Love Letter To True

During her golden years she tore along the flat miles of Pembrey beach, flinging violet mussel shell shrapnel, scattering gulls, and elbowing waves until she was a dark mole on the horizon’s spine. Walkers stopped and straightened their spines to watch this muscular missile, this dark blur, this canine child of Bluebird, breaking land speed records just a few miles from Campbell’s Pendine Sands. 

She was still a jittery rescue hound back then. An underfed, underloved hunter, raised in a travellers camp, prodded and terrorised by rough kids, anxious and stiff, and not yet softened into family life. So there was always a moment - a brass-bell chime of uncertainty. Would she pivot back to us, or would our wild thing bolt for good? 

She always returned, a shabby, sand-blasted, dripping, grinning wreck, with mystery nicks and wounds burning like spent sparklers against her black coat. 

Years have passed. Now we dispense praise to her, hoping it is longevity medicine. We praise her every time she drops from the sofa to try her luck around the kitchen door. We praise her every time she wakes us up in the morning, waiting for her neck massage from Ronny. We praise her for each finished meal. (She has never left a meal unfinished). We praise her when she spots a neighbourhood cat through the pretty moonstone of her cataracts. We monitor her minutely. Her weight, her muscle mass, the state of her teeth, her silvering muzzle, her uncharacteristic clinginess at the cove, the overlooking of infractions by insolent magpies that would normally have stirred her to action.

We don’t like to talk about the reasons for our vigilance but we do, before we go to sleep. We keep our voices low to save her blushes. Her bed is there beside ours.

Last week, with the weather gossiping of spring, we took her on a nighttime walk past the field where mice, kestrel, owls and foxes scratch out a living. And there she was again, Miss Vera the youngster. Her ears were up, eyes flinty, muscles rigid, cells electrified. She found springs in her ankles, her heart was a hammer, neck arched like a lion-dog-warrior from the Assyrian reliefs in the British Museum.

A few more years. A few more years. A few more years yet.