No more yellow fur to fill the vacuum canister, another collar put away
By Will Sullivan, The Picayune Item Managing Editor
The last load of yellow fur mixed with white should fill the vacuum’s canister soon for we have hung another collar on the hook. Our elderly golden retriever Hunter has, as the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote, “cross(ed) the bar.” Tennyson wrote the poem about himself and how he would have liked his demise to be greeted. I’m afraid we couldn’t meet his high standards Tuesday, for there was “sadness of farewell” as we said good-bye to our faithful companion and friend of 14 and a half years as she “put out to sea.”
I use Tennyson’s poem because Hunter liked to go to the beach and swim off the seawall in Waveland. She stank to high heaven after those swims, but she loved them so and I think they helped some with the skin irritations she would get from rolling in the grass.
Hunter came to us as a birthday present to our son, Will Pat, when he turned 10. We still had another dog, my old bird dog Molly, back then, but every boy needs his own dog, not that you can really own one when they are a pet. Genie found Hunter in a litter in Florence.
