Before Brea: Lucky

Little Baby Lucky

Lucky followed us home one day.  We were passing an old storage shed on Harvey's Creek and heard a little dog barking at us.  We stopped, and a little brown puppy came out from under the shed and started sniffing with Lady and Lucy.

She followed us home and waited outside on the porch.  After it got dark, she started crying and whining and scratching on the screen door. Eventually, she wore a hole in the screen.

Originally, our plan was to take her to the animal shelter on the weekend, if we hadn't found a home for her by then, because we didn't think we needed or wanted another dog.  That was a few days away.  By the weekend, though, we thought that maybe we did have room for one more dog. Good luck for her, so we named her Lucky.

Carol used to say that Lucy was her dog, Lady was mine, and Lucky was Lady's, and that certainly seemed to be the case.  Lucky followed Lady everywhere. Lucky was kind of standoffish with people. She was with us for five years before she would sit with her back to me and let me pet her, and even then she would sometimes growl when I petted her.  It was a couple more years after that before the first time she rolled on her back and let me rub her belly.

She didn't like smokers, and twice lunged without warning at people who had a strong smell of cigarette smoke about them, and I caught her just in time.  One was a plumber who was doing some work at the house, and the other was a coworker, a very nice lady who needed to share a ride to work.  All of us were pretty shaken by the experience.

Lucky was with us for sixteen years.  She mellowed out in her old age, but she always took her guard dog duties seriously.  Nobody lit a cigarette in this house while Lucky was around.

Brea is back from her vacation.  More about that later.