It’s All About Beau
Editor’s Note: The author wrote about Beau while she was living in Varenna in Santa Rosa. She and Beau moved to PVE in December 2017.
It’s been forty years since I’ve had a dog, and the old “maternal” longing came back again after meeting all of the wonderful dogs that live here at Varenna. I’ve begun to know most of them by name and sometimes even remember the dog owner’s name on a good day! OH, I just had to have my own dog again.
I was informed about three months ago that the Santa Rosa Animal Shelter had a few new small dogs who had come in just recently, so I gave them a jingle. Sure enough, they had received two new dogs about a week before. A nice woman from the shelter offered to come here to Varenna and show them to me along with three bigger dogs. The day they came, all jumped out of the car yapping loudly except one. He was the smallest, thinnest, undernourished, dirtiest and very scared. I put a leash on him and walked him back and forth on the sidewalk just to see what he’d do, and he was so docile and shy and looked up at me with a look that I couldn’t resist. He was the one for me and the one who needed a mother the most. My heart melted. We’ve been together three months now and we couldn’t be happier.
One little incident I’d like to relate. It happened very recently. Beau and I were sitting in the shade on a hot day behind the main building near the gym where I can unleash Beau for a while. Not many people pass by and it’s quiet and he can have some freedom to play.
His friend Ginger, a tiny Chihuahua was there with my friend Bernie, and chewing on a nice bone contentedly while Beau was enviously watching her, obviously wishing it was his. Ginger was almost done with it when it dropped to the ground.
Well, as soon as the bone hit the ground, Beau grabbed it between his teeth and proceeded to walk very rapidly along the path toward home without looking back while I kept calling “Beau, Beau, come back here!” My yelling was to no avail.
He acted as though he never heard me and just kept going with me in hot pursuit.
When I caught up, I found him sitting on the front porch of our building with the bone still in his mouth! Beau never did finish what was left of the bone, but he continues to hide it in different places in the house making sure no one takes it away from him!
Only Beau knows where it is.
