We were all sitting at the table eating lunch. It was rare that we would eat lunch together. Usually Daddy would eat as he worked or would walk over to the house and grab a sandwich when it fit into his work. We kids would just grab some veggies out of the garden whenever we got hungry. But this warm summer day we were all together having a rather pleasant lunch together.
The side door slammed shut. We all turned around to see Randy walking into the house. He would just walk in whenever he wanted. It didn’t happen often but still often enough that that we weren’t surprised to see him. He casually walked over to the table and announced, “Ol’ Dirt is out sweeping under the snowball bush.” It was all we could do not to laugh out loud. Ol’ Dirt was our white husky dog that we had named “Dusty” since a white dog in Iowa would not stay white long. With Randy’s lisp just turned Dusty’s little nap into sweeping. Randy was only about five at the time, but Mom and Dad never tired of telling the story. I am sure that Randy was a bit tired of the story by the time he turned thirty.
We got Dusty when we were living in Fountainelle Iowa. I was about three years old. We had a dog, shepherd I think, that came with the farm we were living on. One day he ran out in the road and was hit by a car. Truly bad luck for the dog as we lived on a country road and perhaps two cars a day would drive by. Well, after the shepherd died Mom said that we would not be getting any other dogs. Point blank. No more dogs. As the summer turned into fall and the days got shorter and colder we missed playing with a pet. Then the winter snows came and we were basically shut into the house. One evening after supper there was a knock at the back door. Momma opened it to find Grandpa stomping the snow from his boots holding a little white ball. The first words out of Mom’s mouth were “Dad, take that back where you found it!”
“Now Hester,” he said, “ the girls need a pet and this little fella is just what they need.”
It didn’t take long for us to see that Grandpa had a puppy and to start playing with him right away. Momma could sense defeat, so she claimed the right to name the creature. “We’ll call him Dusty.” She declared. “He’ll never be that white again living on a farm.” Dusty was officially part of our family now. He would move from Fountainelle with us to the house in Corning, to the farm outside of Brooks, and then finally to the house in Brooks. He remained faithful to us through all of these changes and never once wandered far from home. Dusty quietly passed into the afterlife one warm summer day at a very old age for a dog. We missed him and I still think of him fifty years later. I never was much of a dog person, but Dusty was ours. That made him different.
