Our Nana was Sue
Sorry to disagree with T.S. Eliot, but even with its IRS deadline, April is not the cruelest month – it’s March, when Spring Break collides with our April issue press deadline.
It never fails that Spring Break starts just when the staff members most responsible for getting this magazine to press are working extra long hours, and their kids are home impatiently waiting to do exactly what our magazine’s motto tells everybody to do – Have Fun!
But if you think you can suddenly find somebody to help you with child care during spring break, forget about it! Any teens you know who could help are off on a trip, and any of their parents who can take off work are with them.
Too bad real life can’t sometimes be like the movies. Where are Mary Poppins and Nana (the lovable Old English Sheepdog who tended Wendy, John and Michael Darling) from Peter Pan, when you really need them?
Actually, once upon a time, after my husband and I had five children in eight years and I became a stay at home mom, we did have a Nana of sorts for a little while. But our Nana was a black Labrador named Sue.
Sue lived with us at an Illinois farmhouse that could have been an illustration for a children’s book. Nine lovely apple trees lined the front lawn of the cozy, green-shingled, two-story home. Next to the house were nestled a chicken pen, a big white barn and several sheds. The outbuildings came in handy for housing the family’s menagerie that included two ponies, numerous rabbits and chickens, a pig and several goats, dogs, and cats.
About 100 yards from the bottom of a slope behind the house, a little stream teeming with creek chubs wound its way through an oasis of walnut and other hardwood trees that had miraculously escaped being scraped away to make another one of the cornfields surrounding the house on all sides. Our family spent some golden years at “the apple tree house,” where I enjoyed getting to be home with our children so much that I even hated to see each spring break end.
When we moved years later, there wasn’t a square inch of the property our children hadn’t explored – with Sue by their sides. She was always with the children, and whenever they happened to stray farther from the house than they were supposed to, Sue would hear me calling for them and start herding them home. Gentle as she was with the children, she was also their fearless defender. I never doubted she could, or would, permanently dispatch any kind of critter she regarded as a threat to the children, or die trying.
Sue didn’t care for cats or fireworks, and she had an almost human sense of humor. In the evenings she would patiently tag along with the kids while they took care of all the other animals. But as soon as the children had finished their chores, Sue would give them a mischievous look and make a game out of racing them to the house.
When Sue got a tumor, the vet tried to save her. When she died you would have thought we lost a family member, and we did. But Sue left us one of her sons, a white Lab named Corky who moved here with us when we came home in 1983. By then, all but one of our kids was in their teens and we no longer lived on a farm they could roam with Corky like they had done with Sue.
But we did find a great new place we could all explore together – the nearby Canadian River. In its cold, pristine waters and along its sandy beaches, we swam and fished and picnicked and relaxed. In the winter Corky hunted ducks there with Frank and the boys. And as long as he lived he constantly tried, like his mother before him, to keep watch over our family.
Linda Seubold, editor of Entertainment Fort Smith Magazine, can be reached at lindaseubold@efortsmith.com. Read her archived columns and articles online.
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