bring “Crazy Kelly” home.  Go run with your sister Taffy who has been waiting for you at the “Rainbow Bridge”.  We miss you meeting us as we come in the basement door.