A Southern Belle in the Deep North

When we left The Bag last week, she was sitting between the captain’s chairs of a twenty-seven foot U-Haul truck with her parents headed from Memphis to Providence. She adjusted far better as a southern belle to New England than her parents from the deep north had adjusted to Memphis—but then Snow never had difficulty adjusting to anyone or anybody. Except our new landlord. For some reason, he was the one person Snow did not like; she growled at him every time he reluctantly came to take care of something after several calls. She was a good judge of character—he was definitely a dick.

Our first winter in Providence—the winter of 1995–turned out to be a record-breaker with more snow accumulated than any of the subsequent eighteen winters we have been here. The Bag had never seen snow, but it did not cramp her style in any way. In early December she was on the loose again, this time in a still unfamiliar neighborhood during the first snowstorm of the season. It was snowing so hard that Jeanne and I soon gave up trying to follow The Bag’s tracks and jumped in the car to cruise the streets looking for her. We made a fine impression on our neighbors as we drove up and down the blocks with our heads hanging out the windows yelling “SNOOOOWWWWW! SNOOOOWWWW!!” at the tops of our lungs. Wait till these new folks from Tennessee have been here for a winter—they won’t be so excited about snow any more.

After a year and a half we bought our first (and hopefully last) house just a few blocks away from where we first rented in Providence and only a few blocks in a different direction from campus. The Bag continued to make friends. She became a familiar figure in the neighborhood as she found new ways, in spite of my best efforts, to escape our fenced back yard and meet new people. She got into the habit of going from house to house through back yards whenever possible in order to make it more difficult for me to spot her as I cruised the streets responding to the latest Missing Bag Alert. Thank goodness for identification tags. On occasion Snow would get a ride home in vehicles ranging from pickup trucks driven by strangers to the mail truck driven by her friend our mail lady. One summer afternoon when she had been gone for two or three hours and I had given up on trying to find her, an unfamiliar car pulled up in front of the house. A couple from Nicaragua who had just moved into the neighborhood and spoke only broken English had come across The Bag wandering around in the middle of the street. Throwing her into the back seat, they drove her home. Upon my leaning into the back seat and saying “Come on, Snow,” she pinned herself against the opposite back door and cowered as if she expected to be beaten yet again—except that neither Jeanne nor I had ever laid a hand on her in anger. She just was not ready to return to her boring life at home yet—the folks from Nicaragua apparently were far more interesting than I am. Fortunately they did not have the animal abuse hotline on speed dial.

One day we received a call from a guy who lived on a circle close by—Snow had escaped yet again and this time had showed up at Owen and Tina’s door (Owen was the guy on the phone). They invited her in and gave her something to eat. That was enough in The Bag’s mind to establish a long-lasting friendship; The Bag showed up at Owen and Tina’s so often when on the lam that I eventually stopped trying to track her down and just would give her enablers’ house a call. “Is Snow there?” I asked on the phone one day. “Yes,” Tina replied. “I’m on my way.” “Oh do you have to come so soon? She just got here!” I waited an hour or so, then drove over and retrieved The Bag.

Eventually Owen and Tina met Jeanne; one day the four of us (along with The Bag and our hosts’ dog) were conversing in their back yard over drinks. During the course of our conversation we learned that a fellow named Eric, just a few doors up the street from Owen and Tina, was the widower of one of the flight attendants on the second airplane that had crashed into the Twin Towers just a few days earlier. Just as two extroverted women should do, Jeanne, with Snow in tow, knocked on Eric’s door a few days later and introduced herself.  We were in Eric’s life for a short time as he worked through the early months of the tragedy that taken his wife from him and as he took tentative steps to move on with his life. Eric moved from Providence a couple of years later to start a new business and a new relationship in North Carolina. We have lost touch, but the two pieces of furniture he gave Jeanne when he moved have a prominent place in our living room. They make me think of Eric, which makes me think of who was responsible for our meeting him—The Bag.

So many vignettes bubble up from my memory banks. The exuberant joy with which The Bag greeted Jeanne at the door every time she walked in. The disdainful manner in which she sighed and walked away when it was just me without Jeanne. How she became so deaf that she literally could not hear you walk up behind her to within a foot away, yet could instantly sense the opening of the refrigerator door from anywhere in the house. How she loved pasta so much that the mere starchy aroma of pasta boiling would send her into what Jeanne dubbed “the pasta dance.” The mountains of white fur that she shed indiscriminately regardless of the season, so abundant that it would have been suitable for ten larger dogs.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about Snow except that she was ours. When we had to have her put down a few years ago at age 17 ½, the only people who shed tears were Jeanne, my youngest son, me, and a neighbor several doors down the street. Marcella, an older Irish woman, became so attached to Snow that for the last several years of The Bag’s life she had 24/7 access to the house in order to take Snow out walking—the same access Marcella still has to our current three dog menagerie. As we sat in a neighborhood pub after the traumatic moments at the veterinary hospital, downing numerous drinks in an impromptu Bag-wake, we recalled that Snow had a knack of connecting us to people who became important in our lives, even in the short-term. She was an agent of grace with a halo of white fur trailing behind. We planted two trees in the back yard three years ago under which Snow’s ashes reside along with those of Spooky (the Pussmeister), who outlived Snow for a year until moving on to his feline reward at age 19. Sometime soon we’ll have a memorial plaque made: Pussmeister and The Bag. The trees will live for a thousand years.