I'm surprised we've never written a post about her --- Lucy is such an integral part of our farm.

We weren't looking for a dog. By the time we moved here, I had decided I was a cat person. Mark has always been a dog person, but he had loved his last dog so much that when Goo died, he didn't feel up to taking on another dog. But soon after moving in, a pitbull showed up and crawled right up through the hole in the front of the trailer where windows would later be and into my lap. Mark and I named her Chocolate and fell in love, but it was clear she had owners somewhere. So we put a sign up on the bulletin board at the post office in town, explaining where we lived and that we didn't have a phone yet but that the owner could walk half a mile through the mud and across the creek to see her if they'd lost a dog. When Chocolate (aka Dixie)'s owner showed up, we knew that he wouldn't have walked so far through the woods if he didn't love his dog, so we gave her back.

Soon thereafter, our mechanic told us that his daughter had a dog she needed to get rid of. Lucy was tied up all the time because she had growled at the daughter's other (much smaller) dogs, and when we went to see her, she was wild. I was pretty sure Lucy was the wrong dog for us, but Mark somehow knew she was right, so we loaded her into the car along with the dogloo and toy that her previous owner said she couldn't live without and headed home. It was dusk when we parked, and we still had to carry that dogloo back through the floodplain, so I ended up being the one holding onto the end of Lucy's chain. I had to wrap it around my waist to keep hold of her --- she's big and strong and was just so excited by life that she nearly yanked me off my feet. I was definitely ready to give her back.

Luckily, we'd been reading Cesar Milan's dog training books, so we started walking Lucy twice a day. Within a few months, she turned into the sterling dog she is today. Interestingly, she did love that toy she came home with, carrying it everywhere for years. After the first year or so, she started hiding it in the woods, and would find it again every few months. I haven't seen it in the last couple of years, but am not so sure it's gone.

We got Lucy around this time in 2006 and were told that she was about two years old at the time. So, I guess that would make her around 7 now. Unfortunately, Chesapeake Bay retrievers are supposed to be relatively short-lived, and I have noticed a lot of gray around her face in the last year, but we're going to keep feeding her awesome food and make her the exception to the rule.