On Labor Day, our daughter Megan and I visited three local animals shelters in search of border collies, retrievers, or Australian shepherds who needed a home. She has been talking for some time about getting a dog of her own and Rob and I urged her to search the shelters first.
Our first stop was Animal Care and Control, the county shelter, a truly depressing place. The dog area isn’t air conditioned, although there are window fans that circulate the air. Many of the dogs didn’t have bedding, some didn’t have food or water in their bowls. Nearly every other dog was a pit bull – no puppies, just adult pit bulls whose sad eyes tell you a great deal more than you want to know about their lives. Here, we spent some time in a greeting area with a pretty white dog that was part retriever.
We both felt bummed out when we left the shelter and drove out to a place called Peggy Adams, a private shelter that was the complete antithesis of the county shelter. Here, all the animals are kept in air conditioned quarters, a necessity with summer temps reaching into the high 90s. The dogs have ample room in their cages and are walked by volunteers. They all had fresh water and food in their bowls. They even had toys and beds to sleep in.
Megan had her eye on an Australian shepherd who was listed on the shelter’s website. She was gorgeous, just a year old, with the most beautiful blue eyes, a shiny multicolored coat and a sweet temperament. But she had been adopted already and her new owner was to pick her up in a few days.
From here, we moved on to another private dog rescue center. The facility sits on 28 acres and used to be a wildlife center where Megan had volunteered in high school. When we walked in the front door, there were five or six dogs lounging in the air conditioned lobby, all comfortably ensconced in doggie beds or on quilts/bedspreads. But the area where most of the dogs were kept was hot, crowded, and many of the cages had signs written in angry red letters: heartworms; aggressive; issues with children. I felt nauseated in here, just as I had in the county shelter. Megan asked about the border collie puppies the center had posted on their website.
Since the place is staffed by mostly volunteers, there had been a snafu in the record-keeping. It turned out that a black and white pup had been brought in with some German shepherd pups and was listed as male – but was a female. And she looked nothing like the shepherds. The volunteer said she was a border collie. We played with her outside, a rambunctious little thing and said we wanted to think about it. We took pictures. That night at the dog park, we showed the pictures to a woman who owns a border collie. Her take? Definitely a border collie. “That white ring at the tip of the tail and those ears are the things to look for.”
The next day, we took Rob over for a look. Two days later, we brought her home. Megan was juggling two names – Niki and Nica. “I’m leaning toward Nica,” she said.
Here’s the synchro: Nica is the nickname of my antagonist in Esperanza, a book Megan hasn’t read. Yes, it’s possible she heard me toss that name around during random discussions and that it stuck in the back of her mind. But I probably would have referred to this character by her full name, Dominica. She’s not a nice person. Well, she’s not even a person. She’s a ghost that has evolved over the centuries so that she’s able to seize living people in order to experience the full physical pleasures of being human. She commands the largest tribe of such ghosts in South America and she and her tribe have terrorized Esperanza for decades.
I cautioned Megan about naming her dog Nica. But Nica she is, although megan changed the spelling of her name to NIKA. She’s a little lover, friendly to everyone, and a huge admirer of Noah, who steals her toys. He’s a gentle 95-pound Golden Retriever and to her, must look like an Olympian god. The three cats are defining their borders with Nica. Here she is with Powder, who is bigger than she is. Already Nica’s person is definitely Megan.
The difference in size is clearly depicted in the first picture, where Nika is curled up asleep against Noah. To give you some idea of how large Noah is, here he is chasing a squirrel and apparently figuring he can climb a tree.
