Flikka.
What a dog!

Early last year my Favourite Wife had an idea.
“A dog”, she said, more than once, “would be a special companion, and a lovely friend, and a valuable responsibility too”.  Speaking, of course, of our Little One’s interests.

I was slow to warm to this plan, but the plan was forming, with or without my warmth.  By midyear serious investigations into breeds and agencies were being made night by night on the iPad.  And in October a trip was made to Canberra to bring home a five year old Labrador named Flikka, who seemed – as we read her particulars and spoke to those who knew her at Labrador Rescue – too good to be true.

But it was true.  Flikka was everything anyone had said and a great deal more. It felt at times that she spoke English.  Commands such as “pick that up, and take it outside” (for a chew toy dropped in the hall), or “Off to sleep on Cassie’s bed” were simply obeyed from the outset; we never trained her to do anything at all.  She would come when called and sit when asked.  She would sit while food was put her in her bowl, and remain seated – in an agitated, tail-banging, lip-slavering state – until we said “OK”.  She was adorable, and she adored us.  Let’s be honest, she adored everybody! A paw would be placed gently on the knee of anyone found sitting down, drawing their attention to the beautifully seated Labrador with the slightly mournful, penetrating gaze; longing for a scratch.  Scratch under her chin too long and the delicate manoeuvre of double-paws on the sitter’s knee might be enacted; and scratch just a little longer and the whole dog would begin to lean heavily on your leg, and slide ever so slowly sideways onto the floor.  Which just so happens to present the dog correctly for a tummy scratch.  In the extremely rare event of a reprimand (thrice? maybe?) she would immediately hop on three legs with one paw poised to match the painful pity on her face.  Who could be cross with that?

If Flikka barked it was only ever once.  One single, gruff, woof; just enough to alert us to the person at the door; or to her desire to come or go through it.  She had the most adorable wrinkly-Labrador face that made us laugh out loud as we watched her emotions pass through her fur.  She was an accomplished sleeper.  Late in the evening we used to say her name very, very softly and her tail would bang-bang-bang on the wall even while she snored on through her dreams.  In fact, one of her greatest gifts to us came through her aptitude for slumber.  Against every scrap of my better judgement we had told Little One that Flikka would be allowed to sleep on her bed!  This bribe was not only effective in getting our 12 year old into bed on many occasions; but with Flikka on the end of her bed Little One began to routinely sleep all night.  We had been getting up to our daughter in the wee hours every night, sometimes more than once, with very few exceptions for more than a decade.  Thank you, Flikka, for teaching Little One something that we could not.

By now you have probably noticed that I have written in the past tense: Flikka has gone; barely five months after she arrived. I went to church on my own last Sunday, while the others took Flikka to the vet.  The vet was more alarmed than we had been, and was uncertain if she would come through an operation for a bowel obstruction.  But she came through well, and on Tuesday she came home to our enormous relief and joy.  It was short lived; as was our gorgeous friend.

Today I am completely alone in the house for the first time in months; no occasional woof, no paw appearing on my knee.  I was never keen to admit that Flikka was “good company for you” (me? needing company?  what am I, an invalid?).  I was wrong, and today the emptiness of the house is a very raw wound.  And it’s raining, which never helps my mood.  It hasn’t rained properly for three months; and now the drought has broken I’m glum.  But not so the animal kingdom.  Two green parrots, a pair of majestic red parrots with long blue tail feathers, and fully fifteen green finches have been nibbling at the bird feeder just outside my window – more than I have seen before – and as many Kangaroos have been grazing a stone’s throw beyond.  It feels like the zoo!  Nature lost one of its own and has summoned a menagerie to pay homage, and to remind me there is beauty in the world.

Our sadness is sudden and engulfing.  We have wept a late night vigil together on our lounge several times this week. It seems impossible to believe that one day our memories of Flikka will be fond, rather than anguished.  My distress frightens me.  I am troubled by our unanswered prayers for her life.  I am spooked by wordless notions of my own mortality.  I don’t understand why goodness is fleeting, why the pure things in our world are subject to indiscriminate violence.

As the rain clears away I am reading The Little Prince.  So popular when I was a child, but I guess he can’t compete with My Kitchen Rules.

“Goodbye”, said the fox. “Here’s my secret.  It’s very simple: one only sees clearly with the heart.  What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” repeated the little prince, so as to remember.

“It is the time you have wasted on your rose that makes your rose so important”

“It is the time I have wasted on my rose…” said the little prince, so as to remember.

“The men have forgotten this truth,” said the fox.  “But you must not forget it.  You become forever responsible for that which you have tamed.  You are responsible for your rose…”

“I am responsible for my rose,” repeated the little prince, so as to remember.

– Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

And as the rain clears away I am listening to J.S. Bach, St Matthew Passion.  It is the most beautiful, ordered, deliberate and unsparing telling of human grief; and of the hint of joy that lies beyond.
Sometimes no more than a hint.

Rejoice!

 

Someone recently pointed out that readers might believe our family to consist simply of myself, Little One and my Favourite Wife; just we three nestled in comfortably in Paradise.  But, there are numerous characters in the story (beside Bugger) whom I have not yet introduced.  The other permanent resident in Paradise is Flikka, the most charming Labrador ever to set paw on the Great Southland. Much could be written about Flikka, and it’s a puzzle that she has eluded the narrative so far.

But it doesn’t end there – far from it! – and this particular Sunday with the youngest of our three grandchildren visiting seems an opportune moment for an introduction.

Family life came suddenly to us, which is a gift of life that I treasure.  We were an ‘instant family’ of five, and for a long time afterwards our 4 year old would point from the car window at “our wedding church where we got married”.  Her words were apt, as we had all stood in front of the congregation, and we were all five of us married as a family.  That wondrous day was more than 20 years ago, and we now number fifteen.  One son, five daughters, one daughter in law, three sons in law, two grandsons and one granddaughter: the smiling bundle of joy at the other end of the house tonight.
So far. Doubtless there are yet more in the wings!

Shortly after Five became One we were offered the management of a poultry farm by friends in our church who had a very large number of birds.   50,000 excess laying hens were to be housed on a farm that would be leased for a couple of years, and we were given the job of making it work.  The leased farm was very old; and our adventures were very many.  The farm was on a steep hillside, which is a startling way to manage poultry.  In fact, it is probably a mistake.  The cottage was in a small house paddock at the bottom of the hill, beside a creek in which we swam and swam and swam.  For many weeks our three children who had never ventured beyond the burbs could barely be coaxed through the first gate!  Then for months they wore whistles around their necks, and when they were occasionally shrilly blown in terror at the sight of a giant spider, or perhaps a snake, I don’t know who was more afraid: them or us.

My first mistake as farm-boss was to systematically eradicate every last member of a dozen strong clan of cats.  I accomplished this in about a month of hunting, mostly late at night, armed with a .22, a torch and a 12 gauge for good measure.  To the untrained eye, (which mine was: a carpenter running a farm) the plague of mice surging thousands-strong along the feed troughs in the beam of my hunting-torch was a worrying sight.  Something to be dealt with once I could rid the farm of these darned cats.  It wasn’t until great long brown snakes started appearing in the chook sheds, shiny and fat on a diet of mice and egg yolk, that the first faint thoughts about the food chain began nagging at the edges of my working mind.

And what a mistake that was!  The snake crusades consumed a great deal more lead than the cat wars had.  We soon had numerous egg-packers working for us, and we appointed one as master-at-arms on the basis that she was a prize-winning large-bore marksman at the local rifle club.  This, also, was a mistake. She froze when faced with a target closer than her preferred range of 500 yards! Especially a slithering, red-belly black target advancing rapidly between the rows of birds.  It was very nearly a catastrophic mistake.

Our old fibro cottage by the river appealed enormously to my (dwindling) bachelor instincts, but must have come as a sobering shock to the other four-fifths of the tribe.  Favourite Bride’s bedside glass of water would quite literally freeze across at night when the mercury dropped to minus 8.  When the wind blew all the curtains in the house would billow, not seeming to notice that the windows were tightly shut.  There was a hump in the floor, making the walk from the kitchen (the only heated room in the house) to the mid-point of the lounge room an up-hill march, with a down-hill run to the children’s bedrooms beyond.  When I eventually drove my Favourite home from hospital with our first born I felt an irrational pang of conscience, and pulled off the dirt road for a moment to explain that there had actually been a snake in the kitchen earlier that day, only a little one though; and also confess that it had evaded extinction with its current whereabouts unknown.
This, also, was a serious mistake.

Our first winter was long, cold and absurdly wet.  Every machine was forever bogged in a deadly mess of mud and wet, slimy chook poo; and the sheds seemed likely to slide straight of the hill and into the creek below.  The tough conditions knocked out 12,000 laying birds – which is not good.  I spent more time burying birds than feeding them; and that too is a mistake. Nothing was easy on that farm, but nothing could have been better for our fledgling family than this nest in the bush.  No neighbours within cooee, acres to explore, tractors to drive, (and a bobcat! and a front end loader!  and a grader!), wood to chop, chores to share, a cow to milk, a horse to ride, and a creek beside which to eat our Sunday bake.
We’ve lived in paradise from the get-go.

 

Rejoice!