Ginger

(entry for 7/24/2024)

When we moved from Greeley to Montrose in the fall of 1949, we first lived in the Queen Chipita Motel for two weeks while looking for a house to rent. The motel room was small and crowded and dark. We got a bit desperate.

The first few rentals we heard about were either falling down or filthy or both. Then my dad was told about a really nice house for rent at 1147 South Second. It wasn’t advertised and there was no sign in front that said it was available, but he heard about it somehow, I think at work at the Montrose Medical Clinic, where he had started a good month before we moved. (He was already staying at the motel when the rest of us joined him there.)

The owner’s name was Brosch, and there were huge initial ‘B’s on the shutters, dark blue against the white shutters. (Not visible in the more recent photo below.) He had lived in the house for years, having had it built for him and his wife when they were first married. She had recently passed away, and Mister Brosch couldn’t stand living there without her. He said it brought back too many memories. In fact he couldn’t stand living in Montrose anymore at all, so had bought a house in Fort Collins, on the other side of the mountains, where a son of his lived.

But he was also very attached to the house, and that was why he hadn’t started advertising it yet. He told us he was going to be very picky about whom he rented it to, and looked us each in the face very sternly as he said it.

Another issue besides his attachment to the house and his suspicions about possible renters was his dog, Ginger. She was reportedly half Alaskan Husky and half German Shepherd, but looked exactly like a full-blood Chow, except for having normally-colored tongue and gums, where a Chow’s are black or dark blue. Mister Brosch said that Ginger had been his wife’s dog and had been in a bit of a funk since the wife’s passing. But the dog seemed friendly enough to us, if a bit subdued. She rolled onto her back, asking us to scratch her tummy. We obliged.

The picture at the top of this post is NOT Ginger. It’s a stock photo of the same mixed breed. The color is right, and the ears are right, but Ginger’s nose was lighter and browner, and shorter, and her face was rounder. Other than that, they could be twins.

The owner showed us around the small three-bedroom house with one bath, and pointed to the detached one-car garage. Then, after a conversation which took place mostly outside on the tiny covered front porch, lasting about half an hour, he decided that he would be willing to rent to us, and my dad eagerly accepted the offer, though the rent was a bit high compared to my dad’s income.

Once the details had been worked out and the handshakes made (there was no paperwork), Mister Brosch turned to Ginger and said, as though addressing an adult human equal, “Well, Ginger, the next decision is yours. Are you going to go with me and live with me, or are you going to stay here where you’ve always lived and live with these people?”

For answer, Ginger got up from where she had been sitting beside him, and came over and sat down next to me, leaning up against me to emphasize the point.

From that moment on, for the rest of her unfortunately short life, she was my dog. Or, to be more accurate, I was her human. She tolerated the rest of the family, but she and I were an item, and there was no doubt about it.

On the few occasions that Mister Brosch came to visit during the year or so that we lived in his house, she greeted him warmly and obviously knew who he was. But she and I belonged to each other. This was true no matter where we moved, and, as usual with our family, we moved a lot. We lived in four different houses in the four years that we lived in Montrose, not counting the motel we started out in.

She instinctively knew where the property boundaries were at each house we lived in, and she never strayed. Even up on Spring Creek Mesa, the third of our Montrose homes, and Ginger’s third ever residence as well, she knew where our land ended and the neighbors’ began. She was not an indoor dog, though we let her come in on occasion. She stayed outdoors all night every night, no matter how cold or snowy, and visited indoors only briefly on occasional days.

She got along well with the cats we always seemed to have. And on the mesa, she even got along with the chickens, of which we had a dozen.

She liked people, never barking or growling at visitors.

She knew about cars and never put herself in danger around them.

In late summer of 1953, when we moved to Grand Junction, she of course moved with us. She was never leashed and never allowed to be indoors overnight, but she never left our yard, knowing again instinctively where the boundaries were. We gave her a doghouse when we moved to the alfalfa farm in Fruita, but she refused to go inside it and it sat unused from then on.

She never was seen by a vet in her entire life, which might have contributed to the ultimate problem. She died from a severe infestation of heart-worms, when I was fifteen and she eleven. A vet would probably have caught them in time and cured her of them, and she might have lasted many more years. But somehow it never occurred to us to take her. She seemed ‘above’ all that sort of thing.

But more than the worms, I think it was an emotional issue that did her in, rather than a medical one. For the first two years in Grand Junction I lived at home and saw her every day. We had moved from Montrose to that city so that I could attend the ten-grade Adventist school there, and so I was seldom gone, even overnight. But at the end of the tenth grade, we were faced with a decision. I could go to Campion, the only Adventist boarding high school in Colorado, or I could go even farther away. My Aunt Reba had attended Laurelwood Academy in Gaston, Oregon, for her junior high school year, and her tales about the place intrigued me. I had been to Oregon only once in my life, when I was seven, and we hadn’t visited Laurelwood on that trip. But I had seen many pictures and had heard her tales, and I was pretty sure I wanted to go there.

On the other hand, I had been to Campion many times. That was where the Colorado Adventist ‘camp meeting’ was held every summer, for two weeks, and we went every year. We stayed in the girls’ dormitory and ate at the cafeteria, which was in the boys’. Reba herself had graduated from there, as had her younger sister, Alta. Most of the kids I had known in grade school had gone there. So there was precedent. Also, my dad knew the man who ran the boilers in the heating plant, and had gotten the promise of a job for me there. He seemed to think it would ‘make a man of me,’ something he felt sure needed doing.

But I didn’t want to work in the heating plant, and I didn’t want to graduate from High School where all my dad’s siblings had. Besides, Aunt Alta, my favorite of my dad’s relatives, was currently living at Laurelwood, where her husband, Richard, was the piano and organ teacher, and by going to school there I would get to take lessons from him. So in the fall of 1955, I was enrolled in Laurelwood and we drove out to install me in the boys’ dorm there. It was too far from home to go home on weekends, so it was agreed that my first visit to Colorado would be Christmas Vacation.

We ‘explained’ all this to Ginger, of course. But it was no good. All she knew for sure was that I wasn’t there with her anymore. She died on Thanksgiving Day, four weeks before I would have arrived for the two week Christmas Holiday. My dad buried her in the back yard, and I never saw her again.

Strangely, I didn’t seem to miss her at first. I had made new friends and opened new vistas at Laurelwood. Home seemed far away. Dogs seemed unnecessary. My mother’s mother, Emma, died the same month as Ginger, and that hit me harder than losing my pet.

My dad gave me another dog that summer, an all-black Water Spaniel. I named her Blackie and I liked her a lot. She returned the favor. But she wasn’t Ginger. She wasn’t ‘attached’ to me.

I’ve had other dogs over the years. But there has been a distance between me and them, and between them and me. I find that now, all these years later, I do miss Ginger after all. A part of me went with her when she left.

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