It's been thirty-four years since I brought Sollee home. When he came into my life I was employed at a local garage as a car valet-come-gopher, working long hours for little cash; a far cry from my teenage dream of becoming a freelance journalist and writing wildlife articles for such magazines as National Geographic, with the aim of eventually penning a wildlife novel that would see me hailed as the new Jack London. In fact I wasn't writing at all in those days. Eight years of caring for my invalid mother had poured a few gallons of cold water on my writing dreams, and after her death I had been too exhausted to even consider pursuing the memory of those dreams.
My father had retired in January '79 and he wasn't in the best of health and I knew soon he would need my help. I wasn't, at that point, his carer but I knew I might have to take up that role before too long. So I remained living at home and for a few years I took seasonal work on local farms, then after passing my driving test, I moved on to garage work.
By the summer of '83 it had become apparent that father's health was steadily failing and, fearing something might happen while I was at work, I gave up my job. It wasn't an easy decision to make. I knew what I was taking on (or I thought I did), but there was no one else to care for his needs, so I handed in my notice. I reasoned that I had already cared for mother when I was a teenager, now at thirty-two I should be better equipped to cope, emotionally stronger and more resourceful. Plus, I had my boyfriend Tom for moral support. So I thought I was a lot better off this time round than back in '67 when I had given up my dreams and turned down a place in college to take on a role I knew nothing about and was, because of my age, ill equipped to handle.
While I was still working at the garage I had sold my car and bought a vintage van from one of my fellow workers. It was a 1967 Ford Anglia 7cwt model and it was basically sound but much in need of some TLC. Sollee, along with working on the van, went a long way to saving my sanity over the next seven years.
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Father, as I had feared, was taken seriously ill about four months after I gave up working. He was rushed into Hospital on New Years Eve 1983 with pneumonia and a collapsed lung. It was a pretty bleak New Year, for even though I didn't have a really strong relationship with my father this was the first time in my life that he had been seriously ill, and the first time that I had lived alone ... alone except for Sollee.
The weather had suddenly caught up with the season and daily a bitter wind tore in from the east. It blew for weeks, savage and unrelenting, and at night it wailed about the chimney's moaning its cold hearted misery and adding to the strange emptiness that enveloped the cottage. Jack Frost arrived and joined forces with the wind. Withered leaves scoured the rock hard ground and were hurled in multi hued clouds through the trees and into the garden, where they finally dwindled in brittle, melancholy drifts into the front porch. Sollee loved the wind and the leaves, his eyes gleamed as he raced and chased with them, hurling himself into the drifts, barking a crazy challenge into the eye of the wind. When the first snow came he was ecstatic, a black dog, young, fit and full of life running free through snow clad woods, across storm blasted fields, leaping and prancing, tongue lolling in his joy. He buoyed my spirits and made the cold fun.
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